If you’re like me and someone hands you a bucket of LEGO pieces, you come up with a depressing rectangular chair or an airplane whose wings keep falling off. We’re nothing like those obsessives who create replicas of the Kremlin in their basement, or the Battle of Gettysburg, or the molecular structure of strontium. So it is with Hollywood blockbusters made from toys. Most are put together and come apart with disposable shoddiness, but every once in a while a couple of lunatics will build something ridiculous and lasting. When that happens, it should be honored. My fingers rebel, but type it I must: “The LEGO Movie” is the first great cinematic experience of 2014.Shot with a mixture of CGI and stop-motion animation and using 3-D to invite us into its brightly knubbled world, “The LEGO Movie” is a series of irresistible comic riffs on creativity, and it divides the world into two kinds of people: those who like to snap things together and keep them there and those who prefer to pull it all apart and start from scratch.
The control freaks and the dreamers, in other words, and the movie clearly knows which side it’s on. Thank you for signing up! Sign up for more newsletters here Writer-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (working from a story also written by Dan and Kevin Hageman) simultaneously celebrate and subvert the sameness of all those little blocks and the humanoid figures that come with them. Their hero, Emmet Brickowski (voiced by actor Chris Pratt), is as generic as can be, and still he worries about fitting in with the yellow plastic crowd. The urban LEGOLAND in which he works as a construction drone is a lockstep society run by the ruthless Lord Business (Will Ferrell), whose government/corporation owns all the voting machines. The hit TV show in this world is a brain-dead sitcom called “Where’s My Pants?” The song on everyone’s unmoving plastic lips is “Everything Is Awesome,” a chart-ready paean to conformity that scoops out your frontal lobes and takes up permanent residence in your skull.
It all feels a lot like home. “The LEGO Movie” then proceeds to cheerfully rip off “The Matrix” and every other paranoid-fantasy-gobbledygook epic of the last decade. After he stumbles upon the legendary Piece of Resistance, Emmet is mistakenly singled out as “The Special” by members of the LEGO underground led by Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks) and Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman). The latter is a cut-rate guru who might be mistaken for Gandalf or Dumbledore if both those two weren’t milling around in the background in nearly identical LEGO-guy form.There’s an element of opportunistic genius to this movie: Since LEGO has been releasing licensed character sets from hit films and TV shows for years, the filmmakers can toss just about anyone into the story as long as the lawyers agree. This means that Wyldstyle’s boyfriend can be a testy, blowhard Batman (Will Arnett), that Superman (Channing Tatum) can be hounded by a needy Green Lantern (Jonah Hill), and that Very Special Guests can include William Shakespeare (Jorma Taccone), Abraham Lincoln (Will Forte), and Shaquille O’Neal (Shaquille O’Neal).
As a bonus, Liam Neeson channels both his sensitive art-film side and his kickass blockbuster persona as Lord Business’s chief enforcer, Good Cop/Bad Cop.The keys to the movie’s absurdly high enjoyment factor are its exuberance, timing, wit, and willingness to stoop to its source — or kneel on the carpet looking for lost bricks, as the case may be. Unlike “Battleship,” “G.I. Joe,” and the dreaded “Transformers” series, “The LEGO Movie” is rooted in the wonky hobbyist esthetic of the LEGO system itself, Denmark’s greatest gift to the world. You don’t just play with LEGO, you build stuff with it, as far out as your imagination and patience can stretch.It’s a toy fetishist’s dream, then — a movie made entirely of eensy-weensy plastic bricks. The visuals in “The LEGO Movie” are both insane and generous, and occasionally the film backs into a startlingly pure beauty, such as an ocean sequence made of endless, undulating blue cubes.That’s one of the few times you’re thankful for the 3-D, and, typically, Lord and Miller dispel the mood with a gag involving a double-decker couch.
The duo previously gave us the family-friendly “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” and the rowdy, inventive “21 Jump Street” remake, the latter another franchise extension that had no reason to be any good and, surprisingly, was. Their humor here isn’t potty-mouthed like the Farrelly brothers or Judd Apatow, nor does it come loaded with sardonic pop-culture references like “The Simpsons,” nor does it strain for hipness like every other movie tasked with amusing both children and adults. Instead, it’s manic and smart and respectful of the mysteries of silly, as if Jay Ward of “Rocky and Bullwinkle” had been reborn as a LEGO freak.Some of this may still be too intense for the smallest audiences, and there’s only so much sport a massive, profit-hungry corporation like LEGO or Warner Brothers can make of massive, profit-hungry corporations without being called on it. Yet when “The LEGO Movie” finally shoots through the rabbit hole into a larger reality, the yin/yang of order-vs.-messy creativity gets played out on a different kind of stage.
The film goes majorly meta but movingly so, and we’re made to understand that everything we’ve been watching is provisional, able to be disassembled and reimagined at will. When all is said and done, LEGO is still a toy, and this movie is a sweet, rococo ode to child’s play.Though my kids and I saw “The Lego Movie” last week, I’ve been avoiding blogging about it. Contrary to what some commenters claim, I don’t relish seeing yet another movie for kids with the same old sexist pattern that’s been done so many times my head spins. I’m so fucking sick of the Minority Feisty, I could scream. I cannot believe Hollywood keeps churning out this shit. The last line of the movie, the finale, is all you really need to know to understand the sexist stereotyping throughout. Batman (a major character, while Wonder Woman gets two lines) urges his girlfriend, Lucy, to go off with, the movie’s protagonist, saying: “No, Lucy. He’s the hero you deserve.” The girl– and she is the girl– is the prize to be won.
Why can’t a girl be the fucking hero? Here’s what drives me crazy about this film. “The Lego Movie” is all about prizing creativity above all, yet, when it comes to gender, innovation flies right out the window and cliche dominates the imaginary world. It’s just like how in “Turbo” the movie’s message is that a snail can win the Indy 500, follow your dreams, be anything you want to be…unless you happen to be a girl. Same with “Planes:” anyone can become a champion, even a crop duster, except for…females. What are children supposed to think about possibility and potential when in narrative after narrative girls are stuck in supporting roles if they get to exist at all? The bad guy (yes, bad guy) in “The Lego Movie,” Mr. Business, is evil because he wants all the LEGO sets to stay only with their intended pieces. He wants to build impenetrable boundaries to make sure nothing too creative goes on. His deadly weapon, the kragle, is superglue. To Mr. Business, LEGO is not about process and creativity, but a static, finished, perfect product.
This is a brilliant message to teach kids. Art is about process (not to mention, life.) LEGO’s self-awareness about its toy surprised and impressed me. The movie’s narrative illustrates the problem I have with LEGO sets (besides their sexism, of course.) Every time I struggle through yet another 1,000 piece project with my kids, I wonder: What is the point here? What are we learning, how to follow directions? Near the end of the movie, Will Ferrell, who voices Mr. Business appears in human form. He’s angry with his son (yep, his son) who’s in the basement, playing with Ferrell’s completed LEGO sets. The kid has put a dragon on top of a building, where it’s not supposed to be. Ferrell gets mad, and the kid says, “But it’s a toy! For 8 to 14 year olds.” Ferrell says, “That’s just a suggestion!” At this point, like so many other times in the movie, I cracked up. The villain is my husband. While I lie there wondering what the point of LEGO is, he’s snatching up pieces, trying to finish the set himself, do it all perfectly, and once it’s done, he puts it somewhere high up where no one can reach it.
So, this is what I want to know: LEGO, how can you be so creative, smart, and funny but then fall into tropes when it comes to gender roles? Why can’t you break through the impenetrable boundary of your own sexism? There’s one Minority Feisty gleam of hope that comes at the end of the father son scene. After an epiphany, Farrell lets his kid enjoy the LEGO and says, “Now that you’re allowed down here, we’ll have to let your sister play too.” Cue the scary music. Could this be the next movie? Girls are allowed to play, front and center? And what if those girls are actually seen having an adventure, not shopping or eating at a cafe or taking care of sick puppies or whatever LEGO Friends allows them to do? LEGO’s world would change. Not to mention ours. That would be an adventure. Reel Girl rates “The Lego Movie” ***H*** Update: For those of you who don’t know about LEGO’s history of sexism, here are some posts you should read: If you want to see how male protagonists dominate children’s movies while female characters are continually sidelines or go missing all together, check out Reel Girl’s Galleries: