Random Tumblr posts

[Hypodermic Johnny]

This one came across my dash just today. A shitty movie about a shitty mobile app is anti-Muslim propaganda now, apparently.

 

[Helvetica Scenario]

Goddamn it, Tumblr. You guys say shit like this and it makes me want to defend the Angry Birds movie. Your progressivist bullshit kneejerk idiocy is making me think something vaguely positive about the fucking Angry Birds movie. That is absolutely unforgivable. You bastards.

 

[sgetti]

That last picture though

How dare Disney make a villain/suspicious character look Arabic in a movie where literally everybody is Arabic

 

[Meowthkip]

This one came across my dash just today. A shitty movie about a shitty mobile app is anti-Muslim propaganda now, apparently.

Tumblr's not the only ones picking up on this. I've yet to see the movie, but anti-immigration sentiment is something a lot of critics have picked up on.

A sampling of some people that don't live on Tumblr talking about the movie follows under the spoiler.

Spoiler: WORDS WORDS ANGRY BIRDS

https://rogersmovienation.com/2016/05/14/movie-review-the-angry-birds-movie/

But if it’s not about the laughs, and this isn’t, then what is this exercise in brand marketing really going for?

The “Twilight Zone” episode that this ties to, based on a Damon Knight short story, had an anti-communist subtext. Was Vitti trying to turn Red into an anti-Red, or something broader? Anti-consumption/anti-capitalist? Anti-immigrant?

Children’s entertainment has long had more going on than is obvious on first blush, from Babar the Elephant to Peanuts to “Wall-E.” “The Angry Birds Movie, disquieting as it feels, is certainly trying to shove something between the lines.

But the effort is so clumsy and the lines themselves so limp that the entertainment that’s supposed to be the vehicle for this murky message fails, and with it the movie.

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment...-predictable-flight-path-20160511-gosdmw.html

The animation is slick and luscious, but what are we to make of the rest of it? You could argue the storyline has an unfortunate potential to feed into fears about immigration – on the other hand, it could be seen as an allegory about colonial conquest.

And is there more to say about the metaphorical implications of the lazy, self-satisfied Mighty Eagle (Peter Dinklage), a remote, retired avian legend who's definitely resting on his laurels until he's roused into action by the birds' plight?

Whatever we might think of its broader implications, in the end, The Angry Birds Movie is basically a franchise extender that follows a predictable formula.

The film is marketed as family entertainment, and younger viewers could well enjoy the scenes of animated mayhem – yet they don't seem to be the target audience for much of the time, at least not for the "pluck my life" puns, gags about The Shining and Fifty Shades of Grey and the use of Rick Astley's greatest hit on the soundtrack.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/the-angry-birds-movie

The Angry Birds Movie is about as generous as a free app where all the good stuff requires in-game purchases. But then there's the subtext. While never overstated in the movie itself, it's hard not to pick up on how Red's righteous wrath starts out as a liability in his social circumstances. The film's entire trajectory bends toward re-contextualizing anger from being a major character flaw into the quality necessary in a leadership role. Especially in times of crisis, especially when foreigners (who may as well be different life forms in the eyes of some) are threatening to skip borders and steal everything they can get their hands on. Yes, it's highly likely that the film was well into development, if not production, long before anyone took Donald Trump seriously as a presidential candidate, but even accidental serendipity can reveal basic and ugly truths about our cultural id.

http://www.avclub.com/review/angry-birds-movie-infuriatingly-unfunny-236797

Because this is all a perfunctory way to imitate the birds-versus-pigs gameplay, the movie gives seemingly little thought to what it’s telling kids (or, for that matter, adults). This is a story where the hero’s suspicion of visitors who don’t look or act like the species he knows proves correct when it’s revealed that they’ve arrived on the birds’ island to kidnap and devour their children. It turns out that the most authentically angry thing about Red is his unspoken but clear isolationist streak and mistrust of immigrants.

http://www.thewrap.com/the-angry-birds-movie-review/

(This film also has some sort of tie-in happening with the United Nations’ global sustainability efforts, a strange choice given that the story is about how visitors who are different than you are literally only interested in stealing your babies and eating them.)

This one from Impulsegamer is probably the most hysterical:

The Angry Birds Movie is both the equivalent of a screaming five-year-old and a regressive piece of American propaganda. Out of all the films I’ve seen this year, this is the one I least expected to have an anti-immigration and an eye for an eye message underneath it. But it’s actually happened. Angry Birdsis now a metaphor for the September 11 terrorist attacks. The film was developed by Sony Pictures based on the phenomenal mobile phone game series courtesy of Finnish company Rovio Entertainment. Last year, 30 million copies of the game’s sequel, “Angry Birds 2”, were downloaded. Having been developed into books, multiple games, theme parks toys and other forms, it was inevitable that Hollywood, divorced from making films for adults, would turn the franchise of aiming birds at pigs into an animated film for children and their poor parents. They’re in for a rude shock. Aside from the pitiful, threadbare story and the ADD direction by first-time directors Clay Kaytis and Fergal Reilly, the film is also politically dubious and set on a message that isn’t appropriate for children or clear-minded adults.

[...]

What happens next in the film can’t be spoiled. It’s not that there’s a riveting twist. Aside from a useless visit to Mighty Eagle (Peter Dinklage), the last thirty minutes of the film is literally smashing, crashing and banging. A bombastic final quarter isn’t unusual for mainstream films. What is strange is that someone had the bright idea of coating every other scene with the same sludge as this headache-inducing film style. The film is so loud, overly busy, hyperactive and overzealous—determined to keep children awake—that no beat or scene is free of being suffocated under the film’s own attention-seeking needs. It doesn’t have a story. It’s a barrage of lines being shouted, monotonous slapstick gags that were once sketched onto storyboards somewhere and painfully obvious pop songs (Limp Biscuit’s cover of “Behind Blue Eyes” and Imagine Dragons’ “On Top of the World” are both used) to telegraph emotions. Having the film padded out to ninety-minutes, thirty minutes of which is birds being catapulted into pig city (I counted), one considers such ruminations as to what a nail gun to the face might feel like instead. Not to mention that the mildly amusing trip to Mighty Eagle where he makes Red and company sing, is a rip-off of one of Megamind’s best jokes. I also think that having a lazy, giant eagle that was once legendary but now fallen is meant to represent America’s flagging world status, which invites a whole set of new problems.

A mediocre animated film is tolerable but subtly injecting reprehensible propaganda beneath all the deliberate noise marks a new low for Sony Pictures. The first warning sign is when Red discovers that pig leaders are secretly holding dozens of their friends at the bottom of their ship as though they are people smugglers and refugees. Likewise, these pigs decide that they will blow up the city with dynamite and then steal their unhatched eggs, the children of the birds. What better way to resolve this problem than by tracking down the pigs, the leader of which has an Arab-style beard, and then blowing up their city? This is capped off with a creepy, eye-opening song where some bird-children sing about Red saving their homes and liberty. Essentially, the film is a metaphor for America being a walled-off island of sunshine, the happiness of which is threatened by outsiders until they have the daylights bombed out of them and order is restored. It is skin crawling that beneath a film as stupid and superficial as this that it could have such a toxic message. What starts as a story about tempering your anger devolves into a revenge mission aimed at children too young to remember the careless outcomes of 9/11. To me, there is something deeply disturbing about using a children’s film to mislead them in this way and someone should answer for it.

A few reviewers see it as accidental or interpreted it as not being anti-immigrant, but anti-colonist.

http://www.metro.us/entertainment/t...-to-be-if-not-by-much/zsJper---eRt9ZWiWGhH7Y/

Generically watchable but almost never inspired, “Angry Birds” has so little to it it can’t even be joke-read as a risible if accidental political allegory about the fear of immigrants. To wit: “Angry Birds” hatches an elaborate origin story about a peaceful, suburbanized island of flightless creatures who are one day greeted by green pig foreigners. Their leader (voiced by Bill Hader) bewitches the denizens with his refined graces and cool gifts. But only a batch of birds with diagnosed anger management issues — chief among them perpetual grumbler Red (Jason Sudeikis) — know their real angle: to blow up their land and make off with their eggs. At one point a Trumpian border wall makes an appearance.

This is divining far, far more out of a film with no agenda, and no deeper thought than getting, very eventually, to the main attraction: birds catapulted into structures and dynamite boxes and easily-popped nemeses. (Though this being a nice movie, no one dies or even bursts into nothingness.) The climax has its share of kinetic destruction, though the massacre is strangely short-lived and it takes so long to get there the film could even be mistaken for any rando off-brand toon.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottme...arable-for-the-donald-trump-age/#582f599c28a5

The story is a pretty obvious parable for European colonialism and the horrors which it brought to indigenous peoples. In that sense, it’s no different from The Battle for Terra or Avatar, with the caveat that none of the oppressors changes sides to lead the revolt. The story becomes one about a bird ostracized for being angry, and that bird being the only one able to see the danger, while all others either can’t see it or choose to ignore it. Beneath the bad jokes, there is a genuine piece of art here about how great evil comes to power in a relatively good society because no one will listen to the few who cry foul.

It becomes a story about the value of so-called negative or anti-social feelings and emotions as a necessary tool for survival. And yes, it works as a parable for those who spent the last year warning us not to view Donald Trump merely as a political joke (or a click-friendly media story) but rather as a genuine political threat. Of note, the picture contains shockingly few female characters. This is doubly unfortunate, as the “It’s okay to be angry!” moral is especially important to girls and women who live in a world where they are raised to be polite to the very people who may choose to harm them. But if I’m making the film seem better than it is, well, I must now concede that what Angry Birds is about is better than how it goes about it.

[...]

I’m not saying I needed to see Costa-Gavras’s Angry Birds from a Gavin De Becker screenplay, but the film offers enough potent subtext that I wish it didn’t sabotage itself to be a stereotypically “edgy” kid-friendly animated comedy. Or, since I imagine the message will be clear to anyone paying attention, I just wish it were funnier. Sudeikis makes a fine lead, and the film subtly implies that he relates better to kids than to adults. Josh Gad is relatively amusing, and his big “speedy” action moment plays like an homage to X-Men: Days of Future Past. I will say that Peter Dinklage’s extended urination joke works better in the movie than in the previews.

http://www.screendaily.com/reviews/the-angry-birds-movie-review/5103462.article

Furthermore, once Red and the other birds slingshot themselves into the pigs’ kingdom — recalling the video game’s central motif — they topple buildings and send characters scurrying for their lives, an image that’s uncomfortably reminiscent at times to so many post-9/11 scenes of urban devastation from live-action blockbusters. These moments are so ostensibly harmless that it won’t ruffle too many people’s feathers, but it does suggest a project that doesn’t quite understand its core audience, throwing spectacle and jokes at us without discretion or enough wit.

But I think Radheyan Simonpillai of NOW Toronto summed it up best:

I can’t muster up the righteousness to be offended by any of it; this movie is just too inconsequential.

 

[Billiam Cipher]

considered posting this in the Cultural Appropriation thread, but I feel like it's less about appropriation and more about "Black Tumblr."

(followed by ten screenshots of pages of YouTube comments)

Spoiler: Do you REALLY feel like reading all of these?

It's fucking YouTube. People are going to be trolls on there. People are going to say rude or "racist" things, because they can get away with it. If you need to be "protected" from immature trolls with bad grammar, maybe YouTube isn't a site you should be using.

 

[ZehnBoat]

Only arabs can have sideburns and beards at the same time

 

[Meowthkip]

considered posting this in the Cultural Appropriation thread, but I feel like it's less about appropriation and more about "Black Tumblr."

View attachment 95571

(followed by ten screenshots of pages of YouTube comments)

Spoiler: Do you REALLY feel like reading all of these?

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It's fucking YouTube. People are going to be trolls on there. People are going to say rude or "racist" things, because they can get away with it. If you need to be "protected" from immature trolls with bad grammar, maybe YouTube isn't a site you should be using.

"Paid for labor."

So, I haven't watched this video or know any other context, but how fair is it to assume that the "pay her" in the video means "pay me to explain to you why you honkies are so terrible instead of just taking everything I say as gospel truth."

'Cause I mean if you wanna get paid for that, you could at least write and sell a book on that shit or something first, instead of just screaming about it on the internet for free.

 

[AnOminous]

Tumblr's not the only ones picking up on this. I've yet to see the movie, but anti-immigration sentiment is something a lot of critics have picked up on.

This started on /pol/ back in January.

 

[Meowthkip]

This started on /pol/ back in January.

Tumblr and /pol/ should just fuck already.

 

[Hypodermic Johnny]

Tumblr's not the only ones picking up on this. I've yet to see the movie, but anti-immigration sentiment is something a lot of critics have picked up on.

A sampling of some people that don't live on Tumblr talking about the movie follows under the spoiler.

Spoiler: WORDS WORDS ANGRY BIRDS

https://rogersmovienation.com/2016/05/14/movie-review-the-angry-birds-movie/


http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment...-predictable-flight-path-20160511-gosdmw.html


http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/the-angry-birds-movie


http://www.avclub.com/review/angry-birds-movie-infuriatingly-unfunny-236797


http://www.thewrap.com/the-angry-birds-movie-review/


This one from Impulsegamer is probably the most hysterical:



A few reviewers see it as accidental or interpreted it as not being anti-immigrant, but anti-colonist.

http://www.metro.us/entertainment/t...-to-be-if-not-by-much/zsJper---eRt9ZWiWGhH7Y/


http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottme...arable-for-the-donald-trump-age/#582f599c28a5



http://www.screendaily.com/reviews/the-angry-birds-movie-review/5103462.article


But I think Radheyan Simonpillai of NOW Toronto summed it up best:

Jesus. I can't tell who's reaching further. Either the reviewers have all turned into conspiracy theorists or the filmmakers really somehow thought they could slip this kind of message into a damn movie for kids about an app game with pigs and birds.

 

[Yamyam]

It's a cash cow of a movie it's not that deep.

 

[friedshrimp]

Tumblr's not the only ones picking up on this. I've yet to see the movie, but anti-immigration sentiment is something a lot of critics have picked up on.

A sampling of some people that don't live on Tumblr talking about the movie follows under the spoiler.

Spoiler: WORDS WORDS ANGRY BIRDS

https://rogersmovienation.com/2016/05/14/movie-review-the-angry-birds-movie/


http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment...-predictable-flight-path-20160511-gosdmw.html


http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/the-angry-birds-movie


http://www.avclub.com/review/angry-birds-movie-infuriatingly-unfunny-236797


http://www.thewrap.com/the-angry-birds-movie-review/


This one from Impulsegamer is probably the most hysterical:



A few reviewers see it as accidental or interpreted it as not being anti-immigrant, but anti-colonist.

http://www.metro.us/entertainment/t...-to-be-if-not-by-much/zsJper---eRt9ZWiWGhH7Y/


http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottme...arable-for-the-donald-trump-age/#582f599c28a5



http://www.screendaily.com/reviews/the-angry-birds-movie-review/5103462.article


But I think Radheyan Simonpillai of NOW Toronto summed it up best:

Remember the days when kid's cartoons were simply reviewed for things like story/animation or characters and didn't have any of that weird "omg muh political message!" in it? Those were the days (i blame Frozen and Zootopia for all of this tbh)

Only arabs can have sideburns and beards at the same time

And big noses!

Latinos, Jews, and Mediterraneans should all stop appropriating from the arabs uwu

 

[Steamboat_Bill]

Remember the days when kid's cartoons were simply reviewed for things like story/animation or characters and didn't have any of that weird "omg muh political message!" in it? Those were the days (i blame Frozen and Zootopia for all of this tbh)

Everybody seems to have their heads up their ass these days.

 

[friedshrimp]

Found this on my dash now:

I'm half and half with this post honestly...They have a point but the point of academia is having advanced knowledge and knowing how to use it, and that also suggests knowing how to properly use the language in any given situation.

And this had like 20000 notes...I wouldn't be surprised that half the rebloggers are typical "HIGH EDUCATION IS RACIST" folks and the typical tumblrinas with bad grades who say "school's not important".

 

[AnOminous]

Remember the days when kid's cartoons were simply reviewed for things like story/animation or characters and didn't have any of that weird "omg muh political message!" in it? Those were the days (i blame Frozen and Zootopia for all of this tbh)

Why? It's not remotely Frozen's fault that SJWs went full retard, and Zootopia came into existence well after this shit started, and didn't promote it at all despite having understated political messages.

Why not blame Steven Universe, which actually did court SJWs?

 

[Loxiozzz]

It's funny when adults overthink movies for kids.

 

[Meowthkip]

Remember the days when kid's cartoons were simply reviewed for things like story/animation or characters and didn't have any of that weird "omg muh political message!" in it? Those were the days (i blame Frozen and Zootopia for all of this tbh)

No, 'cause I'm pretty sure that sort of thing has been going on a while now.

Kids are smart, man. I think often we underestimate how much they're able to read into stuff like this. I doubt the writers of the movie purposely wanted to convey an anti-immigration message (they probably were thinking more like an anti-colonialism message, if anything), but kids would probably pick up on "these strange people that are different from you coming in might actually secretly want to hurt you for their own gain." That's pretty much the crux of xenophobia.

If anything it kind of underlines just how poorly thought-out this movie is, all for the sake of a cash-grab. Critics pointing out how it could be interpreted in a malicious way is more than fair. But Tumblr users raging that you could maybe interpret the pigs as Islamic terrorists if you squint hard enough, and squawking for a boycott over a cynical cash-in on a franchise with declining popularity? That shit is pretty ridic.

 

[Android raptor]

considered posting this in the Cultural Appropriation thread, but I feel like it's less about appropriation and more about "Black Tumblr."

View attachment 95571

(followed by ten screenshots of pages of YouTube comments)

Spoiler: Do you REALLY feel like reading all of these?

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It's fucking YouTube. People are going to be trolls on there. People are going to say rude or "racist" things, because they can get away with it. If you need to be "protected" from immature trolls with bad grammar, maybe YouTube isn't a site you should be using.

Holy fuck what a spoiled, obnoxious cunt.

It's like the tumblr version of kids on dA who'd launch into self righteous tantrums because someone said mean words about their mspaint Sonic recolors.

 

[kidsquid]

Yeah, because every man is out to rape women from the moment they step outside.

 

[friedshrimp]

^It's the "IMAGINE A BOWL OF M&MS" all over again.

Also, she just basically said men are just like animals. Cute, like any guy's gonna like what she says "you are all beasts based on the actions of a few haha".