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.

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.