The Lego Movie was officially released four days ago in Australia. I have been hanging out to take the boys to see it because they are huge fans I am a huge fan of the toy. All the way through it I was thinking about whether I was going to write about it and if so, what I would be writing about, and for most of the movie I pretty much had the working title “Lego Movie – Best. Ever.” in mind, but towards the end of the movie, that changed. Now I am going to declare this because it has only been out for four and a half days in Australia and most of my readers are in this country; if you haven’t yet seen it, SPOILER ALERT. Our boys are 5-years-old and three-months-short-of-3-years-old (is that how you write it?) and both love Lego even though most of the sets they play with are labelled as 5-12 (years old) or even 8-14. In fact, I just looked at a box sitting on the counter and notice the sad baby face “not for 0-3 year olds” logo on the box. Okay, so the toddler does love to chew on a few pieces, but roughage is good for him right?
My wife has been on a course for work since Wednesday and it continued up until late Sunday afternoon. She’s been leaving real early and getting home fairly late because the course is being held at a location that’s about an hour away. When our first born was showing signs of being a movie addict at a reasonably young age, my wife and I thought it would be a great bonding exercise for me to take him to the cinema. She stayed home because our youngest was only a baby and therefore having many day sleeps if not sleeping the whole day away. Even though the toddler still isn’t a sit-there-and-watch-the-whole-DVD kind of kid, for the last two movies that Master 5 wanted to see – Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 and Frozen – we went as a whole family because my wife wanted to see them too. During both of these movies the toddler needed to go to the toilet so she did the valiant duty and took him so that I could watch the whole movie having missed the scene in Rise of the Guardians where Jack Frost found out who he really was due to the older one needing to “do a wee Daddy…”
But, because she was doing that course, and because I promised the boys they could see it the first weekend it was out, she wasn’t able to come with us. As a back-up plan in the event that the toddler needed to visit the toilet during the movie, and so that Master 5 wouldn’t miss any of it, I invited a friend and his kids along. The movie is 100 minutes long, or as described on the website, 1 hour and 40 minutes. I remember when all movies were 90 minutes long. There was the occasional 88 minute movie or 91 minute movie (sack that editor), but all-in-all most movies ran for exactly 1-and-a-half hours. At about the 40 minute mark the toddler, getting restless, decided it was time to fall asleep. I didn’t mind, after all, I didn’t have to pay for him to see the movie because he is under 4-years-old. And really, I thought it was a blessing because he generally sleeps for two hours during his day nap which meant that I would be able to watch the whole movie unless Master 5 needed to go (although he’s a trooper and would hold on if it meant not missing a second of the movie).
And this is where my problem with the Lego Movie kicks in. At the 90 minute mark, the point where all those other movies would have ended, the climax to the movie, the bit with the reveal, the part where the penny drops, that’s when the toddler wakes up, stands up on his chair and then leans over and in my ear proclaims; “I need to do a wee Daddy…” And when he says I need to do a wee, he means that he needs to do a wee. I might get a few minutes out of him holding on if we’re in the car when the feeling comes on, but any longer than that and he’s resorting back to wetting himself. Now I could have been a crap dad. I could have simply told him to sit back down as we’ve only got 10 minutes to go, but no, I picked him up and ran for it. The distance to the toilet was maybe about 100 metres, and I reckon, even though I had a toddler in my arms, I would have taken Usain Bolt’s record and smashed it. But then, the toddler took forever to finish up. I could have run that 100 metres in sub-8 seconds, and all the good that would have done me.
When he finally finished, I washed his hands and mine (new Olympic record for that too) and then ran back as fast as I could. We got back to see the last three minutes or so. But that scene, the one where the tears would have fallen if you were the type to shed a tear, that moment when the boy and his dad had that moment, that connection, the start of their journey together in the world of playing Lego together and using their collective imaginations, we missed it. And because I don’t know exactly how that scene went down. Because I missed half a percent of the movie, that to me was enough to skew my full judgement and make me ineligible to cast my vote. So best movie ever? At the very least, it is the best ever movie about a toy that has given me over 30 years of joy (and counting), and is destined to repeat this with our boys. Have you seen the movie? What did you think? Truthfully, I loved it more than I thought I would. ‹ Why Should You Donate To This Charity?
The Reasons Why Child Abuse is an Issue For Men ›Everything in "The Lego Movie" is, indeed, awesome.Awesome as in imagine if "Toy Story" were spoofed by Mel Brooks after he ate magic mushrooms while reading George Orwell's 1984.Awesome as in the sort of silly yet wily kid-appropriate PG-rated performance by Will Ferrell that you've been waiting for ever since "Elf" came out more than a decade ago.Awesome as in geeking out over the sight of a grim little Batman hitching a ride on the Millennium Falcon piloted by a smart-ass little Han Solo—with a suavely plastic Lando Calrissian in a flash of a cameo. To be honest, my enthusiastic reaction might be slightly skewed by the fact that "Everything Is Awesome" is both the title and most insidious lyric of a catchier-than-a-Norovirus musical number whose sweeping camerawork over a Lego-ized cityscape is almost as impressive as the opening sequence of "West Side Story". Somehow, the dastardly ditty has taken up permanent residence in my brain, snaking into the cubby hole previously occupied by the Pee-wee's Playhouse TV-show theme.
Normally, I oppose the trend of plaything-based moviemaking, especially when the results are as brain-numbingly awful as "Transformers", "G.I. Joe" and "Battleship". But if those uninspired efforts had featured not just Michelangelo the Teenage Mutant Ninja but also Michelangelo the ultimate Renaissance artist as they fight for the greater good of interlocking mankind, maybe they would have changed my mind, too. Besides, with so many animation powerhouses settling for easy-money sequels lately (we mean you, Pixar, DreamWorks, Universal and 20th Century Fox), it is exceedingly cool that a major-studio family film refuses to simply capitalize on merchandising spinoffs by offering an oppressive 100-minute commercial. Instead, "The Lego Movie" manages to be a smartly subversive satire about the drawbacks of conformity and following the rules while celebrating the power of imagination and individuality. It still might be a 100-minute commercial, but at least it's a highly entertaining and, most surprisingly, a thoughtful one with in-jokes that snap, crackle and zoom by at warp speed.
This surreal 3-D computer-animated pop-cultural cosmos overseen by directors/co-writers Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the talented team behind 2009's "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs", takes off from those countless amateur fan-produced stop-motion films found online before concluding with rather ingenious live-action interlude.For once, an overly familiar plot is intended to be overly familiar as this action comedy lampoons nearly every fantasy-sci-fi-comic-book-pirate-cowboy movie cliché that has been in existence at least since George Lucas and Steven Spielberg turned Hollywood into a blockbuster-producing boy-toy factory. Our unlikely hero is Emmet (earnestly and engagingly voiced by Chris Pratt of TV's "Parks and Recreation"), an unremarkable construction worker who is perfectly happy with his staid generic existence as an ordinary citizen of the metropolis of Bricksburg. As is the custom among his peers, Emmet doesn't just avoid overthinking. He barely thinks at all. But after dawdling on a work site after hours, Emmet finds himself tumbling into an underworld where a wise Obi-Wan Kenobi-type wizard named Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman, mocking his history of movie mentorships) mistakenly declares him to be the Special, the greatest Master Builder of them all.
Unfortunately, special is exactly what Emmet isn't and he appears to be ill-equipped to battle the monstrous foe at hand. That would be Ferrell's President Business, a maniacal manipulator whose looming overlord alter-ego is a sly nod at the actor's despot in "Megamind". The minute that a swivel-headed henchman named Bad Cop/Good Cop starts spouting menacing threats in Liam Neeson's Irish-inflected rumble, you know that a "release the Kraken!" joke can't be far behind. And "The Lego Movie" does not disappoint, as Ferrell's control-freak villain aims to glue all the pieces of the city in place permanently—no freeform deviations allowed.From there, Emmet and would-be love interest Wyldstyle—a tough-chick cross between "The Matrix"'s Trinity and Joan Jett blessed with Elizabeth Banks's vocal spunk—enter a surreal hodge-podge universe where Lord of the Rings-style warriors, Star Wars and Harry Potter characters, superheroes, Abraham Lincoln and even basketball star Shaquille O'Neal (a legacy of an actual 2003 NBA-sanctioned Lego set) join forces to foil President Business's nefarious plan.