THE LEGO MOVIE

Looks to be great, can't believe there's no thread! Anyone seen this yet?

This looks super hilarious to me.

Veronica thought this preview was hilarious

The animation style where they're deliberately dropping frames to evoke stop-motion as well as the blue classic space dude as a character give me high hopes.

Plus, some of the designs they came up with to manufacture look properly insane

Utterly fantastic. Go.

Would watch in a theater

met one of the guys working on this the last time I was in Australia. Looking forward to seeing it with the kids tomorrow.

AV Club's having a bit of fun with this. The write-up is gold.
-

Fox News decries movie designed explicitly to sell toys as "anti-business"

http://www.avclub.com/article/fox-news-decries-movie-designed-explicitly-to-sell-107610

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rprB_VNm3L8

I thought it was a funny and entertaining diversion but not the OMG BEST ANIMATED MOVIE IN YEARS that some critics are proclaiming it is.

Seeing this tomorrow. Glad Charlie Day's gettin more work.

In line to see this now.

It's not the best animated movie in years. It's just the best movie that's also animated in the last couple years.

Loved it!

Yeah this is v good. Closer in tone to South Park w out the filth. Time Bandits also springs to mind. Last third elevates it to a different level imo.

just the concept seemed like it promised some smurfs-level shit

but i guess this is OK. color me surprised

This looks super terrible, but my brother liked it.

Looks like some reheated pixar/wreck-it-ralph leftovers

I'll bet there will be cheeky references to other blockbuster movies!

I thought it was funny enough on its own without being too overly-referential.

I had barely even heard about this until yesterday, when I kept seeing rave reviews everywhere. I was curious enough to see it and I enjoyed the hell out of it.

Very Gnostic in that movie-ish Matrix-y way

Batman was hilarious

I thought it was funny enough on its own without being too overly-referential.

― Murgatroid, Sunday, February 9, 2014 11:11 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Will Arnett as Batman, a DC Comics superhero
Channing Tatum as Superman
Jonah Hill as Green Lantern
Cobie Smulders as Wonder Woman
Anthony Daniels as C-3PO
Keith Ferguson as Han Solo
Todd Hansen as Gandalf, one of the Master Builders
Billy Dee Williams as Lando Calrissian

This is the movie Looney Tunes: Back in Action would've been had it been a good movie.

I thought it was funny enough on its own without being too overly-referential.

― Murgatroid, Sunday, February 9, 2014 11:11 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Will Arnett as Batman, a DC Comics superhero
Channing Tatum as Superman
Jonah Hill as Green Lantern
Cobie Smulders as Wonder Woman
Anthony Daniels as C-3PO
Keith Ferguson as Han Solo
Todd Hansen as Gandalf, one of the Master Builders
Billy Dee Williams as Lando Calrissian

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Monday, 10 February 2014 06:28 (16 minutes ago) Permalink

I guess you haven't actually seen the movie. All of those you just listed, save Batman, are cameo characters. They all have about two lines each.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jC6WJ3fTUkc

I didn't know that Tegan & Sara sang on the theme song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6lHm-stXdM

Most of the references I got were for weird, weird deep-Lego shit, like noticing that a random side character is wearing a Fabuland or Blacktron lego body.

They don't do your standard Dreamworks knock-off movie-references-and-nothing-else idiocy. If anything, this is a Lego version of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, where Warner Brothers characters are interacting with New Line characters and Disney and 20th-C Fox etc etc

I didn't realize the folks behind The Lego Movie also did Clone High, which REALLY makes me want go see it.

Holy shit, the Lego movie references Lego products that are licenced from other pop culture properties? Say it ain't so! What is this, some sort of big ad for Legos? I'm completely distressed by the presence of marketing in the Lego movie.

My wife loved this, said the message (one message?) is that it's cool to mix up your Lego sets and do cool things with them, which is a great message. I'm looking forward to seeing this with the other kid this week.

"I didn't realize the folks behind The Lego Movie also did Clone High, which REALLY makes me want go see it."

never saw that, but they also did 21 Jump Street which was hilarious, and the LEGO movie is arguably funnier than that was. Most I've laughed in a movie in a very long time. Too bad the Billy Dee Williams' cameo was spoilered up above!

"Looks like some reheated pixar/wreck-it-ralph leftovers"

I thought it would be like this also but it's not even remotely like that

I'm sure its repeated use of the word "awesome" is to great effect

itt Hurting takes a valiant stand against the evils of the Lego Movie

I don't watch Pixar crap in general so I dunno how it compares really but there was only one explicit reference to another movie, and it was a maybe 30-second aside ref'ing the Empire Strikes Back.

Roger Rabbit also a good point of comparison.

while i dislike what lego has done with its brand, it's nice to hear this likely won't suck when i see it.

the movie surprisingly speaks directly against what they did with their brand which is interesting.

my kid is a lego fiend btw, his room is a menagerie of lego demons, robots, and demon-robots.

hmm. I wonder if that signals a different direction? I was a huge lego nut when I was a kid, and as my daughter approaches lego age it makes me kind of sad to see how over-branded and over-simplified a lot of modern lego sets seem.

also holy shit they're expensive!

yup. i helped my folks break up there house to move to a condo/care facility a couple of weeks ago. my mom found a huge box with thousands of pieces of late 70s early 80s lego- she's been dragging it around for 35 years apparently.

their

the movie surprisingly speaks directly against what they did with their brand which is interesting.

yeah there's a little disconnect there.

Clearly intentional. FWIW this article details their high end recruiting process, in which they're looking for people exactly like the kid:

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303460004579193901642418812

Can someone repost the WSJ bit? I'm hitting paywall

FilmCritHulk wrote a neat bit about how this "toy commercial" can engender the emotional reaction it does, the movie tropes that are used and subverted, and gets into what the filmmakers are actually saying.

http://badassdigest.com/2014/02/11/film-crit-hulk-smash-the-real-awesomeness-of-the-lego-movie/

And here's that WSJ article, before it disappears:

Winning a Job at Lego
Aspiring Designers Build Sets Under Pressure

By JENS HANSEGARD
Nov. 13, 2013 7:11 p.m. ET

The toymaker Lego invited a group of 21 prospective designers to their headquarters in Denmark to see if they have what it takes to become a Lego designer. Johannes Ledel watches the hopefuls as they are put through a series of "brutal" exercises.
BILLUND, Denmark

James Colmer, 46 years old, had a reason for spending two days building Legos in Denmark, leaving behind his kids in Australia.

He was applying for a job.

Mr. Colmer was one of 21 men and women who came from around the globe to the small town of Billund last month to compete for a job as a Lego designer. The Danish company has an unusual method of filling this position. Rather than conducting formal interviews, Lego invites the most promising applicants to its headquarters to sketch and build Lego sets in front of a panel of senior designers.

Lego is the world's No. 2 toy maker by revenue, behind Mattel. It has built its success in recent years on a string of product lines based on hit movies, such as "Harry Potter," "The Hobbit" and "The Avengers." Vital to its fortunes is a steady flow of new play sets—themed kits of Lego bricks meant to build specific, sometimes ambitious, designs, step by step, such as a 996-piece "King's Castle" released earlier this year.

That means the company needs to continually build its design staff. Its 200 designers include people who sketch characters and people "who literally just sit and build Lego models," Lego Design Director Will Thorogood says. By asking recruits to design, "we get to see people in a much more relaxed way than they would be in a standard interview process," he says.

Lego has run these two-day recruit workshops for seven years, but until now, they have been kept under wraps. Aspiring designers apply online to take part in the recruiting workshop, which Lego says takes place at least once a year, depending on the company's needs. Legitimate candidates are identified via Skype conversations and tests. Participants who are selected are sent a bag of Legos and told to show up in Billund with a creation that represents a direction that Lego should go.

When the candidates entered a conference room at Hotel Legoland on a rainy October day, the first order of business was to show off the homework. Among their ideas: remote-controlled scorpion models, magical tree houses and a high-tech music player.

"It's an icebreaker, a way to introduce the recruits to each other and to us, and to see what they would make out of the bricks," said Caroline Hansen, director of the recruiting program.

Many of the hopefuls, flocking to Billund from countries including New Zealand, Brazil, Taiwan, Indonesia and Germany, were seasoned designers. Mr. Colmer, a 46-year-old Englishman living in Australia, has worked in the entertainment industry since 1988, designing the look of sets and other elements for movies such as "Superman Returns." He says, "My son suggested to me that he wanted to be a Lego designer when he grows up and I thought, "Hey, that would be a great idea.' "

York Bleyer, a 49-year-old military veteran from Los Angeles, worked for several years as a Mattel designer. Allan Faulkner, 48, of Inverness, Scotland, has worked for Hasbro and as a designer in the medical industry.

Design degrees and experience aren't required. Kurt Kristiansen, a 40-year-old designer on Lego's Star Wars team, creating some of the most popular toys the company sells, was a tractor mechanic before he joined Lego in the 1990s.

Mr. Bleyer was surprised to find himself competing alongside men and women fresh out of college. "First, I thought, 'what the heck?' " Mr. Bleyer says. "I've worked for years [and] you're making me go up against these kids?' But then I thought it was a really good idea. You bring your skill and show what you've got."

Most candidates were nervous when they arrived. "I haven't slept all night," Daniel Sudarsono, a 33-year-old furniture designer from Indonesia, said. As his homework, Mr. Sudarsono had built a complete magical-garden concept including a water-breathing dragon who watered the garden and an evil wizard in the nearby dark woods.

After the designers showed off their homemade creations, the real fun began. The recruits were put through a series of challenges over two days, such as sketching designs, designing minifigures, and creating a set for an 8-to-10-year-old. The challenges were timed.

Mr. Bleyer, the ex-military man, called the design challenges "brutal."

In one exercise—creating a set that combines medieval- and space-themed Lego sets—plastic bags of Lego bricks and minifigures were distributed—and quickly ripped apart—as participants got to work sitting at tables or spreading out on the blue-carpeted floor. Some began by sketching with colored pens, while others immediately started clicking together the plastic bricks, trying out their ideas as they worked.

They had two and a half hours to come up with a Lego toy concept. Nobody spoke, and, aside from the clicking of plastic bricks and the sound of the occasional airplane taking off from the nearby airport, the group operated in silence. Senior Lego designers observed them and scribbled notes.

Candidates were judged not only on the concept but also on elements such as the designs' color schemes and buildability. Not to mention the elusive element of fun. "You need to think in a way that adds a little bit of humor to a product or a character or a story, and that's very important for us," says Mr. Thorogood. The way contestants interacted with each other was also noted.

During breaks, Lego informed the recruits about the practicalities of relocating to Billund, a small town on the windswept peninsula of Jutland. The town has 6,500 inhabitants, and night life is limited to an Irish pub, the Highlander, that is well-known for its "Thirsty Thursdays."

Lego also told candidates about Denmark's forbiddingly high tax system. The company assured them that its wages are competitive enough to compensate.

Candidates put on a wide-ranging display of technical ingenuity. One applicant created a car that could transform into a killer robot, with the tires becoming shoulders.

Lego doesn't look to produce these sets. It takes training for a designer to create a set that is properly priced, targets the right age group and fits in the Lego portfolio, among other considerations. Typically, new hires will work alongside a Lego designer for a year before being charged with creating a small set.

Late last week, Lego said it had decided to hire eight of the 21 candidates. It didn't disclose who would get an offer; a Lego spokesman says it hadn't informed some candidates yet. But recruits who are offered a job, Lego says, will be expected to start work as soon as possible, preferably the next day.

omg another movie taken 'seriously' by the new gen of critics

Was waiting for you to catch up. The trigger on the backlash dash was about to pull without you.

which direction is the backlash coming from?

I didn't realize the guys who did the 21 Jump Street spoof were auteurs, silly me.

Gay defenders of Looney Tunes: Back in Action and Fox News pundits alike. Strange bedfellows.

well i lasted about 25 mins with Back in Action.

kinda wish the new Wes Anderson wasn't coming out next month, I would vow not to see an American studio film all year. Just to save time.

omg another daring takedown of american studio films

if Uhlich thinks this is artificially anticorporate, good nuff

As far as I can see - on wikipedia - Grand Budapest Hotel is presented as a German-British co-production, distributed by Fox Searchlight. Is that too studio-y? Otherwise, vow away!

movie takes Lego to task for its licensing kits etc but then says the solution is to buy Lego so Mark Fisher Capitalist Realism etc etc

but it's funny and pretty smart

well well well, lookee who wrote this

http://cityarts.info/2014/02/07/a-piece-of-resistance/

...but just because reviewers confuse this with Pixar doesn’t mean that you should. The look of The Lego Movie is a conundrum but when a Lego William Shakespeare figure threw off his hat and protested “Rubbish!” I chuckled.

Well then it's practically unanimous, then.

Morbius doing good work in here

"No, you should really watch this 100-minute advertisement where different Lego versions of billion-dollar franchises interact. Also, can you validate my career choice where I convince office workers and college kids that they are cinéastes because they watched a movie for children, but like really watched it."

Every movie is an advertisement for itself. Think about it.

"Come watch this hodgepodge of crass nostalgia and overheated Family Guy references and Animaniacs-style self-parody to mask the bloodthirsty commercial ambitions of a billion-dollar toy company, a billion-dollar movie studio, and a bunch of their liscensee buddies."

ah shut up you Disney park enthusiast

Some people think Disneyland is the happiest place on earth. Others think it is soulless, manipulative and powered by pure greed behind a façade of pretty colors and perky, dancing peons. So, Ned's and Whiney's respective reviews of this movie are very helpful for making up my mind whether I'd like it or not. Thx, fellas.

Ned and Whiney both love Disney parks!

Ironic, no?

I don't feel strongly about Lego Movie one way or another as I've said above but this thread is proof that music writers should never talk about film and vice-versa, keep those lanes separate

Wait has Whiney actually seen this?

whiney doesn't see a movie unless there's a subway tie-in. last one he saw was the lone ranger.

whiney playing nerd-police never gets old

Yeah, it's a kid at heart.

whiney playing nerd-police never gets old

― |$̲̅(̲̅ιοο̲̅)̲̅$̲̅| (gr8080), Thursday, February 13, 2014 3:05 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

disagree

chaser for armond

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/feb/11/lego-film-subversive-countercultural

I'm not proposing it as a work of leftist agitprop – it remains, after all, a giant billboard for a multinational company – or suggesting it offers a viable blueprint for post-neoliberal civics. But it asserts that it's OK – exciting, even – to consider how society could be structured differently. It invites us to imagine other worlds.

Since "The Lego Movie" does not use actual Legos but in fact uses computer generated simulations of Legos, perhaps it is subverting the product placement system by offering instead a synthetic representation of product placement that in fact subverts product placement toward a new end. It's meta product placement, because there is no actual "product" or "place," just the virtual 3D animated field.

I still haven't seen this, but I think my coffee kicked in.

at least half of what lego sells these days are digitally animated cartoons and video games which take place in a universe made of virtual lego, so...

Bitch gotta eat.

That Lego Marvel video game looks so fun it makes me want to buy a video game system just to play that.

There were some actual Legos used in shots.

Also, yeah, the Lego Marvel game is the best they've put out in a very long time.

Also, all the sour reactions to this movie are hilarious considering what Morgan Freeman does with his role, and how they film his character half-way thru

still loling appreciatively at whiney going the extra mile to hunt up the diacritic for "cinéastes"

lol

If he's using a Mac, all he had to do was hold down the "e". Like this: é.

Hold down the e and you get some diacritic options. Same with any other character, I think.

on my PC, when I hold down the e I get eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

typical mac coddling; i google an ascii table and then meticulously copy-and-paste the characters i want like a real man

which is what i will say when The Lego Movie finishes 8th in Film Comment's best of 2014 poll.

xp

(a real man who doesn't know his ascii codes)

Getting flashbacks to when I used to have a PC and memorized ASCII codes so I could have ~kewl~ display names for my ICQ profile.

"uh-oh!"

Oh man, I knew way too many ASCII codes. So cool to write in a .sig file for yourself on a bbs when you're 14.

"uh-oh!"

― i want to say one word to you, just one word:buzzfeed (difficult listening hour), Thursday, February 13, 2014 11:30 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I still remember my ICQ number.

*checks their website to see if my profile is still up*

Yep, Spinal Tap is still quoted in the "About me" section.

i got a new icq account after a year or two of using it, i forget why, i dunno if i was too dumb to recover a password or what, and after this my icq number had one more digit than my best friend's, and this tore me up

Mine is eight digits. Is that cool enough?

http://www.virginmedia.com/images/ice-t-original-gangster-300x300.jpg

(google refused to find me a picture of lenin's party card)

you can never tell where the derails are comin' from

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5W14DZ_bCM

the very first brickfilm, made in the late 80s in Perth:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jde4qHbCtSg

"Come watch this hodgepodge of crass nostalgia and overheated Family Guy references and Animaniacs-style self-parody to mask the bloodthirsty commercial ambitions of a billion-dollar toy company, a billion-dollar movie studio, and a bunch of their liscensee buddies."

― COMME des ÇIGARBOX (Whiney G. Weingarten), Wednesday, February 12, 2014 7:48 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i hope you're sitting down, because i have some news for you:

Every Hollywood film is designed to make a lot of money.

I know, right?

i'm going to see this today. maybe i'll hate it, maybe i'll love it, but i suspect i'll have more credibility for having seen it than nearly all of the knee-jerk naysayers on this thread.

lol at 'bloodthirsty commercial ambitions.'

when will the lego group call off its reign of terror?

I'd rather you all not bait Whiney to come back into this thread but it's probably too late now anyway.

i seldom notice who posted what, sorry.

and i don't know who whiney is. but sorry if i just baited a troll.

Took kids to this yesterday. It was good, we all liked it. Not sure why it's getting the chinstroking/thinkpiece treatment -- the basic message of "be yourself" is the basic message of 95 percent of all children's movies ever. The only thinkpiecey thing it made me think about was the dissonance between that message and what my kids are actually learning in school.

But on a pure pleasure level, the animation is great -- maybe the most inventive-for-its-own-sake since Madagascar 3 (I know that sounds sort of Armond-ish, but that movie was a blast).

guessing ever intelligent person who heard of a lego movie thought "wow that's a cynical cash-in by a toy company to make more money selling its toys" and then the people who liked it (inc. me) are basically "they really were given a shitty property and they did something pretty good with it good job" so I don't understand what merit any trolling here has considering it's all "lol u guyz this is capitalism lol"

Saw this again while awaiting a phone repair. Somebody pointed this out while playing the game and it's in the movie, too; look how many billboards are President Business saying stuff like "What part of 'No' don't you understand?!" and "Because I said so!"

lol

http://toysnbricks.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/70810-LEGO-Movie-MetalBeards-Sea-Cow-Toysnbricks.jpg

2700+ bricks at $.10 a Lego means this should run being $250 and $300 American.

http://news.toyark.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2014/02/Toy-Fair-2014-LEGO-Movie-027.jpg

http://news.toyark.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2014/02/Toy-Fair-2014-LEGO-Movie-017.jpg

OK, so this movie really was pretty much a big ad, but given it was an ad that explicitly stressed maximum creativity above all else, I'm fine with that. Relied a bit too much on Batman for its laughs, but it needed those laughs. Lol at the controversial be-yourself/everyone is special message.

me the kid loved this film.

i think i laughed more than the kid.

*me and the kid.

that said, the original wording works as well ...

saw this during the weekend with my son. Definitely one of the better kids movies I've seen. I really liked how they went for a retro stop motion look for this movie. Also when a space ship lifts off and it basically makes the sound of an 8 year old making plane/spaceship sounds.

My son was singing that "Everything is awesome" song all day yesterday.

Just got back from seeing this, the 6 year old is playing with his lego and hasn't stopped singing "everything is awesome".

hah xp.

Also when a space ship lifts off and it basically makes the sound of an 8 year old making plane/spaceship sounds.

they did this a couple of times ..

really nice touch.

and the 'behind the scenes' video, behind the bricks, totally rips into the actors who played the various parts.

Loved the 80s spaceman guy, basically everything I built with lego as a kid was a spaceship.

My son is singing "Everything is awesome" too!

'80s spaceman guy was the only time my nostalgia bells rang (in a good way). I totally had '80s lego spaceman, complete with cracked helmet. When he finally starts jetting around yelling "spaceship!!!!" my daughter totally lost her shit.

Speaking of which, internet tshirt companies ahve been quick on the draw, and this popped up:

http://www.bustedtees.com/spaceship

$20 + shipping, but give 'em your email and they'll knock 40% off your first order.

http://1.media.bustedtees.cvcdn.com/5/-/bustedtees.f64d3115-9cff-4317-8aa6-e3c9a2f3.jpg

I'm still looking for a proper blue lego space shirt

I just bought the hell out of that shirt for my wife.

cracked helmet : perfect.
my heart just went all gooeey everytime 80s spaceman was on the screen.
i sooo want that t-shirt.

Oops, we hit a snag while processing your order.

The shipping phone number entered is invalid.
Shipping method does not exist.

fuck

dear god.

i am uk'r wanting a sodding t-shirt.

its not build a rocket science.

eBay.uk has some good looking blue classic space logo shirts, too

As I understand it, only the Spaceship! Spaceship! Spaceship! Spaceship! t-shirt will get you laid.

salt. open. wound.

trying all manner of variations.

fuckers aint wanting my ca$h.

thank the lord that i have rediscovered mickey newbury tonight to keep me on the path of righteousness.

uk based groove !

http://ih1.redbubble.net/image.15905279.5835/fig,black,mens,ffffff.u1.jpg

this may do me ..

Jesus, they've been busy lately:

http://www.redbubble.com/shop/recent+lego+t-shirts?ref=sort_order_change_recent

Oh and as far as enabling links go, the fact that you can bid on cheap lots of Lego from Goodwill might cause issues for some people.

this is cool

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1214729/James-May-size-Lego-house-wants.html

Yeah, if you dig around on youtube, or...other sources, you can find that ep. Stephen Fry shows up.

They made a neat little book about it I got for Christmas last year.

saw this late but I really enjoyed it! it helped that the main voice cast was like 90% people from NBC comedies. also lol'd at will arnett's batman being essentially the same character he played in hot rod .

Or anywhere? He's pretty much got the arrogant buffoon down.

Anthony Lane's review distills the movie's gist down to Marxism.

That was Fox News iirc.

xp mostly it was arnett's tendency to say "babe" a lot

Mark Mothersbaugh?!

what about him

obv this is no Rugrats wrt subversion of capitalist imperialism but

Mothersbaugh is not exactly choosy when it comes to his soundtrack work

Hah I was drunk last night so I can't remember exactly why I posted that, but I'd forgotten he did Rugrats and most of his 90s stuff tbh. Been in a bit of a Wes Anderson bubble wrt that stuff - though ILX prob prefers Crash Bandicoot to WA anyway.

Anyway I was just surprised because I'd been finding "Everything is Awesome" singularly annoying through the course of the movie. Which is the point of it, I concede. And it is kinda Devo to write a pumping anthem for the brainwashed corporate dystopia, to be reprised with varying levels of sarcasm throughout.

Its a beautiful world

Mothersbaugh only produced the song. Lonely Island + 3 others (I think?) wrote it.

I like Tegan & Sara's processed vocals. Yeah, Mothersbaugh didn't write the song, and according to the wiki:

Also included is the song "Everything Is Awesome!!!" written by Shawn Patterson (El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera and Robot Chicken), Joshua Bartholomew and Lisa Harriton (Jo Li)[59] and performed by Tegan and Sara featuring The Lonely Island, which has also been used in the film's marketing campaign

this was pretty cute i guess. really exhausting though. kids really sat all the way through this? wreck-it ralph felt a million hours long too.

definitely the best morgan freeman performance in years.

I loved this movie but didn't like the "male lead proves that he, not the self-assured manic pixie dream girl, is the real hero" aspect of the plot.

Dragging a bit, but Lego finally put out Benny's spaceship:

http://shop.lego.com/en-US/Benny-s-Spaceship-Spaceship-SPACESHIP-70816

http://www.bricksandbloks.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/LEGO-70816-Bennys-Space-Ship-LEGO-Movie-Summer-2014-Sets-e1396661618955-640x371.jpg

A hunnerd bucks American at 940 pieces, I believe its the biggest Classic Space-style ship they've ever produced.

Also, it never occurred to me that he's called "Benny" because he acts like he just downed a handful of them.

One of my new favorites to watch high as shit

Can't believe they turned the Matrix Reloaded into a watchable movie

This was great

The Lego set I always wanted as a kid but never got but knew someone who did was the Pirate Ship

I remember that it cost ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS (or maybe fifty) and that was an unbroachable price point

I'll probably never watch this movie again though

I ordered the deluxo set off of Amazon today. Hell, I have enough Amazon cards from staying in hotels so much, so I figured why not

i loved the explosion effects in this, i'd watch hours and hours of just lego flames.

The water & bubbles were great. Very funny, I was pleasantly surprised.

And there's the bit where falling pigs explode into sausages

GET THAT DAMN SONG OUT OF MY HEAD AAAAAAAAARRRGHHH #weekendwithchildren

So you're saying everything isn't awesome?

watching this again for the third time (first time at home) still funny

Thought the plot was pleasingly weird, the switch to reality towards the end almost reminded me of something out of a Grant Morrison comic.

Switch to reality was where is went from awesome to shitty imo. Would have much preferred it to have carried on implicitly being childs play without suddenly the film being about a bad father.

The shift from from general anti-hegemony theme to overly-specific Lego Sets are Bad and Stifling Child's Growth just seemed like needless lurch.

when do we get a playmobil movie

The shift from from general anti-hegemony theme to overly-specific Lego Sets are Bad and Stifling Child's Growth just seemed like needless lurch.

Overly-specific Lego sets ARE bad.

I saw it for the first time tonight & loved it

I flipped out about Benny the spaceman! When they close-upped on his face & his helmet was broken I was like HOLY SHIT I HAD A BENNY THE SPACEMAN TOO! He was red & his helmet was broken in the same spot! I also had a suburban house with a mom & dad so my benny spaceman slept in the spare room & parked his spaceship on their front lawn :D

anyway loved all of it. real world stuff was corny but nice. little sister aliums made me lol

"we are here to destroy you"

If nothing else, I can always explain why I got an aerospace engineering degree by talking about how I was first given a Classic Space set when I was 6.

Watching the blu-ray, I'm noticing jokes like one of the robot skeleton guards goose-stepping in the background of the control room.

Also, they do a shitload more with cameras and lenses than the vast majority of animated movies

Or the construction worker trying to ward off the evil by holding his sausages in a cross shape near the end

mr veg said watching it made him nostalgic for his own super-8 stop motion movies he made as a kid.
just the fact that the cgi made you forget that it was even cgi, it was so convincinglly lego, it was awesome.

And they incorporated stopmotion movies into some of the background monitors!

And a shot of the collected Justice League in the end celebration(sans Manhunter)

yeah apparently a bunch of the monitors playing the Villagers Fighting Back in the background were actually youtube fan films made during production

Overly-specific Lego sets ARE bad.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/91lXZp%2BlsML._SL1500_.jpg

I get the irony, but I am totally getting that for my 6-yr-old for Christmas...

I really don't get the level of hatred this movie appears to inspire from people who otherwise happily consume the worst summer blockbuster garbage imaginable, simply on the basis of it being explicitly product-driven.

I really don't get the level of hatred this movie appears to inspire from people (period)

well that too

it inspires hatred?

"Come watch this hodgepodge of crass nostalgia and overheated Family Guy references and Animaniacs-style self-parody to mask the bloodthirsty commercial ambitions of a billion-dollar toy company, a billion-dollar movie studio, and a bunch of their liscensee buddies."

― COMME des ÇIGARBOX (Whiney G. Weingarten), Thursday, February 13, 2014 1:48 AM (4 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Among those who object when overtly consumer product is actually done well, mainly.

Right, there are no objections to Michael Bay because everyone with 2 brain cells can see he's craven.

I think that if I objected to the film on principle then I would find the mawkishness in the last act especially revolting.

I don't know that I would extrapolate an epidemic of critical drubbing based on a single post by our resident Andy Rooney, Jr.

critics seemed to like it, I just had other friends (and lol Whiney and I guess NotEnough) who didn't

"Come watch this hodgepodge of crass nostalgia and overheated Family Guy references and Animaniacs-style self-parody to mask the bloodthirsty commercial ambitions of a billion-dollar toy company, a billion-dollar movie studio, and a bunch of their liscensee buddies."

― COMME des ÇIGARBOX (Whiney G. Weingarten), Thursday, February 13, 2014 1:48 AM (4 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, July 1, 2014 3:57 PM (52 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

posting whiney hating something is like being excelsior'd by me

I was definitely skeptical of the movie before I saw it, and it did seem a little crass (a la Battleship or movies based on Disney World rides), but I don't think many people who've actually seen the movie have had a lot to complain about because it was really well done. I don't think films based on beloved children's toys, properties, etc. are inherently worthy of scorn but, given the amount of bullshit that comes out of that subset of films (most recent example: that thoroughly execrable Paddington trailer), I can totally understand why people might assume the worst without bothering to see the thing.

i saw part of it and it was kind of exhausting i thought. which isn't to say it's not good or funny. i just kinda thought it was good in that sort of predictable way that these types of movies are good, i wasn't startled by how amazing it is or anything.

Xp no, I enjoyed it a lot, at least for the first hour. Fun and funny and beautiful looking and I loved the kids playing sound effects and batman being a super serious boyfriend, and I even enjoyed the star wars characters showing up. I didn't have any objection to the commercial drivers behind films production cos guess what most films are made to make a profit. But the zoom out into will Ferrell's basement made me dislike the film for two reasons. It stopped me caring about the Lego characters cos they only exist in the kids head anyway. And instead of the film being implicitly about creativity by being obviously artificial and bound by rules, it became explicitly about how it's important to be a good dad by allowing creativity. It was sorta jarring IMO and spoiled it for me.

It certainly thought it was a cut above megamind or despicable me or something.

posting whiney hating something is like being excelsior'd by me

LOL I was about to say something similar.

Just saw this movie and WOW

Visually, it's a masterpiece.

Someone initially told me it was stop motion, and I totally bought that, the visuals really are that good that it could all be. (I think some bits actually are right?)

I really didn't want to see this because I thought ugh, lame. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed watching it. Thought it was clever and not what I was expecting.

Ive seen it quite a lot bcz bf with kids the right age, its fun being around them and they just burst out with "honey... wheeere are my PANTS!?"

Saw this for the first time last night; really enjoyed it, with some caveats (mainly re: female characters). Want to watch it again.

This is in semi-constant rotation on our TV -- kids are now to the point of watching it with the commentary tracks turned on -- and if I'm walking through the living room I'll stop and watch a few minutes and always see some details I hadn't noticed before. So packed with visual gags and flourishes. It must have been fun to work on.

Also, Vitruvius I think is a great send-up of Morgan Freeman wise-old-black-man characters.

once again i am disappointed at lack of commentary track on the dvd. i want to know how they did those things.

(by 'once again' i mean in addition to the last twice, which were the paranorman dvd and something else,)

Just saw this. So good! Beautiful visuals, creative, very sentimental and touching for the final part.
Seriously, I think it's the first American animated movie to give Pixar a run for their money for legit great films

I dunno. Dumbo and Pinnochio were pretty great.

ugh. i meant since Pixar

How to train your dragon

On top of the childhood nostalgia (I too with the broken 80s space helmet) and sniffles at the pro-creativity message (though yes this movie was made by capitalists who want to sell things and not by true revolutionaries, I concede), this is one of the rare movies that I could imagine not just watching without sound, but also enjoying the hell out of the audio track alone. Amazing voice work, even old hands like Morgan freeman and Liam Neeson who could easily autopilot were clearly having fun.

yeah i need to watch this again

One of Freeman's best bits is about the fact that he's on autopilot- the line where he says something like "I'm never going to remember that so you're going to have to write it down".

I like movies that are jampacked with jokes, and this is one of those movies.

i really liked this! very entertaining.

"These mechanical birds will get our message out. They will go to an internet cafe and email the remaining Master Builders who will meet us in the secret realm of Cloud Cuckoo Land."

My favorite Morgan Freeman moment was either this line or his ghost sounds.

Everything about this is awes... you know.

i know that sounds like a cat poster

Saw A LEGO Brickumentary. Didn't really like it at all--I can only take so much gee-whiz wonderment in 90 minutes.

Okay so, seeing Lego Batman tomorrow.

I am psyched for it. I bought the Batmobile.

looking forward to taking the kids to this

I watched this with the kid on Prime around Christmas. It was pretty good I guess, not as suitable for adults as the Lego Movie, and Superman is in it a lot, almost as much as Batman. If I didn't have children to pacify I would probably give it a miss, but not really into childrens' films anyway.

Oh, and my office has the federation of master builders downstairs. I have informed my five year old of this and he is *very* impressed.

I watched this with the kid on Prime around Christmas

I do not understand how this is possible

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lego_Batman_Movie

Ah... apparently there are two different Lego Batman movies ?!

I saw this one. Thought it was a bit low-budget to be in the cinema.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Batman:_The_Movie_%E2%80%93_DC_Super_Heroes_Unite

yeah that was direct to TV

still enjoyable

And seen. Very entertaining, it pretty much is the formula they've already established (and the Ninjago one looks like the same), but it works for that reason and there's some deep, deep Batman nerdery throughout. (The extended Nightwing riff at one point was amazing.)

I kind of want to go see this just for The Scuttler

seeing this on Saturday

is it as funny as lego movie?

I'd say so, yeah.

trailers look bad and Seth Grahame-Smith wrote it. I'm sceptical

My favourite was "more like Martian Dancehunter"

I thought it was a little better than the Lego Movie.

Saw trailers for the abysmal looking Boss Baby and Despicable Me 2.

This was p good, not as great as first one but whatever. I lol'd most at all the villain cameos/jokes ("i'm irritating!")

Was surprised Lego Batmite wasn't included

"Despicable Me 2" this came out years ago....there must be yet another one coming?

Yes its DM3

This was exec produced by our new treasury secretary

Went to see this last night and it was good and entertaining and funny - more about Batman than about Lego, definitely, but the fact that it was Lego was an intrinsic part and not incidental.

Very light on plot, really, and possibly a little dissatisfying because of that, but so many jokes and so much to look at. Definitely one for watching again on blu-ray to spot the references and obscure characters (and characters that oughtn't to be there: for instance the mutant leader from The Dark Night Returns is going to be in an actual Lego set released later this year. He is NOT for kids! Think I spotted him in the movie but only just).

Not as good as The Lego Movie itself, but that had the shock of the new in it's favour, and more scope to explore given the original characters (though obviously The Lego Batman Movie explores outside of just Batman's universe. I enjoyed it more than The Dark Knight Rises though. (I've not seen Bats V Supes.)

This largely what would happen if you took all of the R-rated stuff out of Deadpool - though it left in some McFarlane-esque meanness, which was greatly appreciated.

Also yeah very glad they kept the same approach of "hey I found this in the Lego bucket let's use it" as the Lego Movie.

I was really surprised to hear an Al Jarreau song in the Lego Batman movie.

That and George Michael -- almost spooky.

some McFarlane-esque meanness

took me a while to realise you probably didn't mean todd mcfarlane so before coming to that conclusion i wondered why anything todd mcfarlane-related would be appreciated

then i guessed you meant seth mcfarlane and i spent awhile longer wondering why anything seth mcfarlane-related would be appreciated

then i spent a bit thinking wondering who was worse, todd or seth. i decided on seth obv

it's been a slow afternoon

Todd had his moments.

I thought this movie was about as good as the Ghostbusters reboot, which is to say, not that good. Totally lazy and uninspired, even on its own terms, and it felt like it was 60 minutes too long.

there were way more jokes in this than in nu Ghostbusters, that's harsh

But I thought the jokes were lame and tired and uninspired and repetitive. And then it just kept going.

It did feel a bit longer than necessary but I generally feel that way about all H'wood blockbusters these days, everything has three endings

That's at least partly why I disliked it so much. It's a conflation of CGI and Lego, which means literally anything is possible, and yet it played like a totally boring, explosion-y generic action movie. I was not a big fan of the first Lego movie, but at least it involved (to some degree) creating new things out of Legos. This was just a half-assed Batman pseudo-parody made of CGI Legos. And then even beyond that, the script (credited to like 8 people), there were scenes were character A says stuff like "it's not what's up here that counts" (points to head), "it's what's in here" (points to heart). And I would wait for the joke and then realize, huh, I guess there is no joke, they're just going total boilerplate.

Doesn't help that dickhead Batman in the Lego Movie was amusing because he was essentially a cameo, but here he has to sustain the whole movie with his one-note schtick.

That and George Michael -- almost spooky.

My kids said it was funny...

The Jerry Maguire joke, as an example, is definitely in the key of Seth McFarlane.

And they even do that one twice! I don't even want to get into the literally countless iPhone placements (meta product placement?), Let alone the WB catalog shilling. Surprised Bugs Bunny wasn't in this ...

Xpost My kids didn't like it. One said even the good jokes were dumb, and there weren't many of them.

Let alone the WB catalog shilling.

Dude, seriously -- you're surprised by this.

Actually, yeah, especially because they had to go deep into the dustbin, not just properties they own and/or control (Wizard of Oz, King Kong, Dracula, Harry Potter, LotR, Gremlins (!)), but also forgotten John Cusack rom-coms "Must Love Dogs" (!) and "Serendipity" (!!), whose DVD covers they actually give screen time to!

Anyway, they establish the Phantom Zone as prison for the worst evil criminals of all time, like Zod, and when there's a breakout we get not Zod but Dracula, the Wicked Witch, et al. Just was super lame, especially since the movie was already populated with seemingly all the most powerful DC bad guys of all time. So wtf with releasing, like, a shark and some dinosaurs into the fray along with the aforementioned? That's what made me think of the Ghostbusters reboot. They make a big deal of unleashing the ultimate evil to destroy the city, and we get ... a bunch of Thanksgiving parade balloon ghosts. And here we get throwaway lazy WB references.

I dont keep track of what WB owns ergo idgaf

Assuming, WB stan or no, that you recognized them all, you didn't think the Eye of Sauron, the Wicked Witch of the West, King Kong, Voldermort and a bunch of Gremlins was a conspicuously weird batch of baddies to bust out?

Not really, felt amusingly random

I feel you may have slightly missed the light the rom-coms are shown in.

The variety of baddies is as in the Lego Movie, that's what I meant by "hey I found this in the Lego bucket let's use it".

Yeah, random Lego baddies here was in direct reflection of random goodies in The Lego Movie.

Also "British robots; ask your nerd friends"!

I liked that joke, but also thought it was dumb, given the Doctor Who resurgence and especially the Doctor Who resurgence among kids. Biggest Doctor Who fans I know are either pushing 50 or under 12.

Re Lego box, I wish there were some invented baddies then and not just known quantity pop culture baddies. Even then, they establish early on that Zod is in The Phantom Zone. So why didn't they release Zod? And for that matter, where were the rest of the super friends? Still partying in the Fortress of Solitude? I couldn't even figure out why the three dozen DC bad guys turned on the Joker. Maybe I missed something? I don't know, I just thought it was so so lazy.

My kids had a half day, though, so if you asked me if it was better than sitting around the house doing nothing but screaming at one another, then yeah, it was better than that.

I did like that Batman was really into rap metal though.

I liked that joke, but also thought it was dumb

"Should I be enjoying this" material!

I thought this was decent. The Scuttler was everything I hoped it would be, but The Phantom Zone being an extremely lazy version of Cloud-Cuckoo-Land was a bit disappointing. In retrospect I am actually pretty surprised that Will Arnett growling for two hours wasn't anywhere close to being as irritating as the Despicable 3 trailer (we were spared the Boss Baby one, thank god).

Barbara Gordon's intro + presentation was solid gold. Top of her class at Harvard For Police. STATISTICS and COMPASSION!

Boss Baby looked fucking awful.

this was totally great. agreed that it's not quite as good as The Lego Movie, but really really great for Batman and Lego fans.
love that these movies are still really (especially visually) creative and not lazy, production-wise. yeah the story is whatever but it had tons of great jokes and colorful splashy set pieces and animation. totally worth it

sometimes I wonder if I really like these movies just because of Corporal Dan...

so many lols at HARVARD FOR POLICE

So, the Australian distributors complained when the original movie came out thatr they lost estimated millions in piracy here because they waited over 2 months after release to release the movie in Aus. Then said theyd never make that mistake again.

Guess what isnt coming out here til MARCH EFFING 30???? :|

i thought this went on too long with its generic power-of-teamwork arc. also the animation wasn't as charming as the lego movie -- they went full cg overload instead of the "is this stop-motion or cg?" approach of tlm.

I was bored with this and left a half hour early, but I suspect I'm not its target audience. I Loved Lego Movie but this shtick wore thin really fast.

i really loved the use of kid noises for the guns during the battles .. 'peeeuuuw peeeeuuuw peeeeeuuuw'

hehe me too. the sort of stupid, non-clever yet completely amusing joke this movie had in spades

The LEGO ninjago movie Is genuinely funny imho. Writing is sharp and the voice acting is superb. Especially throreux as the evil lord garmadon

Lego Movie 2 is really good. It obv loses some compared to the first one which was such a surprise but I still really enjoyed it, also, it has some of best ending credits ever.

Agree with you on the ending credits, it's wonderfully animated and the Lonely Island song is great.

Found it a letdown from both Lego Movie I and Lego Batman personally. I loved some of the pieces - the overarching real world story was sweet and the final act were a lot of fun - but the first two thirds felt lacking in humor and momentum. But, in fairness, it was sort of impossible to follow up the first movie with something as good given that surprise.

ya all otm

That song is stuck inside my head.

took mk2 today to see it.
I was the oldest man in the cinema.
I laughed the most.
I absolutely loved it.

(if we had not watched LM1 yesterday then we would never have got the wonder woman invisible spaceship joke, nor several others … )

(Wonder Woman has had an invisible plane since 1941, btw!)

It's pretty wild that a) the first movie came out five years ago and b) five years ago President Business was if anything a slightly elderly Mitt Romney reference.