Thought of the Day: Be Decisive

One thing I am quickly learning as I approach my mid-twenties is that decisiveness is the key to life. This word or similar ones are banded around nowadays without much weight being placed behind their usage. We are tepidly encouraged at school to pursue our passions and follow our interests, but it always seemed, at least in my case, to come with a heavy dose of experiential detachment. By this I mean that the art of decision making and perseverance were not taught in a very active sense, but more from a passive, disconnected and intellectual point of view. I don't necessarily have anything against this - here I am writing this after all. But one thing I consistently felt as I drifted through school was that I wasn't being inspired. I wasn't being taught how to think for myself or how to practically go after what I wanted in life. I suspect there are many others with a similar memory of their school days. As I moved through school, college and even university, I found myself achieving mostly good grades, yet not once did I reach a point in which I felt I had all the tools to make my aspirations a reality, and to be honest, I still don't.

I am not here to make any kind of argument against the school system or anything like that. Who am I to do so? I have my naive opinions on it but I will save that for another post. I am simply here to say that I believe the best way to approach life is with complete openness, vulnerability and most importantly, high expectations of oneself. I am a strong believer that making the wrong decision is always better than making no decision. I have learned this through living my first 23 years on this planet completely indecisively. I was a drifter at school, I was a drifter at university and I have been a drifter ever since. Only in the last few weeks have I realised that this simply won't do anymore. The attitude I have started to adopt is one of 'do it anyway', 'do it even if it hurts', 'do it even if it has no reward'. I believe that this is the key to building a strong character and reaching your goals, but I also have no delusions about how hard this can be to maintain. Everywhere I look there is another distraction, another comfort, another piece of mindless pleasure. All of these are meant to hold us down, to shield us from the true potential of our own little lives. It extends beyond our personal lives and into the workplace too. I know from experience just how hard it is to give up job security, to say enough is enough to an abusive boss or a miserable job and step out into the world alone, with no immediate place of refuge or salvation. Of course I am not advocating that everyone leave their jobs tomorrow, but what I am saying is that it is absolutely necessary to fail in order to succeed. No one has ever realised their dreams without risking everything and falling on their face a few times, or a lot of times. It is simply part of life, and a beautiful part at that.

I want to keep this quite brief, but I felt compelled to put this into writing. I will summarise by pledging that I intend to live my life large and unrelenting from this point forwards. For too long I have seen myself and many of those I love fall further and further into a docile and vacuous way of life, deeply unsatisfied but unable to crawl out of the deep hole created by those who don't want to see us succeed. I am here to say that enough is enough. I urge anyone reading this to take a stand for what you believe in. The biggest obstacle I have come across when making big decisions is overthinking them. If you know something is the right thing to do but are putting it off, don't think about it, just do it, then reflect on it afterwards. As a serial over thinker, this is helping me massively. Whatever it is you're putting off, do it today, or at the soonest moment possible. You will soon become a beacon of hope for others around you, and this is the best gift you can possibly give to anyone. I know it's cliché, but it cannot be expressed enough. It is hard to live deliberately without making positive life decisions on a daily basis, and for me this involves removing many of the negative and seductive influences in my life. To quote one of my favourite artists, Kanye West, "I've got way too many blues for any more bad news." It is high time that we cut all the negative shit out of our lives so that we can start creating our own stories, so that we can start being the future instead of just helplessly watching it grow more and more grim. So that's it really. I am not encouraging people to abandon everything that gives you happiness, or even things that provide temporary pleasure. I am simply saying that we owe it ourselves and our society to be the best we can be, and this is done most effectively through positive decision making. If you can get up every day with the mindset of optimism and moving towards your dreams, you are doing something right, even if you don't achieve it. Do more, love more, be more! Have a great day.

"Dark times lie ahead of us and there will be a time when we must choose between what is easy and what is right."
  J.K Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

MOVIE REVIEW: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016)

I still vividly remember seeing every single one of the Harry Potter films in the cinema for the first time. It always felt like one of the biggest moments of the year, and they never let me down. David Yates directed my favourite one of the lot, The Half Blood Prince, as well as both parts of the Deathly Hallows which are right up there too. I will always consider myself lucky to have grown up in the age of Potter, both the books and the films. Perhaps because I was roughly the same age as Harry as each film would come out, but mostly because the Potter universe was somewhere I actually wanted to spend a lot of time. The complexity and realness of the characters really carried the story, and you believed in the magical elements precisely because these characters were so believable. Fast forward to 2016 and we have a film that takes place in the same world, yet comes up a long way short of the originals in nearly every department.

I really wanted to like this movie. The idea sounded really cool to me. As I mentioned Yates directed some of my favourites in the franchise, and with J.K Rowling on board as the screenwriter I felt like we were in safe hands. There is not one fundamental problem with Fantastic Beasts - in fact there are lots of positive things about it. The CGI and character design were outstanding for the most part, the 1920's New York setting was gritty, if slightly bland, and a few of the performances really shone through. Unfortunately the problems are also many-fold. The most glaring of all is the script. As much as I admire Rowling, the screenplay for this film kind of has me wishing she'd stick to writing novels. It's not that it's terrible, it's just that it's mediocre, and in the Potter universe that just isn't going to cut it. Many scenes just felt inconsequential on both a thematic and narrative level, with dialogue that comes off as either awkward, sentimental or dull. There were of course several exceptions - the scene in the bar being my favourite for providing both comedy and tension in equal measure. The script never really drew me in like it always did in the Potter films, especially when it heads in a darker direction that was such a heavy feature of the originals.

The performances were also a mixed bag. Eddie Redmayne does his best as Newt Scamander, but personally I did not like his performance. Like in The Theory of Everything, I couldn't help but cringe at some of his acting, which often looked forced and unnatural. Again it's not a terrible performance, but when you're trying to live up to Potter it's very hard to make an impression. I didn't care for Katherine Waterston's portrayal of Tina Goldstein either. Not bad but too reliant on facial expressions and clichéd dialogue. The standout if there is one has to go to Dan Fogler as 'no-maj' Jacob Kowalski, a loveable New Yorker wannabe baker who acts as both the audience exposition character and the comic relief. He was genuinely funny and likeable, and gave the film the sense of humour it so desperately needed more of. His interaction with the other characters was great, but most of all with the beasts themselves, who he would always end up at the mercy of.

Speaking of beasts, they were undoubtedly the saving grace of this movie. In fact I think I would have enjoyed it a lot more if more focus had been put on the relationship between Scamander and this multitude of intricately designed creatures that he was protecting and caring for. Instead the film seemed undecided on what tone it was aiming for, on the one hand wanting to capture the awe and magic of Newt and his beasts, whilst also trying desperately hard to be as dark as the final few Potter films, to which it falls embarrassingly short. The story of Credence and his upbringing was a cool idea, but I think they saved it for a later movie, where we would have had more time to understand his character. The CGI mess in the final act, with Credence flying around as an Obscurus tearing up the streets of New York, just shouldn't have made the final cut. The subtly and ambiguity of evil was utilised so perfectly in the Potter films because of the level of nuance in the characters and the growing dread that builds through every successive movie. It's a real shame because I thought Ezra Miller could have made Credence a really fascinating character, he just wasn't given enough to work with.

One thing I admired about Fantastic Beasts is how little it relied on fan service. Apart from the passing mention of Albus Dumbledore, there was very little sucking up to Potter's legacy. Having said that, and with the knowledge that they are making 5(!) more of these things, I have to question whether the world will be interesting enough to stretch it out that much. Many will say that this was a set up film for the ones to come, but I am not going to give it a pass for that. The first two Harry Potter's had me desperate to see how they were going to approach the rest of the films, and I just didn't get that with Fantastic Beasts. Nonetheless, it was a bold move to make a film in such a beloved world without doing what so many other franchises have done *cough Star Wars cough* and simply copy the formula of previous successes, so it does get some praise for that.

Overall, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them was just not what I wanted it to be. Ultimately it lacked a set of characters that I wanted to invest in and had a script that felt like it was trying to do too much. The result was a badly paced and tonally inconsistent film, with the odd scene here and there that really made me remember why I fell in love with the Potter universe in the first place. If they'd focussed mainly on showcasing the beasts and further developed Newt's character, my review might have been entirely different. Nevertheless I still think this is a fun family movie and it will certainly appeal to some much more than it did to me. My hopes are simply that both Yates and Rowling will take this franchise somewhere more engaging in the future. We will see!

Acting: 45
Narrative: 45
Visuals: 65
Music: 60

Overall: 54/100