Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

The answer is - inside J.K.Rowling's head. She is an incredible story teller and writer, but I have heard that she is an even more astute business woman. With her Harry Potter series spawning a world wide franchise the lady had to be good with her marbles, otherwise like J.R.R.Tolkien - the other similar genius, the corporations would have reaped in all the benefits (read billions) while she still scrimped to pay her taxes. Good for her, she is what she is.


Watched this movie with the kiddos. With their ages progressing to double digits (or almost) and their combined ages sitting squarely in the late teens I decided it's the right time to introduce them into the world of grown-up movies made out of children's books. They have a lot of experience watching adult comedy spouting from the mouths of their favorite animation film characters. This movie might be rather tame compared to that.


International travelers with strange looking/smelling luggage, which is practically every traveler at the port of entry of a country different from their own, will be able to empathize easily with the fantastic beasts' care taker and the protagonist of the movie - Newt Scamander.  That name itself is an interesting word play. I almost want to say Newt Salamander. Salamander is a lizard and newt is type of salamander. So the name is like lizard squared, whatever.

Back to Scamander, he arrives in New York city in the early 1920s and adds to the mayhem magnet that is New York (with or without wizards and lizards) a suitcase full of fantastic creatures. He has helpers of the no-maj(humans) and the wizard kind and powerful enemies. And the movie on a whole has better pace than some of the early Harry Potter movies (not the first one.) Good for kids who are interested in becoming paleontologists, zoo-keepers, wizards or bakers and watchable for adults of the no-maj kind.

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The Road

The road is hopeless, long and grim

But they’ve to go on, his boy and him

To South and sun on some ocean’s rim

To South and sun on some ocean’s rim

That is the whole of The Road or my pseudo Frost-ian take on it. Cormac McCarthy won’t spare you like the pithy Mr.Frost. When I read the novel some years ago its apocalyptic vision haunted me for days. It also made me feel blessed, for what we human beings have today – the gift of life on the most beautiful planet in the Solar System and the entire known universe. The Road is very different from McCarthy's previous book that was also turned into a movie which won the Best Picture Oscar in 2007 - No Country for Old Men.

It’s been a long time since I read the novel, The Road. As usual I’ve forgotten most of its details except its pervasive air of doom and grey and its final flicker of hope. I think the movie has captured most, if not all of the core story and the portentous mood of the novel.

If you can appropriately capture the vision of a ghastly, leaden, blown open Earth and make the right casting decision for the roles of father and son, you’ve the movie in your pocket. Director John Hillcoat finds a perfect actor pair in Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee and along with cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe and script writer Joe Penhall he creates a masterful visual poem of  life after the death of Earth.

If you want a little gloom and doom with your pizza and beer this Saturday night (now, isn’t that a perfect combo), check out The Road.

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