What Exactly Is Wrong With Mr. Popper's Penguins?

Okay, so it's half an hour until bedtime, my eyelids are about to shut on their own, the indicator lights on my computer aren't working (I'm starting to suspect imminent system failure - time to back up everything and call the Geek Squad) and then, via this post on Shakesville (in a strictly roundabout fashion), I get THIS.

THIS is the trailer for the upcoming Jim Carrey movie, Mr. Popper's Penguins. Oh, Jim Carrey, how I love/hate you. You, sir, are the male Lady Gaga of comedy. I adore you for your aggressive deconstruction of masculinity and yet you can be such a douche.

Okay, time to quit railing on Jim Carrey. I'm not sure this upcoming mess of a movie is entirely his fault.

It would be far too easy for me just to say the trailer is bad. I mean, we all KNOW that. No, I'm going to go beyond the traditional. I'm going to take a 1:25 movie trailer and deconstruct it like a really real critic, because the failure of this trailer is too deep to be appreciated at first glance.

Here we go.

Firstly, a little background information. This movie is based on a 1938 children's book, also titled "Mr. Popper's Penguins," the summary of which runs thus (according to a website I read):

Mr. Popper is a house painter whose dreams of Arctic exploration prompt him to write letters to real explorers. One of them sends him a penguin, which he keeps in the icebox. Before he knows it, the painter has a litter of 12 beaked birds. They eat voraciously, leading him to form Popper's Performing Penguins, a stage act that goes on tour and creates mayhem at every stop.

I like it. It sounds fun. I especially like the sounds of the hero, Mr. Popper. He is a white male adult, but he's also a working-class hero - and as someone whose job prospects so far have involved working for a dairy or cleaning someone's house, I can get behind that. Plus, penguins! I love penguins. And so do kids. This sounds like the kind of book that would probably induce a lot of giggles in small children, and I'm always for that.

Then I watched the trailer.

OH SWEET CREAMERY BUTTER. I'm just going to make a point-by-point list of everything that they've screwed up.

1. Bye-bye, working-class hero! The protagonist of THIS movie is now a Businessman. Not just any Businessman, but THE Businessman. You know, the one whose nice, orderly life is wackily messed up by wacky kids or wacky penguins, forcing him to slide down the slippery slope from his nice, orderly, kyriarchy-approved Businessman lifestyle into total wackiness. Yes, you know the plot. To explain exactly why this bothers me, well, go back to the summary of the book. It's about a guy who doesn't have much, craves something more, and then ends up getting it, if not exactly in the way he expects. It's an empowerment tale. This is the polar opposite of that plot, and one that's been done to DEATH. Classist, please.
2. WHY DID HE NOT RUB HIS CHOPSTICKS BEFORE EATING? Those are the disposable snap-apart chopsticks, you have to rub them to get rid of the splinters! Actually, that's not the question at all. The question is why he is eating with chopsticks in the first place. He's eating what appears to be a pile of raw (possibly frozen) fish chunks. I could be wrong, but my racist-dar is detecting the good ol' "sushi = raw fish" misconception, straight from the minds of People Who Didn't Give A Shit Enough To Stop Perpetuating This Stereotype. Yeah, you know the guys. Because sushi is raw fish and also Japanese food and you eat Japanese food with chopsticks and yeh.
3. "PENGUINS! YES!" This is not a complaint. This was the highlight of the whole trailer. That kid captures everything that this movie SHOULD be, and probably isn't.
4. "Word." Just "Word." Also the song played at that point in the trailer. Once again, black culture (outdated black culture at that) is treated with this cavalier "isn't this what kids are into these days?" attitude. You throw it in there for cool points, "street cred," if you will. Never mind the fact that while WHITE kids who are into black culture are harmless and easily dismissible (even profitable!), BLACK kids who are into black culture are ghetto and 'hood and OH MY CORNPUFFS THEY ARE SO FUTURE CRIMINALS. Punish them for inventing the culture, then co-opt it for profit. Oh, Whiteness, I've missed the sweet sound of your asshole emissions.
5. Speaking of that dance, Dick van Dyke did that decades ago and it was... well, I was never crazy about it but it was STILL more charming than this, mainly owing to the omission of Jim Carrey's increasingly creepy-ass face. DUDES. Stop putting him in children's movies PLEASE.
6. Oh, and out of three (nine if you count the penguins) characters, there are absolutely no women in the trailer with a speaking role. WHY IS THAT.

I won't bother asking why he feeds them at the table or why there is snow in his house, because it's a kid's movie, and I'm not that much of a dick.