The Lego Movie (2014)

[Edgy MD]

My Facebook feed has been filling with hyperbole over this all weekend. Having no kidmuffins of my own, I'm not sure if all this spooging is something that applies to me, or a real invitation to go see the film and CHANGE MY LIFE. Tell me about it.

[Benjamin Grimm]

This movie came out and I had no idea it was coming. With my youngest now 12 and a half, I realize that I'm now out of the loop when it comes to entertainment for younger kids.

I remember years ago I had a co-worker whose youngest child was just a couple of years older than my oldest, and she had no idea who Spongebob Squarepants was. Now I think I'm in that situation; I have no idea what newer shows the six-year-olds of the world are watching.

The best thing about this is that I don't have to spend money to go see a movie about Lego.

[Ceetar]

I want to see it but my wife is still punishing me for Wreck-It Ralph 2 years ago.

[metsmarathon]

seriously, go see it.

if you have a kid, are a kid, or ever were a kid, you should enjoy it. no, you should love it. unless you are broken inside.

its not just a movie about lego. it is so very much more, in a way that i couldn't describe without undoing some of the magic of the movie.

its a movie about lego as much as toy story is a movie about toys.

[Guest LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr]

Ceetar wrote: I want to see it but my wife is still punishing me for Wreck-It Ralph 2 years ago.

The hell? What was wrong with Wreck-It Ralph?

[Ceetar]

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr wrote: Ceetar wrote: I want to see it but my wife is still punishing me for Wreck-It Ralph 2 years ago. The hell? What was wrong with Wreck-It Ralph?

That's what I said. She clearly didn't play enough of those games as a kid to get the nostalgia involved. Come to think of it, she didn't like Scott Pilgrim either.

bah, I'll just watch it myself at home when I get a chance.

[metsmarathon]

about the only way to not like wreck it raplph is to go in thinking, "bah, video game nonsense. i'm so above it."

which may also be true of the lego movie.

[Vic Sage]

Ceetar wrote: Ceetar wrote: I want to see it but my wife is still punishing me for Wreck-It Ralph 2 years ago. The hell? What was wrong with Wreck-It Ralph? That's what I said. She clearly didn't play enough of those games as a kid to get the nostalgia involved. Come to think of it, she didn't like Scott Pilgrim either. bah, I'll just watch it myself at home when I get a chance.

i had no particular nostalgia for those games either (other than Pong and Pac Man and Space Invaders), but its a charming movie and a fun concept regardless. I'm looking forward to LEGO as well.

[seawolf17]

metsmarathon wrote: seriously, go see it. if you have a kid, are a kid, or ever were a kid, you should enjoy it. no, you should love it. unless you are broken inside. its not just a movie about lego. it is so very much more, in a way that i couldn't describe without undoing some of the magic of the movie. its a movie about lego as much as toy story is a movie about toys.

THIS, all of this.

[metirish]

Agree with above from MM and Wolf , loved this movie....but Christ I loved Lego Batman , I actually thought it was Michael Keaton hamming it up and was a bit disappointed when I checked that it wasn't...Will Arnett was just great.

I loved the ending, no spoilers here, but loved the symbolism.....I also loved how it spoke to the whole NSA type of times we live in ...this is not just a movie for kids but has plenty of stuff in here for adults to ponder.

A great movie.....

[MFS62]

MMYF saw it with our young grandson.
She thought it was excellent, but there was a part that was kind of scary for him, so she rated it 4 1/2 stars.

Later

[Lefty Specialist]

My wife and I went, childless, to see it with a theater full of kids. We both loved it. I had a bit of a problem with the ending, but I nitpick.

The kids just absolutely ate it up. The visuals are just amazing. You really start believing these are Lego people walking, talking, and flying. The pop-culture references are hilarious, and there's plenty there for adults too.

[Guest LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr]

MFS62 wrote: MMYF saw it with our young grandson. She thought it was excellent, but there was a part that was kind of scary for him, so she rated it 4 1/2 stars

How young? (Ours is not quite 4, and is GENERALLY good at handling dramatic/scary moments in kids' movies, but...)

[metsmarathon]

Minimm is 4.1 years old, is scared of the bears in Brave, and the trolls in Frozen, and only got a little scared in the lego movie. I forget when, prolly when the bad guys were winning, but once he sat on my lap he was fine. No hiding or worry.

[MFS62]

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr wrote: MFS62 wrote: MMYF saw it with our young grandson. She thought it was excellent, but there was a part that was kind of scary for him, so she rated it 4 1/2 stars How young? (Ours is not quite 4, and is GENERALLY good at handling dramatic/scary moments in kids' movies, but...)

Almost 3.
And he doesn't get scared by much. He likes dinosaurs.
Later

[Lefty Specialist]

There was a moment where a couple of the younger kids in the audience were scared, but it passed quickly.

My son went to see it with some college buddies and they loved it, too.

[Benjamin Grimm]

Were the college buddies frightened?

[Edgy MD]

Hate to be the naysayer, but I'm giving this three out of five. I was leaning toward two-and a half.

Between the zippity-zip pacing (which also put me off Cloudy with a Chance o' Meatballs), and just the number of times the production seems to betray the film's own spirit*, I had trouble getting on board until the last act.

*Why didn't they shoot it in stop action with actual Lego pieces?

[metsmarathon]

stop motion would've been very limiting. using real actual physical bricks would've been limiting, and damned near impossible within a reasonable budget. there were freaking waves in a lego brick-built ocean. rebuilding and resetting that 24 times a second (or more depending on your framerate) would've been a monster task.

also, using real minifigs would've greatly limited the movement of the minifigs.

it would be done, and many have done stop motion thingies with lego, but to get it big enough to merit a feature film would have been far far more effort to produce a lesser product.

its good enough for me that the world they built could be built with real actual bricks. i don't need them to assemble and reassemble a billion bricks for ever frame of the movie.

[Edgy MD]

Working within limits and exceeding the seeming limitations can be part of the magic of film.

Resetting the shot for each frame would have been a challenge for much of the film, but not all of it, as it only takes a relative handful of brick replacements per shot to give the illusion of movement. Especially if you slowed the fuck down for a bit.

Plus, you could have totally been within the spirit of the film by using a crew of 8-14-year-olds, working as a team of master builders. They could have worked off a computerized design template mapping out the changes for each shot. And then the only computerized animation would have been with the faces. And heck, that could have been done in pen and ink.

[Guest Mets � Willets Point]

I'd like to see this too.

[metsmarathon]

while i agree that adding in an extra 5-10 minutes of take a goddamn breath willya!? would've helped the movie a lot, i think that the frenetic pacing and immersiveness of a universe rendered entirely in lego are what made the movie so enjoyable.

i'd love to see a feature film made entirely with lego, in the way you describe, but i don't hold that against he lego movie, any moreso than i would hold the CGI woody, buzz, and the whole rest of the gang against toy story.

what you describe is an entirely different movie. a good one to make that i would love to see, but it's an entirely different animal.

i still maintain that it would be missing somehting that the actual movie had. legos to infinity. a wholly brick-built universe would need to employ forced persepctive, or would need to occupy dirigible hangars for every outdoor scene, and while the forced perspective or turning smal bricks into large distant objects is challenging and cool and would be awesome to see done on a large scale, bricks to infinity. its a whole goddamn immersive universe built of lego. this is what you imagine when you build your lego firehouse and set it in your lego town, and have lego batman swoop in with your totally cool classic space guy and his swooshable classic space space ship. that they are in their own universe, where anything is possible with enough bricks.

[Vic Sage]

EVERYTHING IS AWESOME!
i can't get that song out of my head.

I forced Sage jr. to go with me. He was reluctant because he's 13 and it looked too much like a kid's movie. But his friends said it was good, and Rotten Tomatoes scored it in the high 80s, so he agreed to go with me. And he liked it alot. I did too.

Aside from the jokes, puns, pop cultural references and clever action stuff, the movie was about something. And it was subversive to boot. It's not just dealing with the typical "believe in yourself" and "power of imagination" type themes kid movies usually traffic in, though it does that stuff well. And it doesn't just settle for the "individualism over conformity" theme so common in dystopian SF, though it's about that too. And its got a father-son reconciliation thing, and that's nice too. But the movie actually has an overarching socio-political viewpoint.

This is a big corporate studio movie that opposes corporate control of culture, where "president business" lives at the top of a huge office building and tries to control all expressions of culture and fix it permanently in place, and society is coerced into thinking that happiness comes from following instructions. But the heroes are an anarchic group, one is even a "pirate", that wants to give the power to build and rebuild the culture back to the people, to mash it up and recreate it as their imaginations dictate, and to stop following the prescribed instructions. Basically, its playing out the social debate we're having in this country about who controls our culture and makes a plea for "fair use" by the people. In a movie produced by a Time Warner subsidiary. That's pretty cool, i think, and warrants bonus points.

Story-wise, yes, its frenetic pace doesn't do it any favors or give the characters room to develop and breathe, so the emotional content is fairly minimal until the end. And the father-son denouement should really have been more strongly foreshadowed and set up earlier so it paid off better. As to its animation style, i appreciated that it didn't go for the slick Pixar CGI look, or classic cell animation look, but gave it the stiff, blocky movement suggestive of a Lego universe. Might it have been better, or at least more thematically pure, if done in stop-action? Yeah, probably, but i don't begrudge it for what it isn't. I appreciated it for what it is. Not flawless, but a fun and smart family movie that is biting that hand that feeds it.

[Edgy MD]

metsmarathon wrote: what you describe is an entirely different movie. a good one to make that i would love to see, but it's an entirely different animal.

I don't think so. I think it would have been a film that honored the spirit they were trying to get across --- medium is the message and all --- while advancing the art of stop action.

[Vic Sage]

i agree; I'm just not willing to criticize it for failing to do what it is not trying to do.

Even Harryhausen at his height never animated an entire movie, just limited scenes within a movie. The films that are pure stop-motion animation are the simplest kind of claymation or short films. The fully animated feature-length movie you're suggesting would cost at least $100m, probably more, due to the time and labor-intensive nature of stop-motion. That they were not willing to invest that much in a 1st time feature of this type, with a subversive script to boot, doesn't surprise me and i don't fault them for it. Given the probable budget for this project, i think they made the right aesthetic choices with regard to the animation style; they avoided slick Pixar-style realistic CGI or smooth, soft classic Disney-style cell animation. They made it blocky, stiff and lego-like. so good for them. Maybe if this one's a huge hit, we can lobby for a full stop-motion sequel!

[metsmarathon]

according to producers, there are 3,863,484 unique lego bricks used in the movie. however, to recreate the entire movie using physical bricks, you would need over 15,080,330 bricks total, as some of hte unique bricks get "re-used".

i'm not sure what this means... possibly cloned buildings and the like. that kinda makes sense. if you have ten lego skyscrapers in the background, you clone the whole thing and slap in the copy where you need it.

fifteen million bricks sure seems like a lot. the full-scale lego x-wing used 5 million bricks. but it's not getting set and re-set 24 times a second.

[Guest themetfairy]

We caught it this evening - it was very entertaining.

And yes, everything is awesome!

[youtube:191d3g2n]XXzr7mogFxQ[/youtube:191d3g2n]

[metsmarathon]

http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/the-lego-movie/

a little article about the closing credits for hte lego movie, which were 2 1/2 minutes of physical lego stop motion.

took 60,000 pieces, a year of planning, and a month of shooting.

i think that all serves to underscore the difficulty in doing a full-feature physical stop-motion lego movie.

but it would still be cool to see attempted.

[batmagadanleadoff]

[youtube:3qwo88ow]WweptLDy-5s[/youtube:3qwo88ow]

[Benjamin Grimm]

How did they do on the scoreboard?