LEGO Movie Blooper Reel!
Posted on February 13, 2014 at 5:43 pm
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This is How They Made “The LEGO Movie”
Posted on February 11, 2014 at 10:50 pm
Here’s a little glimpse behind the scenes. It looks like even more fun than you hope — playing with a 15-million brick set of LEGOs!
From The LEGO Movie: Everything is Awesome
Posted on February 10, 2014 at 3:59 pm
Tegan and Sara’s adorable song is pure delight — did you know that the rap section is from Andy Samberg and his Lonely Island group?
And be sure to take a look at this great post from Deadline Hollywood about the film’s talented composer, Mark Mothersbaugh. Does that name sound familiar? Yes, he’s this guy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIEVqFB4WUoMothersbaugh has now become a very successful composer for wildly diverse movie genres, including “21 Jump Street,” “Rugrats,” and “The Royal Tenenbaums.” Creating the sounds for “The LEGO Movie” was a challenge.
e reached back to his past to compose the score. “I used old retro synthesizers that I used from the days of DEVO and then used circuit bending.” What is circuit bending? “If you go on YouTube you can see these people who pull out all these crazy, electronic Speak and Spells to Elmo dolls and Casio keyboards and combine the sounds. It’s circuit bending. These people even have their own circuit bent instruments. They are the vocabulary of modern music. So I looked at a lot of that gear, and I created this palate of electronic sounds….He initially scored the whole thing in electronics and then went back and layered in an entire orchestration underneath. The result is bright, popping, almost frenetic music with an underpinning of emotional swells. “Because it’s the world of animation, you really need an orchestral sounds. Even the most cutting edge animation needs help to look and feel like the real world. When you have a little square peg with a face painted on it you need to feel the heart and know that there’s a brain there. I had to ground it and give it its unique place that it was also meaningful emotionally.”
No, Fox News, “The LEGO Movie” is Not Anti-Business
Posted on February 9, 2014 at 12:55 pm
Perpetuating its favorite ploy of simultaneously riling up and soothing its viewers with its message of victimhood, Fox News now claims that the charming, funny, and very smart “LEGO Movie” is anti-business propaganda, designed to inculcate the next generation into hating capitalism. The absurdity of this assessment is evident on its face — this is a movie that is fundamentally a feature-length informercial for one of the world’s biggest toy brands. 
As I have often stated, corporate villains are found in movies in every category and genre. They make convenient villains because everyone knows them, they are impersonal, they don’t have the kind of defenders that various ethnic groups do, and they fit very well in the almost-universal theme of films of the individual against the machine. That does not mean that the people who make films are anti-corporate. On the contrary, films are utterly capitalist enterprises, often costing and making hundreds of millions of dollars. They are produced by corporations and they make a lot of money for the executives and shareholders. They have “partners” — in the case of “The LEGO Movie” the licensing arrangements include McDonald’s, Barnes & Noble, Delta, Microsoft, and Stride-Rite. If corporations think that a movie will make money making some other group the bad guys, they will make it.
However, this is not a movie with a corporate bad guy. While the villain, played by Will Ferrell, is called “Lord Business” or “President Business,” the film’s conclusion makes it very clear that the name comes from an idea that is much sweeter and heartfelt than a generic attack on big, impersonal, companies. It isn’t “The LEGO Movie” that is stuck in a cliched narrative. It’s Fox News.
The LEGO Movie
Posted on February 6, 2014 at 6:00 pm
A-| Lowest Recommended Age: | Kindergarten - 3rd Grade |
| MPAA Rating: | Rated PG for action and crude humor |
| Profanity: | Some schoolyard language ("butt") |
| Alcohol/ Drugs: | None |
| Violence/ Scariness: | Cartoon-style peril and violence, no one hurt |
| Diversity Issues: | Diverse characters |
| Date Released to Theaters: | February 7, 2014 |
| Date Released to DVD: | June 18, 2014 |
| Amazon.com ASIN: | B00HEQOC2A |
Everything is awesome in this fast, fresh, funny, and utterly adorable movie set in the vast world of LEGOs.
Last year at Comic-Con the filmmakers said that there are two great things to do with LEGOs — you can follow the instructions and make something awesome. Or, you can ignore the instructions and make something awesome. Here, they pay tribute to both in the storyline and in their own meta-approach to the material, deconstructing classic movie narratives over here, re-constructing them over there, and adding in some delicious humor and sublime guest stars of both the LEGO and human variety. So when a Gandalf-y looking guy with the deep, familiar voice of Morgan Freeman intones a prophecy about a chosen one, we file it away as the underlying frame for the story — for a couple of seconds until he advises the confused crowd that it has to be true because it rhymes. Big-time Lugnuts and Brick-heads will find plenty of in-jokes and wonky charm and those who don’t know their minifigures from their master builders will enjoy the wit, the silliness, and the surprisingly touching conclusion.
The movie winsomely begins with LEGO logos, immediately welcoming us into a playful, tactile world. And then we meet our unassuming hero, the cheerful Emmet (a terrific Chris Pratt), who greets each day with joyful energy and loves everything about his life. At least, that’s what he tells us as he follows the instructions for getting ready for work on a construction site. The song “Everything is Awesome” (from Tegan and Sara) plays brightly everywhere. Instructions are clear and faces are painted in a smile. But Emmett is lonely. Everyone seems to have friends to hang out with but no one invites him to come along. He loves being part of a team but kind of misses having something special and different.
And then, the brave and glamorous Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), with her fetching streaked ponytail, shows up and he follows her down the LEGO equivalent of a rabbit hole to discover that everything he thought he understood about his world of following instructions and being part of a team is at risk. President Business (Will Ferrell) is about to unleash a terrible weapon, and apparently Emmet is the only one who can stop him. There are worlds beside and under worlds and within other worlds here — you could make an “Inception”-style map that takes you from the wild west and Middle Zealand to Cloud Cuckoo-land. The film makes clever use of the properties of LEGOs, their endless variety of characters and projects and their comforting sameness of structure and inflexibility. It avoids becoming an infomercial by keeping the focus on the story and the goal of creativity. Emmet and Wildfire are joined by Batman (Will Arnett’s dry baritone nails it), Vitruvious (Freeman), a pirate cyborg (Charlie Day), and a rainbow unicorn-kitty (Alison Brie). Their foes include President Business’ two-faced henchman whose head swivels to allow him to be both good and bad cop (a very funny Liam Neeson). It would be criminal to give away any of the movie’s many surprises and the mind-bendingly cool guest appearances, but I will mention that a couple of them arrive from a galaxy far, far away.
There are some unexpectedly heartwarming moments about family and the importance of imagination. The bad guy is not called President Business for the usual reasons. And there’s an unusually astute resolution to the final confrontation. I especially enjoyed some very clever satire about the kind of entertainment we too often settle for. If only they had known about Facebook’s 10th anniversary gift to each of its subscribers of “look back” mini-movies of their own lives — but not even “The LEGO Movie” could have come up with anything that solipsistically deranged. But this movie is itself the best possible antidote to the tendency to settle for lowest-common-denominator formula story-telling. It won’t just inspire you to see better movies; it will inspire you to make your own.
Parents should know that this film has cartoon-style peril and violence with many threatened injuries but no one hurt, a parent-child confrontation, some potty humor, and schoolyard language.
Family discussion: How do you decide whether you are special? Is it more fun to follow directions or make something up? What parts of the LEGO world do you recognize?
If you like this, try: the “Toy Story” movies and “Robots” — and build something with LEGOs!