The tool we need for scene-by-scene breakdowns and discussion of the released Crimes of Grindelwald film (versus the so-called Original Screenplay) will be available for digital download next month and on Blu-Ray or DVD in March. The story from ComingSoon.net:

Welcome back to Hogwarts when Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, the second of five all-new adventures from the Wizarding World created by J.K. Rowling, arrives on 4K UHD Combo Pack, Blu-ray Combo Pack, DVD Special Edition and Digital.

The 4K UHD Combo Pack and the Blu-ray Combo pack include an extended cut of the film with more than seven minutes of deleted scenes added, available as a digital download. Also featured is an audio introduction by director David Yates and over an hour of fantastic special features.

You can pre-order the film in four different packages (links to Amazon from SnitchSeeker.com):

— Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald DVD
— Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald Blu-ray + Digital Download
— Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald Blu-ray 3D + Blu-ray + Digital Download
— Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Download

Blu-Ray DVD pre-orders can also be made at Target.com for $25 rather than $30. 

No doubt we will learn more about the seven minutes of deleted material in the run-up to the release. Hat tip to Kelly for the news!

 

 

Just in time for Orthodox Nativity and Western Epiphany, Rowling switched out her Twitter header on 7 January but kept the same cameo picture. What is the exotic location pictured? “Let me google that for you, Dad,” as a daughter likes to say when I ask easily searchable questions.

Google Image Search says it is Zhangjiajie, specifically Wulingyan Scenic and Historic Area, a ‘AAAAA’ Scenic Site. The grading for scenic sites is a lot like that used in Mr Scamander’s Fantastic Beasts for the relative danger of the various creatures.

Options off the top of my head:

(a) This picture was taken while returning Crimes of Grindelwald Chinese Beast, the Zouwu, back to the wild after filming;

(b) It is a snapshot from a Family trip to a Rowling Inc. Sneaker Factory (which explains her twitter silence for two weeks);

(c) Forget Rio; in Beasts3 we’re going to 1930’s China, before it became Communist after Mao’s Long March;

(d) It’s actually Meteora on a foggy day (so much for Google search);

(e) The picture is of pilings on the Moors of Scotland where Cormoran Strike will learn that it was Lucy’s father who killed Leda, forget Rokeby;

(F) is for Fjord — it’s a Rosmersholm picture?

So far, the speculation online seems to be running for options (a) and (c), that we’re off to China to return the Zouwu we met in Crimes of Grindelwald to its native habitat. As much as I’m hoping it is (e), I think that the road trip to China is a pretty good guess for these three reasons: [Read more…]

I spent International Chiasmus Day looking over my Crimes of Grindelwald charts and lecture notes about Tolkien’s The Hobbit as ring composition when I learned yesterday was also JRRT’s birthday. I flipped a hermetic coin this morning about which notes to write up as a short post here and the alchemical token came up ‘Phoenix’ rather than ‘Dragon’ — I read a brilliant paper draft on those two beasts last night by Lana Whited, too, that will change your thinking about Fantastic Beasts if you’re anything like me — so it’s the ring of Crimes today!

This will be the briefest of exposition, though, because the full version, charts and all, will be included in my online course the updated and expanded version of which is in queue for registration early in the New Year. Having said that, let’s have a look at the second film in the Fantastic Beasts five movie franchise and see if we can spot the story latch, which is to say, where and how the beginning and end hook up, the story turn, the scenes in which we end the beginning and start the end with echo and pointers to both respectively, and the story parallels, the ‘turtleback lines’ moving to and from the center in which the screenwriter creates corresponding in reverse order after the story pivot in chiastic fashion, A-B-C-D-C’-B’-A’, where the A’s are the latch, D is the turn, and B and C are the parallels.

The story latch is two-fold. First there is the Grindelwald’s escape epilogue, scenes 1 to 16 in the Original Screenplay that is not ‘Original’ but pretty much a transcript of the director’s cut (hereafter just ‘the screenplay’), and the Hogwarts/Nurmengard epilogue, scenes 116-120.  [Read more…]

‘Pillar Posts’ are round-ups and explanations of key ideas and texts that have been and continue to be discussed at HogwartsProfessor. With more than two thousand posts in our archives spread out over twelve years of blogging, we need an easily accessible file where serious readers can find — without hours of hunting — the articles they want to read. These Pillar Posts will find a home on the left sidebar of the HogwartsProfessor homepage and I’ll update them regularly.

Today I want to pull together what we’ve written here about the first film in the Fantastic Beasts franchise since its release in 2016.

It may seem irrelevant to revisit the first movie now that we have Crimes of Grindelwald but Fantastic Beasts 1: Newt Goes to New York will almost certainly be reflected in the third film and the finale, Beasts 5. As we’ve seen in Harry Potter and the Cormoran Strike mysteries, Rowling writes her series in rings, a structure that features an axis bisecting the story circle that connects first-middle-and-final parts (for a five film package, that means 1-3-5).

I focused most of my attention in 2016 on trying to come to something approximating Rowling’s final “shhoting script,” something that had to be recreated from the Heyman-Yates mish-mash of a movie, the published screenplay, and the many deleted scenes. As Rowling said Steve Kloves told her, the agony of making a movie out of a Rowling novel or script is “fitting the woman to the dress,” i.e., forcing the natural figure into the mechanical formula of blockbuster movies. I’ll let you judge how successful I was in sorting out and pasting in the scenes that we know were not included in the released movie.

Text-discovery was my focus but there was a lot more going on, from the MuggleNet Academia and Reading, Writing, Rowling podcasts to discussion of the movie’s ring structure and Christian content, not to mention the posts by Beatrice Groves, Wayne Stauffer, and HogwartsProfessor faculty Louise Freeman and Elizabeth Baird-Hardy. You can find it — close to forty posts! — all neatly organized just after the jump.

As with all of the Pillar Posts, please let me know if a link is not working or if I have inadvertently left out an article. Enjoy!

Unlocking Fantastic Beasts: Finding the Text 

Preface: ‘The Original Screenplay’ – Not the Shooting Script or Even a Faithful Movie Transcript (What the Movie Makers Changed or Left Out)

Preface 2: Comparing the Original Screenplay with the Actual Film: What the Film Makers Left Out, Changed, or Deleted (with Kelly Loomis)

Part 1: J. K. Rowling, Screenwriter — Who is Working for Whom?

Part 5A: So What? The Found Text and Its Meaning

• 5.1 The Story of the Text We’re Looking For
• 5.2  Theseus the Hero and Newt Scamander
• 5.3 Jacob Kowalski: Is He Bigger than Newt?
• 5.4 The Grindelwald-Credence Relationship
• 5.5 Lumos and the Barebone Orphanage
• 5.6 Dougall, Intratextuality, and Readers
• 5.7 Fantastic Beasts and the Beasts Within

Part 5B: The Shooting Script — A Corrected Text for Serious Readers

Part 5C: Conclusions and Predictions

Interpretation and Speculation: Ring Structure, Christian Content, Elder Wand, Etc.

• On the Story Structure of Fantastic Beasts: Is It a Ring?
• On the Deep Back Story Revealed in Fantastic Beasts
• On the Christian Content in Fantastic Beasts — and the New Controversy
• Rune Magic in ‘Fantastic Beasts’? I wish
• Why the Film Franchise Cannot Win a Major League ‘Oscar’
• Nicolas Flamel to Appear in the Sequel? Don’t You Believe It!
• Who is the Death Stick’s Master? The Elder Wand and Fantastic Beasts

Podcasts:

• Fantastic Beasts Ring Composition: A ‘Reading, Writing, Rowling’ Podcast (with Katy McDaniel and Brett Kendall)
• On Rowling’s Missteps and Misappropriatrions in ‘History of Magic in North America‘ (with Dr. Amy H. Sturgis and Allison Mills, MuggleNet Academia podcast)
• The HogwartsProfessors Talk ‘Fantastic Beasts’ (with Louise Freeman, Emily Strand, and Elizabeth Baird-Hardy; MuggleNet Academia podcast)
• Eugenics in American History and Fantastic Beasts (with Professor Chris Gavaler of Washington and Lee University; MuggleNet Academia podcast)

Louise Freeman’s Fantastic Beasts Posts:

• Fantastic Beasts Review
• Not all Fantastic Beasts are Fictional
• Is an Obscurus the Opposite of a Patronus?
• Could Fantastic Beasts be Doctor Dolittle with a Wand?
• JK Rowling and her Fantastic Beasts

Elizabeth Baird-Hardy’s Fantastic Beasts Posts

• Throwback Thursday with Narnia, Newt Scamander, and Fantastic Beasts: Part I
• Throwback Thursday with Narnia, Newt Scamander, and Fantastic Beasts: Part II
• Pack Your Bags! Newt Scamander’s Fantastic Beast-y Suitcase, Hermione’s Handbag, and their Literary Relatives
• Five Spoiler-Free Reasons Potterphiles will Love Fantastic Beasts
• Thanksgiving Thoughts on Terrific Treats from Fantastic Beasts!
• Fantastic Beast Flashbacks: The Five Things We Want to Know about What Happened BEFORE Newt’s NY Adventure
• Fairies and Wizards? A Midsummer Night’s Dream and What We Might Expect from Crimes of Grindelwald

Guest Posts:

• Wayne Stauffer: Names in Fantastic Beasts
• Beatrice Groves: On ‘Nagini Maledictus’ – Literary Allusion in Fantastic Beasts