"Popper's Penguins" Premiers Proficiently

"Mr. Popper's Penguins"
π/5 Stars

This summer, theaters were presented with a pleasing picture featuring the purposeful Jim Carry and six positively precious penguins in the movie "Mr. Popper's Penguins." The plot is a partial parallel to the book published in 1938 of the same name. Though anyone familiar with the predecessor can note the perceptible difference.
Unfortunately, it experiences the predicament all pictures of its persuasion of having been produced for the progeny; the plot presents a problem of being poorly predictable.
Tom Popper is a New York realtor who grew up mostly separated from his adventurous father. But as his pop was away for progressively prolonged periods of time, young Tom grew to be somewhat emotionally cold. This proves problematic when he tries to relate to his prepubescent son and his petulant preteen daughter.
Popper finds himself perplexed at the presence of a penguin given to him through the will of his father who passes away early in the picture. When Popper tries to pass off the penguin, he unintentionally orders five more, and his family positively love the penguins before he can purge himself of the problem.
As Popper tries to protect the penguins from the prying eyes of his neighbors and a persistent zoo keeper, he grows to prize his pets, risking his job, home and family to keep them.
One thing I will perpetually praise the picture for is Carry's performance. I had feared it would be peppered predominantly by an over-powering portrayal of Carry like I've perceived in his earlier pictures. But I was pleased to see the performance played down, showing Popper as a positively mature character along with a hint of Carry's charm.
The apparent antagonists were puzzling to posit. The zoo keeper became the obvious villain of the film, but the other two forces were written rather poorly. Popper's bosses, whom he spent the primary part of the picture trying to appease for a promotion, would jump from pleasant to pessimistic throughout and proved to be no problem to Popper in the end.
Popper's pestering neighbor, Kent, spent his three scenes trying to prove the presence of Popper's penguins to the officials of the apartment building they shared (the place had a no-pet rule). But part way through the film, his story just petered out and he disappeared.
Another positive bit I can point out is that Popper's Penguins rarely passes into the present problem plaguing films made primarily for kids; the pitiful production of poop jokes. Although this movie doesn't suffer as badly as some other recent children's movies, it is present. It was especially prominent pertaining to the penguin promptly named "Stinky." The references are few and far between; but still present.
And as I pointed out previously; the plot is plenary predictable. Any particular plot event was easily seen coming several minutes prior to its prosecution. In my polite opinion, this made the picture very plain. I found myself purely entertained by a few jokes proffered by the comedy, and pushed through the picture just to see my predictions present themselves.
I did find myself predominantly entertained by the performance of the peripheral character, Pippi; Popper's personal assistant whose every line in the picture was peppered "P" alliterations.
Is Popper's Penguins a deep, preoccupying movie? Probably not. But is it a picturesque and pleasantly cute picture? In Popper's words, "yeah, absolutley."

NaPoWriMo -- 2010

And so we come to the final day of the month! Today's prompt isn't really a prompt, but just a call to write whatever we want! So I came up with something I like to think is clever. Today's poem contains a line from every poem I've written this month, in order from the 1st to yesterday, plus one final line original for today. WEW!

NaPoWriMo -- 2010

I am there
      the pages are coming out.

It's all poetry.
A stunning view at the ^top
relaxed and carefree.
"Hey there world!"

Until the day I found out
I can only eat dirt
it is over ripe.
Don't misunderstand, though.
Melt ten ounces of bittersweet chocolate.

All that remains are the flowers--
I watch, figuratively, as their petals dry and fall.
This is the time of burning         The cold's departing.
I'll just sit in the corner.
Weekends all around the year.

I am always.
Purr meow meow purr
after the explanation.

Up through the sky
the rules I forgot.
The steak is gross
to the ground;
"It keeps happening!"

With a little forethought,
I'll take to those sails,
to be happy together.
When the sun comes out,
when the rest of us

have written so many silly things this month.

Pope Falls Asleep

Today's prompt is rather fun. Me being me, of course, my first choice was to go to reputable news sources ... such as Weekly World News and The Onion. Hahaha. The story I chose is here.

Pope Falls Asleep

The pope fell asleep--
How could he do this?
That fiend!
How dare he fall asleep
when the rest of us
are trying to nap?

Pukuj

I ... couldn't make sense of today's prompt. It seemed to go in half a dozen different directions and I wasn't sure which was which. ...so another off-prompt day! Wew~

Pukuj

Red, green, orange, blue.
Every color of the rainbow...
Every color of the viper.
It lies in wait,
until after the rain.
When the sun comes out,
this giant snake appears
in the sky.

Run my friend,
back to your home,
away from the poison
of the great snake.
Sing to qualm its
great anger, so
that we might all survive.

Together

Wew, cutting this one close. Today's prompt is a simple acrostic poem. Easy!

Together

Love is such an
important thing to me.
A misunderstanding.
Really, nothing happened.

Can't you get past this?
He's only a friend, you know.
Every little thing seems to upset you.
All I want is for us
to be happy together.
Even you can't object to that,
right?

Wonderful! You're so forgiving.
How nice of you to be so caring.
One of your best traits.
Really, now, don't look like that.
Everything will be fine.

The Most Feared Mistress

Today's prompt is ... well not possible for me to accomplish. As I've said plenty of times before, I don't write poetry very often (I am doing NaPoWriMo at the insistence of a friend), so I don't exactly have any scraps of poetic attempts laying around to use. So it's another off-prompt day.

The Most Feared Mistress

"The man was a fool."
I tell everyone, but
I'm only trying to convince myself.
I look out to the sea,
that cruel mistress who
stole my husband. The
salty air fills my lungs
with countless stories
of the blue.

Like many men, my husband
took to the sea for treasure.
He commandeered ships,
he fought the royal navy.
Or at least he did
in the stories he told.

But word came,
from a toothless cabin boy,
that he drowned with his ship
after a terrible storm.

But no more mourning,
no more tears!
I'll take to those sails,
under the black flag.
Then we'll see,
yes the sea,
who then is the most
feared mistress of all.

Lift

Today's prompt says to wait for the first thing we hear (other than the meaningless and mundane) after having read the prompt. It took a short bit for me to hear something appropriate, but it came when I was helping my dad with a job and was moving things on a dolly and doing it in a way that made it more worked than it needed to be. He corrected me in this, and it also sparked the idea for this poem.

Lift

Lift it up, just a bit,
when you're pushing
it around. That way
the weight stays balanced
rather than you
having to lift
all of it.

We can only do
so much in our lives.
But we can't just rush in
and have to do more work
because it's the first thing
we think of.
With a little forethought,
we can balance our lives,
between the good and the bad,
the ease and the difficulty,
and not have to work
so hard.