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November 28, 2006

Happy feet= bad movie.

Sorry Amanda, you’re just wrong on this one. I saw happy feet and was more than a bit annoyed at how bad it was...

Look, I’m a friend of the environment. We really ought to grow our fish in vats in South Dakota so that the ecosystem has a chance to repair itself. I’m in favor of that. Turning carbon into a global commodity with steadily decreasing availability? Sure. Let’s do that f*cker. The problem with Happy Feet wasn’t message, it was presentation...

The movie started out as a shining example of evolution: penguins show their prowess at gathering scares resources in order to find a mate. Where the resources are the most-scarce, they sing. One little penguin couldn’t sing and so he was not going to be able to pass along his mutant “dancing” DNA. Until one penguin decided that she rather preferred dancing to singing, and so all looked good...

Then for some reason Our Hero had to—half way through the movie—engage in a Campbellian journey to discover the alien’s who are slowly killing his people himself. Eventually, he find the humans aliens, and gets put in a zoo. While in the zoo he goes slowly insane. Until he starts to tapdance. Now, the movie had clearly established that he only taps when he’s happy, and he’s clearly unhappy. But tap he does, and we dasterly humans release him back into the wild. His tapping becomes an internet sensation (no joke!), and the UN is lobbied to prevent further fishing in their area, saving penguins and their tappy-tap-tapping ways...

Moral lesson: animals are only with saving when they entertain us...

It seems as if the movie simply needed to be padded for time and so tacked on this whole other plot as a way of keeping the theatre filled. It was fun and diverting right up until it became a Kafkaesque exploration of the penguin psyche and humanity’s cruelty to nature. The juxtaposition of the two was unsettling at best...

I’d like to recommend this movie, but I can’t. Go watch March of the Penguins again, instead...

Posted by Andrew at November 28, 2006 05:32 PM

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Comments

You have not responded to the points in the article you linked to. The arguments between the two were not on the quality of the movie, but the moral lessons inserted into children's movies. The presentation may have been faulty, and the movie really rather bad, but arguing these points is superficial to the actual issue, which Amanda's article does address.

And what's with "f*cker"? If you're going to curse, do it. If you think that the issue isn't important enough to curse, then don't even begin. I imagine all of those reading your blog are over the age of eighteen anyway.

Oh, and by the way, I know someone who loves you....

Posted by: Wanton Expressions [TypeKey Profile Page] at December 1, 2006 04:24 PM