Fantastic Beasts: the Crimes of J.K. Rowling

This thing was all over the fucking place. I liked the kelp monster. And I liked when the brothers hugged. And I liked when Dumbledore first showed up. Other than the three handsome boys in it*, I was mostly confused during this movie. It felt like it was filling in a lot of old questions I was supposed to have from the Potter books. (I either don't remember those questions or this movie is off the rails.)

And as for Dumbledore's homosexual desires for anyone. They are as absent in The Crimes of Grindelwald as they are in any of the Harry Potter books. J.K. Rowling can say that Dumbledore is gay all she wants, but I remain unconvinced. Dumbledore certainly isn't telling us he's gay. Right now it feels like she's accusing him of something he doesn't even know about.

Actually, wait. I thought I was done, but I'm not. This movie made no fucking sense. The thing I don't get is that Rowling keeps introducing new random elements into her world that no one has ever heard about before. Is it normal for a wizard to call a bunch of other wizards to a meeting by covering an entire city in fabric? Since when? I had never heard of that before, but this movie just treats it like it's a typical thing that we all know about. Rowling changes the parameters of her world so often that it's totally impossible to get one's footing. Like, since when can you see the recent past in a room by blowing magic gold dust around (magic gold dust that is apparently not difficult to acquire)? If we can do that, why didn't anyone do that when Dumbledore was murdered?

Honestly, maybe there are canonical explanations for these things and I am just ignorant of them (I'm no expert on the lore of this world), but when I'm watching my thought process is basically: Wait, what's happening now? I don't know what this is or what's going on. It seems to me that Rowling's basic screenwriting technique is that she jumps from introducing one new magical wonder to the next. This isn't plotting so much as it is a kind of medieval pageantry, and I wouldn't mind this so much except that the entire thing keeps telling us it's a mystery we should somehow be able to puzzle our way through. But who can do any puzzling when the rules keep changing?