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Ryan Hill (152 KP) rated Fantastic Beasts: Crimes of Grindelwald (2018) in Movies
May 9, 2019
The cast particularly, Eddie Redmayne as Newt scamander, Jude Law as Albus Dumbledore and Johnny Depp as Gellert Grindelwald
Opening action sequence was cool.
Cgi was fantastic (1 more)
The world feels magical and the nostalga of being back in the wizarding world is always beautiful.
Grindelwald was underused considering it's called The crimes of grindelwald.
The plot was messy and sloppy. Too many flashback sequences including two back to back sequences that lasted 20 minutes (1 more)
The big plot twist/reveal at the end makes no sense from what i know from the Harry Potter lore.
Lack of Continuity
Action sequences weren't that impressive
A disappointing entry in the Harry Potter franchise
Jupiter Ascending (2015)
6.2
Rate It
Movie Watch
Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) was born under signs that predicted future greatness, but her reality as...
Suswatibasu (1701 KP) rated Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016) in Movies
Aug 22, 2017
Great acting (1 more)
Wonderful special effects
An adult version of Harry Potter
I have a soft spot for the Harry Potter series, a guilty pleasure. So I was hugely elated when this film came out. And more than anything, it felt like a grown-up version of the HP series, which is perfect timing for all the now adults who grew up with these films. It's beautiful in terms of CGI and graphics, especially the world of the fantastic beasts, and the abuse is much more graphic. The acting is by far on another level with Eddie Redmayne, Jon Voight, and Colin Farrell and the story is engaging. Looking forward to the next instalment!
David McK (3169 KP) rated The Aeronauts (2019) in Movies
Mar 29, 2020
1860's period action/drama piece, starring Eddie Redmayne (I still associate him more with Newt Scaramander) and Felicity Jones (who I still associate more with Rogue One), told pretty much in 'real-time' and charting an attempt by a Royal Society meteorologist James Glaisher to ascent in a hot air balloon to study the weather in a period when nobody believed this was possible, and when the sky was still largely unknown
That much is fact.
The character of Amelia Wren, however? Completely made up - I only discovered this afterwards, when I read a bit more into it!
Predictably light-weight, and released (early?) on Amazon Prime - due to the current global pandemic - I'm happy enough to have seen this one, but am also happier that I didn't have to pay to do so in the cinema!
That much is fact.
The character of Amelia Wren, however? Completely made up - I only discovered this afterwards, when I read a bit more into it!
Predictably light-weight, and released (early?) on Amazon Prime - due to the current global pandemic - I'm happy enough to have seen this one, but am also happier that I didn't have to pay to do so in the cinema!
Sarah (7798 KP) rated The Aeronauts (2019) in Movies
Nov 21, 2019
The truth would've been better
I didn't know much about this film, and made the mistake of reading a little about it before going in and I'm regretting doing so as it made me spend the entire film with a look of sheer disbelief.
My major issue with this film is that Amelia Rennes is a completely fictional character, and she's a very cliched and irritating one at that. They've obviously put her in for a little more excitement and romance, rather than actually concentrate on the true real story. There was no real depth or interest in the entire story either and I find it so dull and boring. I love Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne but I felt like even they couldn't save this film. It's a complete "Hollywoodised" film, which tried to focus on the drama and adventure rather than the real science behind it all. Such a disappointment.
My major issue with this film is that Amelia Rennes is a completely fictional character, and she's a very cliched and irritating one at that. They've obviously put her in for a little more excitement and romance, rather than actually concentrate on the true real story. There was no real depth or interest in the entire story either and I find it so dull and boring. I love Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne but I felt like even they couldn't save this film. It's a complete "Hollywoodised" film, which tried to focus on the drama and adventure rather than the real science behind it all. Such a disappointment.
The Pillars of the Earth
8.3
Rate It
TV Show Watch
Set in 12th-century England, this eight-hour miniseries based on Ken Follett's best-seller begins...
LoganCrews (2861 KP) rated The Spiderwick Chronicles (2008) in Movies
Sep 20, 2020
Consider me charmed, as far as 𝘏𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘺 𝘗𝘰𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳/𝘕𝘢𝘳𝘯𝘪𝘢 ripoffs go - you could do a whole lot worse. Story is intermittently intriguing but way too slight for what this wants to be, with lore and creature design *this* vivid it needed to be way more fleshed out. But I also recognize that if this were made today, they would have needlessly stretched out and sterilized this one-movie story into five distended cash grabs - er, I mean - 'movies' until any sense of purpose and enjoyability becomes unrecognizable, so I abstain. I'd much rather this have become a franchise as opposed to 𝘍𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘤 𝘉𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘴, firstly because Freddie Highmore can actually act (he's awesome here in both roles) whereas Eddie Redmayne is perhaps the only Oscar nominee who's never given a good performance. Looks absolutely dazzling, and the voice acting is A-class - just a really fun time all-around. Simple but effective, and I haven't even mentioned how many goblins get gruesomely murdered/dismembered/burned/eaten alive/melted/stabbed/ran over in this.
Kim Pook (101 KP) rated The Theory of Everything (2014) in Movies
Sep 4, 2020
Unless you have been living in a cave you will have heard of Stephen Hawking, this movie is the story of how he met and came to rely on his wife Jane.
It starts in the 1960s, Stephen is an awkward and nerdy college student attending classes, wondering about the universe and meeting the love of his life. Straight away it is evident from little things that his disease is taking a hold on him even before his diagnosis. Eddie Redmayne does such a good job of portraying him that his decline is hard to watch and you feel the frustration he must have felt too. It not only shows Stephens struggles with his motor neurons disease, but also Jane's struggles with helping him, which understandably pushes her into the arms of another man.
The film has its ups and downs, you feel for Stephen and the people around him, but you also laugh as despite his disease his personality remained intact. It is a long movie (just over 2 hours) and very intense, but worth every minute.
It starts in the 1960s, Stephen is an awkward and nerdy college student attending classes, wondering about the universe and meeting the love of his life. Straight away it is evident from little things that his disease is taking a hold on him even before his diagnosis. Eddie Redmayne does such a good job of portraying him that his decline is hard to watch and you feel the frustration he must have felt too. It not only shows Stephens struggles with his motor neurons disease, but also Jane's struggles with helping him, which understandably pushes her into the arms of another man.
The film has its ups and downs, you feel for Stephen and the people around him, but you also laugh as despite his disease his personality remained intact. It is a long movie (just over 2 hours) and very intense, but worth every minute.
JasonKeenan (9 KP) rated Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016) in Movies
Sep 16, 2017
Alright, but missing something
This movie was visually great, couldn't fault it, the SFX where stunning and the acting was top notch, but the story was too confusing at time
First off the visuals of this movie where sublime, stunning, it felt like I where in the roaring 20's New York, the acting was why you expect from an Academy Award Winner Eddie Redmayne, I liked the chemistry between him and Dan Foglers character, who places a muggle named Jacob, who is kind of thrown into the magical world and is forced to just go with it,
Right now the story, to be there was too many things going off at once, it's like they wanted to set up a universe right off the bat, and not ease you into it, the "Finding of the Beasts" made sense, you could have just had a movie about that, but it started adding in other plot lines, e.g. Ezra Millers story, which just went off the rails a Little, and the added ending was pointless (If you haven't seen it then I won't spoil it)
But this movie is worth a watch for the visuals alone
First off the visuals of this movie where sublime, stunning, it felt like I where in the roaring 20's New York, the acting was why you expect from an Academy Award Winner Eddie Redmayne, I liked the chemistry between him and Dan Foglers character, who places a muggle named Jacob, who is kind of thrown into the magical world and is forced to just go with it,
Right now the story, to be there was too many things going off at once, it's like they wanted to set up a universe right off the bat, and not ease you into it, the "Finding of the Beasts" made sense, you could have just had a movie about that, but it started adding in other plot lines, e.g. Ezra Millers story, which just went off the rails a Little, and the added ending was pointless (If you haven't seen it then I won't spoil it)
But this movie is worth a watch for the visuals alone
Daniel Boyd (1066 KP) rated Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016) in Movies
Jul 19, 2017
Some of the lighting is well implemented (1 more)
Colin Farrell
Bad CGI (2 more)
The movies 3 leads are extremely annoying
Johnny 'oooh' Depp
Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them - Or JK Rowling and the Never Ending Quest for More Money
Contains spoilers, click to show
First off, full disclosure, I have never been a fan of the Harry Potter franchise. I’ve read a few of the books and seen a few of the movies and it just isn’t my thing. Honestly, I’m not even a fan of fantasy in general, I think Lord Of The Rings is nonsense and Game Of Thrones is vastly overrated and the last Harry Potter movie I saw was the fourth one. However, I was willing to go into this movie with a clean slate and hopefully have it win me over and unfortunately it didn’t. Also this review will contain spoilers if you care about that sort of thing.
This film is a prequel to the other Harry Potter movies, this time set in America rather than Britain and telling the story of the events that led to the great wizarding war between Dumbledore and Grindlewald. The film did have potential, to see what would have essentially been WWII fought with magic could be really cool but unfortunately all we get here is setup and that actual event we want to see will probably take place 4 or 5 movies down the line. The film opens with Eddie Redmayne’s character, Newt Scamander going to New York from London to set free one of the beasts that he keeps inside his Tardis-like brief case. Then he ends up in a bank and meets a ‘Nomaj,’ which is this film’s lazy version of a ‘muggle,’ who we learn is a simple lonely guy that just wants to open his own bakery and that’s another character cliché ticked off the list. We now have the double act of the nerdy, sniveling protagonist and the overweight sympathetic sidekick. Also, for the rest of this review I will be referring to the baker character as fat bloke and this isn’t to be derogatory, but is purely because the script relies on the, ‘fat, jolly, sympathetic, pathetic loner’ stereotype and passes it off as a character arc. If the script isn’t treating the character with any respect, then why should I? So fat bloke it is then.
So the two of them of course have the exact same briefcase and after some cartoony looking CGI animals escape from Redmayne’s case in the bank the suitcases predictably get mixed up and then the fat bloke gets his bakery loan declined and returns home with Redmayne’s suitcase, then more bad CGI animals open the case and attack the fat bloke. Redmayne’s character then gets arrested by some wizarding inspector for letting the, ‘Nomaj,’ (urgh) get away after seeing the animals in the case and is taken to the New York Wizards base, I guess? Then it’s revealed that the wizarding inspector that arrested Redmayne is a bit of a shit inspector and she is trying to redeem herself in the eyes of her superiors, so in front of this high wizard council, she confiscates the case from Redmayne and opens it only to reveal a bunch of cakes inside. Yes, really… Who writes this shit? Rowling is doing to Harry Potter what Lucas did to Star Wars during the prequels at this point.
So Redmayne gets set free and he goes to fat bloke’s house to find him lying on the floor, then some more bad CGI later the inspector turns up and they take him back to her house to meet her sister? Friend? Does it matter? She ends up becoming the love interest for fat bloke. Then for no apparent reason Redmayne and fat bloke enter the case and he shows fat bloke all this crazy shit that apparently humans aren’t supposed to see and then Redmayne does some more sniveling and decides they have to sneak out of the girls’ apartment and recapture the animals that escaped in the bank and from fat bloke’s apartment. They get a couple of the beasts back then they go to central park to find Redmayne’s horny rhino and they dress fat bloke up in a leather rhino costume and use him as rape bait then they ice skate for a bit and capture the rhino. Again, really… I am not making this shit up for satirical reasons.
Then we see a real life prick Ezra Miller playing some sort of weird emo child who is beat by his mother and we see he is working with Colin Farrell to find a big bad dark spirit that is killing people around New York. Colin Farrell is definitely the best thing about the film at this point. After this a bunch of other stupid shit happens, like Ron Perlman and John Voight coming into the movie, showing a ray of potential then being totally wasted. The movie drags in the middle, but eventually after some more fat jokes, bad CGI and sniveling, all of the creatures are captured and Ezra Miller turns into a black death cloud or some such nonsense. Then he is boosting around New York, fucking up shit as he goes and so Redmayne and Farrell follow him down to the subway to stop him. Redmayne seems to be talking him down and then Farrell shows up and essentially tells him to join the dark side. Then there is a CGI wand battle and the council from earlier show up out of nowhere and kill the black cloud of death. Then Colin Farrell gets pissed off and in the best scene in the movie murders half of the council members before he gets arrested by Eddie Redmayne with some magic handcuffs.
Then the worst part in the movie takes place. It is revealed that Colin Farrell is actually Johnny Depp in disguise. I mean he is Grindlewald in disguise but the important part for me is the replacement of Colin Farrell with Johnny Depp. Now I’m not the world’s biggest Colin Farrell fan, he is great in, ‘In Bruges,’ but other than that he is pretty meh, but he was definitely the best thing that this movie had going for it and they fucking swapped him out! With fucking Johnny-‘ooh’-Depp. As if this movie wasn’t shit enough they swapped out the best thing about it for Johnny Depp, the biggest joke in Hollywood. I’m done, fuck this movie, fuck Johnny Depp, fuck JK Rowling, fuck Harry Potter, I’m out.
Okay, let’s briefly talk about the technical side of the film before I score this thing. The whole cast of this movie is phoning it in, so the acting is fine but nothing to write home about, Farrell is the best thing in this movie, but I feel that in the sequels it will just be an ‘ooh,’ off between Depp and Redmayne. The direction is okay as the movie plods along sufficiently, but the writing is wildly inconsistent and the plot as stated above is all over the place. The lighting and cinematography in one scene are fantastic, when Farrell and Miller are conversing in a dark alleyway but other than that they are pretty mundane too. The score is suitably Harry Potter like and the CGI is also to a similar standard of the Harry Potter films. The problem with that is that the CGI was ropey and of a fairly poor standard in the Harry Potter movies 10 years ago and it doesn’t seem like it has improved much since then. This movie isn’t for me, but even from an objective standpoint, based solely from a moviemaking perspective this movie is poor.
This film is a prequel to the other Harry Potter movies, this time set in America rather than Britain and telling the story of the events that led to the great wizarding war between Dumbledore and Grindlewald. The film did have potential, to see what would have essentially been WWII fought with magic could be really cool but unfortunately all we get here is setup and that actual event we want to see will probably take place 4 or 5 movies down the line. The film opens with Eddie Redmayne’s character, Newt Scamander going to New York from London to set free one of the beasts that he keeps inside his Tardis-like brief case. Then he ends up in a bank and meets a ‘Nomaj,’ which is this film’s lazy version of a ‘muggle,’ who we learn is a simple lonely guy that just wants to open his own bakery and that’s another character cliché ticked off the list. We now have the double act of the nerdy, sniveling protagonist and the overweight sympathetic sidekick. Also, for the rest of this review I will be referring to the baker character as fat bloke and this isn’t to be derogatory, but is purely because the script relies on the, ‘fat, jolly, sympathetic, pathetic loner’ stereotype and passes it off as a character arc. If the script isn’t treating the character with any respect, then why should I? So fat bloke it is then.
So the two of them of course have the exact same briefcase and after some cartoony looking CGI animals escape from Redmayne’s case in the bank the suitcases predictably get mixed up and then the fat bloke gets his bakery loan declined and returns home with Redmayne’s suitcase, then more bad CGI animals open the case and attack the fat bloke. Redmayne’s character then gets arrested by some wizarding inspector for letting the, ‘Nomaj,’ (urgh) get away after seeing the animals in the case and is taken to the New York Wizards base, I guess? Then it’s revealed that the wizarding inspector that arrested Redmayne is a bit of a shit inspector and she is trying to redeem herself in the eyes of her superiors, so in front of this high wizard council, she confiscates the case from Redmayne and opens it only to reveal a bunch of cakes inside. Yes, really… Who writes this shit? Rowling is doing to Harry Potter what Lucas did to Star Wars during the prequels at this point.
So Redmayne gets set free and he goes to fat bloke’s house to find him lying on the floor, then some more bad CGI later the inspector turns up and they take him back to her house to meet her sister? Friend? Does it matter? She ends up becoming the love interest for fat bloke. Then for no apparent reason Redmayne and fat bloke enter the case and he shows fat bloke all this crazy shit that apparently humans aren’t supposed to see and then Redmayne does some more sniveling and decides they have to sneak out of the girls’ apartment and recapture the animals that escaped in the bank and from fat bloke’s apartment. They get a couple of the beasts back then they go to central park to find Redmayne’s horny rhino and they dress fat bloke up in a leather rhino costume and use him as rape bait then they ice skate for a bit and capture the rhino. Again, really… I am not making this shit up for satirical reasons.
Then we see a real life prick Ezra Miller playing some sort of weird emo child who is beat by his mother and we see he is working with Colin Farrell to find a big bad dark spirit that is killing people around New York. Colin Farrell is definitely the best thing about the film at this point. After this a bunch of other stupid shit happens, like Ron Perlman and John Voight coming into the movie, showing a ray of potential then being totally wasted. The movie drags in the middle, but eventually after some more fat jokes, bad CGI and sniveling, all of the creatures are captured and Ezra Miller turns into a black death cloud or some such nonsense. Then he is boosting around New York, fucking up shit as he goes and so Redmayne and Farrell follow him down to the subway to stop him. Redmayne seems to be talking him down and then Farrell shows up and essentially tells him to join the dark side. Then there is a CGI wand battle and the council from earlier show up out of nowhere and kill the black cloud of death. Then Colin Farrell gets pissed off and in the best scene in the movie murders half of the council members before he gets arrested by Eddie Redmayne with some magic handcuffs.
Then the worst part in the movie takes place. It is revealed that Colin Farrell is actually Johnny Depp in disguise. I mean he is Grindlewald in disguise but the important part for me is the replacement of Colin Farrell with Johnny Depp. Now I’m not the world’s biggest Colin Farrell fan, he is great in, ‘In Bruges,’ but other than that he is pretty meh, but he was definitely the best thing that this movie had going for it and they fucking swapped him out! With fucking Johnny-‘ooh’-Depp. As if this movie wasn’t shit enough they swapped out the best thing about it for Johnny Depp, the biggest joke in Hollywood. I’m done, fuck this movie, fuck Johnny Depp, fuck JK Rowling, fuck Harry Potter, I’m out.
Okay, let’s briefly talk about the technical side of the film before I score this thing. The whole cast of this movie is phoning it in, so the acting is fine but nothing to write home about, Farrell is the best thing in this movie, but I feel that in the sequels it will just be an ‘ooh,’ off between Depp and Redmayne. The direction is okay as the movie plods along sufficiently, but the writing is wildly inconsistent and the plot as stated above is all over the place. The lighting and cinematography in one scene are fantastic, when Farrell and Miller are conversing in a dark alleyway but other than that they are pretty mundane too. The score is suitably Harry Potter like and the CGI is also to a similar standard of the Harry Potter films. The problem with that is that the CGI was ropey and of a fairly poor standard in the Harry Potter movies 10 years ago and it doesn’t seem like it has improved much since then. This movie isn’t for me, but even from an objective standpoint, based solely from a moviemaking perspective this movie is poor.