Author: Dale

Fantastic Beasts? Eh.

Posted on by Dale

[Here be Spoiler Alerts.]

We went to see Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, because Harry Potter.  It’s a dazzling movie, to be sure, and the performances are all spot-on, with the four main characters especially charming and adorable.

But…

We left feeling very unsatisfied.  The plotting is haphazard and whatever suspense there might be in figuring out what’s going on is dissipated by the most telegraphing since the Titanic went down.  It relied a lot on fan service, i.e., our prior knowledge of the Potterverse,  to keep us on board, and the middle third especially just dragged.

We were appalled at the loose threads in the plot.  What exactly did the newspaper publisher/senator story have to do with anything?  Was it simply for the Citizen Kane shot being destroyed by the Obscurus?  Not enough.  I got the feeling there was a lot left on the cutting room floor, because the paltry conflict within that plotline was never integrated at all with the main plot.  J. Jonah Jameson, Jon Voight was not.

The conflict that seemed to be driving the American wizards (remaining hidden from Non-Maj society, etc.) was never fleshed out, and the “villainous” Mary Lou who rants on the steps of the bank about the danger of witches among us never seemed more than your usual NYC crackpot.  The idea that she posed a credible threat to the magical community was dumb—her headquarters was a rundown hellhole, while MACUSA occupied a luxurious Art Deco skyscraper.

And what was the deal with Scamander’s relationship with the Lestrange girl back at Hogwarts?  We may never know.  We certainly don’t know what it had to do with the current movie, other than to allow Scamander to display some empathy with poor Credence Barebone, whose relationship with Tina Goldstein is likewise never fully explained.  (There is an explanation, kind of, but like everything else in the movie it’s compressed and rushed.)

The final reveal, that Graves is actually Grindlewald, raises more questions than it solves: Graves is head of the Aurors at MACUSA—how long has Grindlewald been disguised in order to ascend to that position??  I don’t think it’s justifiable that eventually the good Potterian will think, “Ah, it must have been Polyjuice Potion,” even though we never see any evidence of that.

(I just went to the Wikipedia article on the film in order to remember the term “Obscurus,” and was shocked to find in the synopsis details that were not at all clear in the movie.  There are also details which apparently the author of the Wikipedia article got from the film which I think are wrong. Sloppy, and I’m talking about the filmmakers.)

The fantastic beasts were fantastic, but again, they felt glued onto the plot.  They were mostly deployed for slapstick interludes, and we never got to be familiar with any of them except for the Niffler and the Bowtruckle (who smacked of Baby Groot, alas).

After we got home, we kept gnawing on the sources of our discontent, as one does, when it finally dawned on us: the problem was not so much with the movie itself as it was that it shouldn’t have been the first Newt Scamander movie.  This was the second Fantastic Beasts film.  The first film introduced us to Newt Scamander as he scours the earth for these creatures, along with flashbacks to his problems at Hogwarts leading to his expulsion, culminating in the rescue of the… whatever the big bird thing was in the second movie… a Thunderbird, maybe?… in Egypt.  This propels us into the second film, as Scamander comes to America to release the Thunderbird into its native habitat in Arizona (mentioned briefly in the film), and gives more breathing space for actual plot.

Somebody really should be paying me big bucks to do this thinking for them.  Jo?

An artefact

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Clearing out the inlaws’ house has produced a great deal of stuff, most of which has migrated to new homes.  Some things we uncovered, however, are just too yummy to give up.

Here’s one:

A little cardboard frame, and a strange little collage.  Want a closer look?

Um, okay.

This was in one of the infinite number of boxes full of programs, ticket stubs,  photographs of unidentified persons, etc.  Let’s use our sleuthing skills to figure it out, shall we?

First, the hairstyle and dress gives us probably 1919-1920ish for a date.

And here’s the back:

It reads: “Kiss me kid nothing makes me sick.”

Well, then.

My guess is that this is actually a valentine card, one made with a macabre sense of humor during the “Spanish Flu” pandemic of 1918-1920.  We don’t know who made it or who gave it to whom; it was not with any identifying information. The maker and the receiver were well off enough to dress fashionably and to afford copies of photographs they could cut up for such a use, but that doesn’t really tell us which ancestor it might have been.  There were enough great-aunts in those families to give Bertie Wooster the hives for years.

All in all, you have to respect such brazen humor in such a dark time.  When you consider that these young people came of age during the Great War and then the pandemic, you can begin to understand the fevered sense of insouciance that animated the 1920s.  This chick, whoever it was, was a flapper in the making.

 

A small rant, and a fun thing to do

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Don’t worry, this is not a liberal rant.

YOU MAY THINK THOSE LITTLE SQUIRRELS ARE CUTE, WITH THEIR LITTLE FLUFFY TAILS AND THEIR DARLING FACES, KENNETH, BUT YOU ARE WRONG WRONG WRONG THEY ARE THE DEMON SPAWN OF BEELZEBUB HIMSELF.

This is what the new grass in the labyrinth looks like:

Dozens of little potholes:

MAY THEY ROAST IN HELL.

Thank you for listening.

Today we did something fun.  My lovely first wife had inherited an original engraving of one of her ancestresses:

…and wanted it hung in the more Victorian of the two guestrooms.

Here’s the fun part: the frame had an old, handmade brass loop, like so…

…which mean that whatever it was hanging from would be visible.

Fortunately—and I didn’t know this until today—there is such a thing as a Victorian picture nail.  You can see some lovely examples here.  Upon seeing them, the LFW asked if we might not make our own.  “Use what we have,” is our new motto, and boy, some of you are getting some pretty bizarre objects as gifts for the next decade.

Anyway, I conceived a plan.

First, decide where to put the hanger on the wall.  Easy, just hold the painting up to the wall and put a dot where the loop is.

Except the loop didn’t stand up by itself, preferring to slip down behind the painting.

And so…

Loop stabilized, dot made on the wall, and…

That’s right, a plain flat-head screw.  Now all we needed was something appropriate…

…like a handpainted Czechoslovakian ceramic brooch.

The reverse:

Hang the etching on the screw.  Heat up the hotglue gun, put a dab on the screw, and…

Tada!

Frippery upon frippery, eh wot?

The GLRP, 11/11/16

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This was a pleasant surprise.  I had decided, you may recall, to claw out a place from the very back corner in the southwest.  It was previously just a jungle of ivy and whatever volunteer plants sprang up.  I had planted a variety of ferns there over the years, but the ivy choked out everything not at the edge of the planting.

So when the fence builders ripped out all the ivy, I decided not to let it grow back.1  My plan was to pave over it with the same flagstone I used in the fire pit area and to create a little nook of some kind.

And…

All in all, a pretty spectacular little spot.

The stand is a bird cage stand.  We think we will find some kind of hanging lantern that can go on it.  (Since taking that photo, I’ve moved it to the other side of the block wall in order to clear more space in the nook.)

And look at that planter I found when I went to buy the flagstone at Mulch & More!

I think I’m not planting anything in it.  It’s just delightful/provocative enough by itself.

—————

1 Yes, I know it will grow back.  I am prepared to do battle.

The GLRP, 11/9/16

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More terracing, this time at the westpoint:

A slight revamping of the westpoint bowl just to make it balance better:

There remains the northwest corner:

I’m still thinking about the area, but I think I will terrace this area as well, with stone steps curving down the left of the area.

The GLRP, 11/08/16

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This was fun.

First of all, at Home Depot when I went to load the 12 bags of top soil into my car, I discovered this guy:

Thinking that there were too many ways for him to come to grief in his current setting, I scooped him up and brought him home.  There was a moment of panic when I carefully unloaded the car and he wasn’t there—what if he had decided to burrow under the seats and die?—but I found him and as you can see he’s fairly content to be my friend.  He finally leapt to my shoulder and from there to the hostia by the southpoint.  I haven’t seen him since, but he should be fine.

You will recall from yesterday that I had begun the mini-terrace at the southwest corner.

I decided to lower the far range of blocks so that the border bricks were all on one level.  I could have done that by dismantling the whole thing and digging a deeper foundation, but I found it easier just to replace the concrete blocks with others half their height.

After I got the whole thing walled in and filled in, I stepped back and took a good look at it.

Those who know the Lichtenbergianism process know that it’s time for GESTALT and SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION.  My thinking was that the sinuous outline of the terrace was lame.  It did not resonate.  Its woo factor was pitifully low.

So I fixed it.

Still some adjusting to be done—brick-cutting, etc.—but on the whole I think it’s much better.

Long shot:

I am halfway considering paving that circle around the tree with flagstones like the fire pit and the back corner, but that won’t be until the spring.

I also have concerns that the brick edging is precarious: a slight misstep will knock them off.  If I weren’t so averse to permanence I’d cut them to fit and then cement them in place.  Oh well, if that becomes necessary at some point in the future, we can do that.

Next up: the back corner.

So.

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America, you are A Idiot.

This is all I am going to say about it: you elected George W. Bush because he was a manly chest-thumping cretin, and it got you the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a budget surplus turned into a record deficit, ruinous tax cuts, and the Great Recession.

Now you’ve done worse.

The GLRP, 11/07/16

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Back at work on the Great Labyrinth Reclamation Project, this time on the southwest corner.

You may recall that the new fence, in cutting a straight line from one corner to the other, cut off some of my “landscaping” at the far end of the labyrinth, and so I am having to revamp that corner.  It’s always been problematic in that the bricks that I used to create a border were continually being covered over by soil washing down the little slope there.

So my plan is to build a small wall and fill that in with dirt.

Here’s the bottom layer of wall:

And more:

I didn’t buy quite enough blocks, so back to Home Depot today.  I will also buy the fill dirt to put in there and then seed it.

Meanwhile that back corner will become a nook of some kind:

I already had two large pieces of fieldstone, so I went ahead and put them down.  I’ll get to this area later this week.

Onward!

The GLRP, 11/01/16

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I bought a timer for the sprinkler last week—none of the timers I had bought previously worked, of course—and so the labyrinth was watered while I was on Lichtenbergian Retreat last weekend.  When I got home on Sunday, I went to check on things and was astonished to find:

The grass seed has already sprouted!

Now to keep it alive for another four weeks…