TOP Gear presenter James May is looking for volunteers to help him build a new house in Surrey - but one made entirely out of Lego bricks. As part of his BBC series James May’s Toy Stories, he plans to build a two-storey house in the middle of Denbies Wine Estate in Dorking. On Friday, more than three million Lego bricks were delivered to the vineyard in preparation for the task. Denbies marketing and business development manager, Jeanette Simpson, said: “The millions of bricks came all the way from the Czech Republic. The house will be life-size with a staircase, toilet and shower.” May will be hosting a building day on Saturday, August 1, when members of the public can help him with the challenge. The event follows two other successful toy challenges which saw May build the world’s first Plasticine garden, winning the People’s Choice Award at the Chelsea Flower Show, and also the world’s largest model plane. Anyone interested in taking part in the Lego house build should e-mail their contact details to lego@plumpictures.co.uk.
James May's Toy Stories will also feature an attempt to create a Scalextric version of the Brooklands racetrack in Weybridge on August 16, as part of Brooklands Museum's Pendle Slot Racing Festival. More than 20,000 pieces of Scalextric will be laid out before a local community team and members of the Scalextric Club go head-to-head in a 2.75-mile race.Winter Toy Shopproduct_label_list_price_accessibility 128 Reviews123451FIND MORE PRODUCTS LIKE THISSeasonalBuildingsCreatorEnjoy the holiday season with the Winter Toy Shop! Winter Toy Shop Reviews - page 2(CNN) -- Toy manufacturer LEGO, famous for its small plastic stackable bricks, is not allowed to register one of them as its trademark, the European Court of Justice has ruled. The Danish company was granted a trademark for a three-dimensional image of a red eight-stud brick in 1999, for use throughout the European Union. Canadian toy manufacturer Mega Brands, which makes similar plastic bricks, argued that LEGO violated trademark legislation, and the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg ruled in favor of Mega Brands on Tuesday.
"This was the court of final instance, and we have no option but to note the court's ruling," said Peter Kjaer, the head of LEGO's Intellectual Property Section. The ruling cannot be appealed. The issue was whether the famous LEGO brick served a technical function. European law says companies can trademark graphic images like words, designs, the shape of their goods and packaging -- but trademarking a product's shape, if that shape is "necessary to obtain a technical result," is not allowed, the court said. LEGO argued that did not apply to its brick, because "bricks with virtually the same function can have other appearances," Kjaer said. In making its decision, the court referred to an earlier case involving the electronics makers Philips and Remington over the shape of an electric razor. "Patents can protect technical solutions, such as the means to interconnect toy bricks, but patent protection is limited in time and LEGO's patents for the basic brick have long expired," Mega Brands said in a statement after the ruling.
"Put simply, a trademark registration cannot be used to confer a potentially everlasting monopoly on a useful product configuration." Kjaer said the decision will confuse LEGO customers. "It is naturally a matter of concern to us that use of the brick by others can dilute the trademark," he said. "But the worst aspect is that consumers will be misled. Analyses show that 40-60 percent of shoppers believe they are buying a LEGO product when in fact they are purchasing a different product. Shoppers can see there is a different name on the box, but they believe it is a product line or company owned by us."I’m “biast” (pro): love Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s previous films I’m “biast” (con): the trailers didn’t thrill me I have played with the source material (and I love it) (what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto) It’s like the opposite of Lucy-with-the-football with filmmakers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and me. This is the third time they’ve taunted me by dangling something so apparently crapariffic before my geeky yet ever optimistic movie-lovin’ eyes, and then failed to make me utterly despise what they did with it.
First was Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, adapted from a very very short children’s picture book, and how do you plump that up into a decent flick? Yet they made magic. Then was 21 Jump Street, adapted from a very good but very dated TV show I loved that they populated with actors I couldn’t stand — and in the case of one of them, I use the term “actor” only in its most generous meaning. Yet they made movie magic again. These guys made me not hate Channing Tatum (at least in that one movie). This continues to be astonishing to me. Now it’s The Lego Movie. It’s plastic interlocking bricks and little tiny yellow people with no expressions on their faces. Sometimes it’s characters and vehicles and objects shoehorned into the weird brick world from across the pop-culture spectrum. It’s toys that have been plasticized from movies — not originally, but that seems to be the focus today — and then remade into a movie. It’s like if you made some instant coffee, then froze it and chopped it up into ice chips, then tried to make fresh coffee from it.
I mean, those Lego video games are surprisingly awesome, but there’s no way in hell this could work as a movie. This works as a movie. (But Lord and Miller’s next movie, 22 Jump Street, is still sure to suck.) That said: I’m hearing, across the Net, a lot of fanboy orgasming over The Lego Movie, and I can’t get that excited here. I can’t quite say that Lord and Miller — and their cowriters, Dan and Kevin Hageman — managed to squeeze an “original” story out of some plastic bricks, because this is basically Toy Story meets The Matrix, with a bit of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Idiocracy tossed in for flavor. True, it’s kind of amazing that anyone could get all those influences to play nicely in one story and still keep it coherent — even significant — but you’ve seen this all before. Just not done with Legos. And The Lego Movie is some extraordinary eye candy, created from (apparently) actual Legos, for the most part, and animated using them.
Lego-animated fire and Lego-animated water is some of the coolest, cleverest, most geekily ticklish stuff I’ve seen onscreen in a while. It’s crammed with so much detail that zooms by too quickly — it’s going to be fun to explore this one in slo-mo once it’s available to watch at home. The city where construction worker Emmet lives is a visual marvel… and a thematic marvel as well. The bricks line up all neat and square and regular, and so do the people. There are instructions to be followed, proper ways to do things — everything from a guy’s morning routine to the building up and crashing down of structures in this city that seems to be Emmet’s job. The most popular pop song, “Everything Is Awesome!,” is a horrifically catchy ode conformity. The most popular TV show is– well, a PG version of Idiocracy’s Ow My Balls. And in a world of bland sameness, Emmet (the voice of Chris Pratt: Delivery Man, Her) is a marvel of boring forgettableness. He is most definitely not the Master Builder he is mistaken for by Wyldstyle (the voice of Elizabeth Banks: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Movie 43), who has been seeking an object called the Piece of Resistance that can be wielded only by The Special.
Yup, she’s pretty much The Matrix’s Trinity, and she hoped that she herself would turn out to be The Special, and now she thinks it’s Emmet, for reasons you will have to see the movie to discover. It’s sad to me that an accidental message of The Lego Movie is that no matter how brilliant and brave and accomplished you are — as Wyldstyle is here — you can be upstaged by a bland boring untalented dude such as Emmet who’s merely in the right place for the wrong reasons at the right time. But I can forgive that, because the larger message is “Color outside the lines,” and it is transmitted with a lot of verve and humor. For we learn much about this brick universe as Wyldstyle takes Emmet on a journey to prevent President Business (the voice of Will Ferrell: Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, The Internship), who is secretly the superevil supervillain Lord Business, from doing something very big and very bad. The Special will use the Piece of Resistance to stop the bad thing, and it is presumed that only a Master Builder can achieve this, because Master Builders literally circumvent the rules by not following The Instructions — which are actually a thing: Emmet carries them around with him to help him get through his day.
The journey takes Wyldstyle and Emmet into other realms outside his city — an Old West realm; a medieval fantasy realm — and yet this is only the beginning of the layered cleverness of Lord and Miller’s bricky vision here. They have made a toy-based, practically-a-commercial movie, see, about interlocking bricks that come in themed sets, and said, Fuck sets. Use the Batman minifig in the Old West world. He is voiced by Will Arnett [Men in Black III, Despicable Me], he is Wyldstyle’s boyfriend, and he has the best Batman theme song ever.) Use the pieces from the robot set and the pirate set and create something out of your own imagination. Don’t follow the picture on the box — follow the picture in your mind. It’s a little bit sad that anyone — adult or child — needs to be told this. And I can’t decide yet if it’s unintentionally ironic that a flick that grabs ideas and tropes from all over the pop-culture spectrum is ultimately about mixing and matching to create your own brand of fun, or if it’s being deliberately postmeta about it.