I'm slowly recovering my blog from switching back to Blogger after a failed experiment with the program Writer's Block. For the record, there's something about Writer's Block that attracts spammers, and I can't reccomend it. Anyway, after they ate my bandwidth it seemed like a good idea to just go back to what works. I'll try to post more entries more often, we'll see.

Originally posted November 25, 2006 at 18:19.
Crossposted from another journal:

I'm really dissapointed.

As in severly so. If you've watched this space, you'll know that I've been looking forward to Happy Feet for MONTHS. It's been ages since I saw that first teaser trailer and declared that I wanted that movie to be out now.

See, I like penguins. I think they're very cool. I like good CGI. I like dancing animals. Tapdancing penguins? Go for it!

But what I was instead treated to was a movie that alternated between Moulin Rouge on Ice and a PETA commercial. That's exaggerating only slightly.

Basically, I don't think there was a single original song on the entire soundtrack, which bothers me. I like pop songs, I listen to them often. They picked some good songs, and they did okay by them (and I think they did much better at this task than Moulin Rouge, to be honest) but the fact remains that I think it's sad that Hollywood and television are not giving us new original music anymore. Even if I agree that the opening to Enterprise was gorgeous and well done, and the music well chosen, it still means that they didn't write anything NEW.

We just recycle old rock hits and move on. I don't like this trend.

Anyway, I was forewarned about the humans encroaching on the habitat plot. I remember one of my friends said it came out of nowhere, so I knew it would probably toss itself out there when I was least suspecting it.

It wasn't that it came out of nowhere, it was that it was poorly done and poorly intergrated into the story of Mumble. I know it's a kids movie but the fact is that kids movies can be BRILLIANT and deal with very adult subjects in really great ways. Kids books do this even better, but movies are often fantastic.

This one seems like they got halfway through and said "Oh, wait, this whole 'it's hard to be different' thing is too easy. We can't go with that, we need villains. What, you mean penguins have a naturally hard life and have lots of predators? No, I'm sorry. This doesn't really work too well. We're gonna go with...HUMANS!"

Ever single mention of humans seemed to be designed to make adults feel guilty. I liked that they referred to the humans as aliens, that actually amused me. But the rest of it just...it was too much, it was too heavy handed and it didn't work.

It wasn't realistic, it wasn't neccesary, and it just didn't work.

Overall: Meiran is very saddened because she wanted to badly to really really enjoy this film, but she can't say she'll ever really watch it again. And that's depressing. Maybe if I can take it and clip out all the "alien" stuff and just have cute penguins being cute penguins.

There's a place on this earth for environmental films, and for movies that make us think. This one could have been it, but it was at the same time half-hearted and too much. I have no idea how they managed that, but they did.