Football Counter-Programming 2018: Conference Champions Week

After an unscheduled and unannounced absence in Weeks 11 and 12, Football Counter-Programming made a triumphant return in Week 13 . . . just in time to witness Ohio State's triumphant return to prominence and relevancy.

But that is as much football-specific talk as you are going to get in this post. Because I know what the title of this post is and I know what I'm doing here. I trying to get you to do something other than watch college football on a Saturday. And that is only harder to accomplish in late November and early December when most places are cold, gray, and all you really want to do is sit inside and stay warm, eating snacks and vegging out.

But NO! I say NO!

In place of (semi-professional) amateur gridiron, let's talk about Harry Potter. Well . . . specifically let's talk about Newt Scamander and the Fantastic Beasts film franchise that he is the titular (if no longer truly the content driver of) movie hero of.

A few weeks ago I went to see FB2: TCoG and well, I guess it was fine. For a movie that had little to no connection to the charity-based "textbook" the title is based upon . . . it was fine. It was much better than Peter Jackson's three Hobbit movies that played a similar game of taking source material and bloating it out into as many movie tickets as it could get away with.

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Gindelwald was a visually pleasing film with some adequate plot elements. And I like the actors by-and-large--with the de rigueur vilification of Johnny Depp implied, you understand? I very much like Jude Law's Dumbledore portrayal and it almost made me forget what a young Pope he is. But . . . the cinematic reveal at the end of the film was viewed by me, in the moment, as a drastic and very concerning up-ending of Potterverse canon. (If you don't know what I'm talking about it is either because you could not care less or because you just haven't seen the movie. Please use your favorite search engine to discover the awful truth for yourself.)

ANDBUTSO . . . I've listened to podcasts and read the Internet since the movie watching and I am confidently holding out hope for a sensible resolution in films 3-5--assuming of course that the public wasn't so turned off by FB2 that there is no financial stomach to even make the remaining films. If that ends up being the case, then I'm sure J.K. Rowling and the WizardingWorld publishing machine will give us hard-copy versions of the screenplays that were never filmed so that we know what might have been.

But truly--and this is the real reason that I even decided to write about this topic in the first place--what I WANT out of all of this is a canonical, hard-copy version of Rita Skeeter's The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore. It was the tell-all book that shook poor Harry to the core in the wandering parts of Deathly Hallows. It forced the reader to reevaluate what we knew about Albus PWB. And, in no small measure, it is the content spine of FB2 and what we can now assume are the plots of FB3-FB5.

Let's just have the book, shall we?

Until that day comes and we get the books we richly deserve, just remember. It's doesn't matter if your alma mater's special teams coach is a Ravenclaw. If they aren't playing in a conference championship game today you can kiss goodbye their (non Notre Dame) chances of making it into the CFP Final 4.

Have a fun non-football weekend.