Everything below the fold may or may not be MILD plot-spoilers for “Happy Feet 2.”
American “conservatives” who still make a go of engaging with the popular culture already seem to live in a kind of fantasy fever-dream where every single entertainment entity on the planet with the exception of Country Music and Call of Duty (dig the ORGASMIC praise the widely-panned “Black Ops” got from the Breitbart coven) is attacking them – personally – with “surprise liberal messages!!!;” so it’s always fun to see how they react on those rare occasions when a “surprise liberal message” is actually there.
“Happy Feet 2” (written review coming at some point, but it’s REALLY good) features as it’s “B-story” a pair of Krill named Will and Bill (Matt Damon and Brad Pitt) who break off from their Krill swarm to explore the “next world” – i.e. everything outside the swarm which they had previously believed encompassed the entire universe. (their sequences are the visual standouts in what’s already a gorgeous looking movie – the swarm looks like something out of Tree of Life.) Basically, they’re here to go through the “animal outside his boundaries as metaphor for existential-transcendance” (the “Happy Feet” movies are kinda weird) bit that the Penguins already did in the first one.
So what has the professionally-grumpy’s panties in a bunch about that? Will and Bill are gay.
To be fair, they didn’t imagine this – that the two encompass a male/male couple (which Bill seems to be more “aware” of than Will) is the main “for the grownups” joke of the film. But if you want to see some choice venom, look at the comment thread below all that in the link. Yeesh…
Oh well, at least they’ll be thrilled that a film dedicated to telling an audience of mostly teenaged girls that abortion-to-save-the-life-of-the-mother is wrong because dying in childbirth will reincarnate you as what amounts to an angel/faerie/superwoman just had a $30 Million midnight opening. Joy.
MOVIEBOB CENTRAL 
…WHYYYYYYYY
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Well. I have all the more reason to go see the penguin movie now. High five.
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You know Bob, I don't necessarily like conservatives, but it's a bit annoying that you're labeling them as douchebags for disliking gay imagery in a movie when you're panning the crap out of Twilight for being anti-abortion.
On the other hand, tolerating gay people shouldn't be a left-right political issue, it's just basic human decency. And Breaking Dawn is terrible in general.
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@Taylor
Wheras abortion is a complex and nuanced issue with reasonable and un-reasonable arguments on both sides, Gay rights are, as you say, a matter of basic human decency. So I don't know that its entirely the same.
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I cant remember, did the Conservative media throw a shit fit over Wall-E having an environmental message?
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TLW/
+1 to that.
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@biomechanical923: Yes, yes they did.
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Honestly, I can deal with that. The only thing about the first Happy Feet that pisses me off is it pretty much singled out religious people as being foolish and believing in things that were wrong. I can tolerate the environmentalist boo-hooing, and I've watched enough Stargate and Joss Whedon that a movie having an anti-uptight-authority figure is nothing new, but Happy Feet's whole premise is that the leaders aren't just closed-minded, but their entire belief structure is wrong and ignoring the truth of the world.
It really is an anti-religious message.
Of course, my BIGGEST problem is simply that most of the pop music is lame and terrible.
If Happy Feet Two's worst crime in comparison is a subtle gay couple, meh. I've got more things to worry about (though seriously, can we please stop trying to indoctrinate children with our own beliefs? I don't care how correct you THINK you are, it's all brainwashing, be it Twilight or Happy Feet).
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So Bob, are you just psychologically incapable of NOT trying to make people hate the things you are unreasonably hostile to by associating them with something unpopular? Because it's becoming something of a cliche.
Incidentally, Black Ops was not panned. It remains popular even today by people of all political stripes. Did it have anything to do with Happy Feet 2? No. But you just had to reinforce that if we like games you don't like that makes us bad people.
Though I do have to thank you for posting it the same week as the one you deigned to tell nerds what's wrong with us for maximum irony. I would have bet you'd have made it at least a week before violating your own rules.
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@Dave from canada,
You're putting much more thought into my fiendish machinations than I am 😉
I was looking for something other than Country Music that gets slobbering praise from Breitbart's goon squad in the popular culture, and the fact that his sites breathlessly report COD's sales figures – usually in the context of “see liberal media!? THIS is what Real Americans want!!” – is what I settled on.
FWIW, the first thing I typed was actually “Larry the Cable Guy;” but honestly his History Channel show and “Cars 2” has me rethinking my attitude towards him recently.
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@Chris Cesarano aaand there's the problem. Showing gay people to exist and be normal should not be a political statement in and of itself capable of “indoctrinating” anybody. When all one side wants to do is acknowledge people's right to live the way they were born, it's not a question of two opposing viewpoints, it's an aggressor and a defender.
That's why there is no middle ground with portraying homosexuality – just by including them at all without condemning, you're “indoctrinating” and pushing a “liberal agenda”. If you ignore their existence altogether, then the homophobes get what they want.
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Wait… Bob is seriously under the impression that CoD: Black Ops was widely panned? The game that sold gangbusters and got positive reviews from basically everyone (especially Screwattack)?
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Excellent point, A. Ivan.
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Ooh, there's some entertaining comments, and I'm not even infuriated. At all. It's amusing. Here's a interesting one: “What caring parent would take their children anywhere close to the sewer pipe that's Hollywood?
There are plenty of DVDs from the era when Hollywood was actually patriotic!”
I love that last sentence.
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I clicked on the link thinking “Perhaps Bob is wrong, or overreacting or… something.”
Read the article, think the author is a bit of an idiot, but so are many authors these days.
And then you get to the comments section and I had to leave to hurl. Belief is not the same as being a right dumbass.
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@Christ Cesarano “Happy Feet's whole premise is that the leaders aren't just closed-minded, but their entire belief structure is wrong and ignoring the truth of the world.
It really is an anti-religious message.”
That shows more you having a very low opinion of religion, not so much the creators of happy feet.
Religion by no means is inherently ignorant.
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Maybe Bill the Krill can go join Marcus Bachmann's clinic, and pray away the gay!
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@A. Ivan
Truth told, you're right about that. I can't really say for the portrayal of the pair in Happy Feet Two, but normally when Hollywood chooses to represent gay people, they're in a very flamboyant manner that is beyond stereotypical, which I would imagine only does harm to the gay community (I don't really know any gay men that act so flamboyantly as film and television presents them as being).
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I just came back from the comment section. I find it terribly ironic that a comment expresses his distaste for tolerance towards others…through a MLP reference.
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Those comments… gah! They actually think THEY'RE the ones being discriminated against, by apparently being “forced to watch this stuff”. They HONESTLY think it's them that's under attack, and “The Gay Agenda” is the attacker! No wonder it's so hard to have a damned debate these days.
I also find it kind of hard to get my head around the argument that young children “aren't ready” to see homosexual relationships, when clearly they see heterosexual relationships on a daily basis, including in kids' films.
A. Ivan is dead right. It's fucking stupid that “here are some gay people” is considered controversial. Just… blargh.
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Arturo:
I also like how, of all the possible ponies, that poster picks Rainbow Dash as her avatar! The one that has the whole “likes girls” meme going on… d'oh! Guess she thinks she's making a point or something…
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Popcorn Dave,
Of course conservatives think they are the victims of the people they persecute. Most out of control authoritarian movements are like that. The Nazis believed they were being persecuted by Jews, the Khmer Rouge believed they were being persecuted by intellectuals, etc.
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I fall a bit more toward the right than a lot of the other posters here. I'm even a registered Republican. I think the big problem here is that the further you are from the center, the harder it is to distinguish nuances within the opinions in the other camp. If you believe that marriage is a sacred institution and homosexuality is an abomination (my own views run strongly counter to Republicans as a whole), it can be really easy to confuse a gay couple for activists. Bigotry and persecution complexes are pretty common on either side of the fence.
Does this mean that the comments above weren't disgusting? I don't think it does. Intolerance is absolutely shameful and I'm embarrassed to be associated with the same species as some of the posters. Still, lumping all Republicans into a single group is no less closed minded than their behavior.
Arturo: since the comment is taken from Rarity at her most dramatic, I thought the comment was sarcastic. I could be mistaken, though.
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President Obama is firmly committed to the homosexual agenda and recent promises made to the LBGT and others have caused some in the conservative movement and the evangelical and Pentecostal churches to shudder. It is also clear that the church's concerns have little bearing on the President's position to throw the doors open for the “gay agenda by closing the steel doors around those who make so much as a whimper against the gays. Signing the untested and highly suspect Matthew Shepard act is the latest evidence of that.
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