BEFORE: The connection here is children's books, I'm kind of splitting up the straight animated films, but I will get back to them shortly. Jim Carrey carries over from "Lemony Snicket", obvi.
THE PLOT: The life of a businessman begins to change after he inherits six penguins, and as he transforms his apartment into a winter wonderland, his professional side starts to unravel.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Happy Feet Two" (Movie #1,327)
AFTER: Hollywood's fascination with penguins returns - you'd think that "March of the Penguins" would have told us everything we need to know about these birds, but apparently not. Did you know they could just be packed in ice and shipped across the world in a crate without food, and they just go into a state of hibernation, which they recover from with no ill effects? Yeah, me neither.
But this is based on a children's book, you have to allow for a little bending of the facts. Kids' books are not meant to be taken seriously, or turned into movies that we're supposed to take seriously. And that's where children's lit meets Hollywood films, because both genres produce things that are otherwise impossible, or sometimes just plain silly. How else to explain that taking care of 6 messy, loud, smelly birds somehow fixes a man's life, including his personality, career, and relationship with his ex-wife and kids?
I could get into a whole host of NYC building regulations and other laws that were broken here, starting with a building's "no pets" clause and spiraling from there. I can't remember if it was Bloomberg or maybe Giuliani who passed that law against keeping penguins in an apartment, but I'm sure it's on the books somewhere. Plus I'm fairly sure it's not possible to keep your apartment so cold that you can have piles of snow in it that don't melt, or to turn your living room floor into a surface that you can ice-skate on. So shenanigans on that. Plus NITPICK POINT: you just can't fill up an entire bathroom with water, all the way to the ceiling, without it leaking out through the door or the electrical fixtures. Do filmmakers have any idea how heavy water is? The floor would collapse before the room filled up.
I did appreciate the red tape he encountered when he tried to get some NYC agency to deal with the birds. We had a raccoon in our backyard once, and called animal control - they told us they couldn't capture a raccoon because it's "part of nature". Well, aren't ALL animals part of nature? So they've got a built-in excuse to accomplish nothing all day long. They told us to call the police, so I did, then I had to explain the situation to the cops and I felt ridiculous. What were they going to do - arrest it? Shoot it? Two years later we had a possum in the yard, and I ended up just spraying it with a garden hose to make it go away.
Again, the theme of orphans comes up, not just in the birds that are removed from the flock and need to be taken care of, but the fact that Mr. Popper had a father who was always traveling, essentially an absent parent - to the point where Popper learned to get by without him. (Kind of like "The Secret Life of Walter Shitty"...) And if you follow the logic, this corrupted his personality to the point where he couldn't maintain his marriage, feels disconnected from his own kids, and is a ruthless corporate real-estate weasel. OK, so the path between those things isn't completely clear, but the implication is that something went wrong somewhere. But caring for these birds and their eggs somehow puts his priorities back in order - he's still a real-estate weasel, but at least he admits it now. I'm not sure that constitutes an improvement, though.
So there are a few shortcuts exploited here to bring about a satisfactory resolution - like exploiting the closeness of the Central Park Zoo to the Tavern on the Green restaurant. It's tidy, but also too much of a coincidence. And I'm glad they mentioned that penguins "imprint" on people, because that explained how the birds knew to travel across town, through a city they've never seen, to find one man in a city of millions, even though they didn't know where he'd be. Wait a minute, that wasn't explained at all.
I guess this movie's a lot of fun if you can turn your mind off and not worry about such things. I obviously can't. This hearkens back to the living at the zoo vs. living in the wild aspect of "Madagascar 3", complete with "evil" zoo personnel, but once again there are no easy answers to this debate.
Also starring Carla Gugino (last seen in "New Year's Eve"), Angela Lansbury (last heard in "Anastasia"), Clark Gregg (last seen in "The Avengers"), Dominic Chianese, Philip Baker Hall (last seen in "Argo"), James Tupper, Ophelia Lovibond, with cameos from Jeffrey Tambor (last seen in "Muppets From Space"), David Krumholtz (last seen in "A Very Harold & Kumar 3-D Christmas").
RATING: 5 out of 10 ice buckets
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