Happy Feet

I saw Happy Feet yesterday. Here goes.

All penguins have a "heartsong", basically this one song they sing during mating season. Oddly, despite their complete isolation from human popular culture, their songs all seem to be pop hits from the 80's and 90's. Some of them rap. Anyway, there's this one penguin who's born without the ability to sing because his father dropped his egg into the ice accidentally. Instead, he does this freaky dance thing, and everyone things he's deranged, which he kinda is.

While obviously not Movie of the Year, it was still super cute. It started out kinda crappy, and then Hugh Jackman Penguin started doing this Elvis thing to try and woo Nicole Kidman Penguin, and I was thinking "Christ, please let the whole movie not be like this." And then their baby penguin started tap dancing, which is fine. A little unimpressive. After seeing the previews, I was expecting the movie to be more Stomp and less Ruby Keeler.

But anyway, the baby was sad that he sucked at everything except tap dancing, but I just couldn't seem to care. So when he got attacked by three predatory birds, I was kinda on their side and thought "Eat him! A 20-minute movie!"

But obviously, he didn't get eaten, and then the movie got better. He grew up into a post-pubescent penguin, as all penguins eventually do -- except for some reason, he didn't really develop right. Nobody ever commented on it (perhaps because it made them uncomfortable), but the dancing penguin never matured out of fuzziness, and he had this weird baby head the entire time. I spent the entire movie thinking "I bet that's like what penguin Downs Syndrome is like" and I proceeded to refer to the main character as "Chromosome" because I couldn't understand his real name. It was Mumble or Mambo or something, but nobody said it clearly enough.

But either way, the movie dealt with some neat themes. The penguins were a society of crazy, conservative religious nuts (worshipping the Great Guin, a name I found endlessly adorable.) They even went so far as to call the guy's dancing "pagan", so... yeah, I wonder what religion they were comparing it to, hmmm.... And they also dealt with conservation and being yourself and all the stuff you'd expect from a cartoon movie about penguins.

Robin Williams made the movie awesome like he always does with things. He plays this tiny penguin named Ramon and says "Let me tell ju someting" a lot.

So, cute movie. I give it a million stars.

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Ok, but the real reason I went to see this movie was because it was the first release to carry the teaser trailer to Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and in all geekiness, I'm confessing that I've never been more excited about a movie ever.

Helena Bonham Carter looks amazing as Bellatrix Lestrange. But I knew she would. Hermione's still pretty. But I knew that too. The movie looks dark and awesome. There were no shots of Imelda Staunton or the Room of Requirement or Emma Thompson or the veil, but... fine. The flight over London was neat-looking. Sadly, I think Angry Dumbledore will be back.

Dear World, I am a Harry Potter dork. I've read the books 50 times, I can practically recite the movies, and I've had inappropriate dreams about Emma Watson. Whatcha gonna do about it?