Lego Movie clips are way funnier than they have any business being1/27/14 10:40am The Lego Movie is funny. Check out these nine clips. If you don't (at least) chuckle, you're dead inside. Also, they introduce the greatest character ever made — Princess Uni-Kitty! Big props to directors Phil Lord, Chris Miller (21 Jump Street, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) and Chris McKay for actually turning The Lego Movie into something other than a giant ad for Lego. This movie is front loaded with 1,001 jokes, and continues to blast the audience with sheer creative joy. These clips are an excellent example of why you should probably check this film out.“Everything Is Awesome” About These Nine Clips From ‘The Lego Movie’Posted on Monday, January 27th, 2014 by Angie HanIn the wrong hands, The Lego Movie could’ve been a lazy, forgettable kids’ film with no obvious purpose other than pushing more plastic bricks. But as directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, it’s looking like a very early contender for the year’s best animated film — funny, smart, energetic, and far more original than we have any reason to expect a film based on a toy would be.
With every new bit of marketing that rolls out, it’s looking more and more promising. Today, we have nine new clips from the film totaling about eight minutes of footage. Chris Pratt leads the voice cast as Emmet, an extraordinarily ordinary minifig who is accidentally drafted to lead a revolution against the evil President Business (Will Ferrell). Watch all the videos after the jump.While there don’t seem to be any major spoilers up ahead, we’ll warn you that the scenes do give away some minor gags and plot points not previously shown in the trailers.At this point, Lord and Miller practically specialize in things that sound groanworthy on paper, but look magical onscreen. Before I actually sat down and watched them, I wouldn’t have thought there was much promise in a Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs adaptation or a 21 Jump Street reboot, either. But not only were they pretty great, Lord and Miller liked working on the latter so much that they’ve returned for the sequel, due out this summer.2014 is also shaping up to be a pretty great year for Pratt, between The Lego Movie and this summer’s Guardians of the Galaxy.
There aren’t many actors who can boast that they became part of the Marvel family and hung out with the Justice League in the space of twelve months — even if, okay, the Justice League we’re talking about here is a tiny, plastic version.The Lego Movie opens in 3D on February 7. Elizabeth Banks, Alison Brie, Will Arnett, and Liam Neeson are also among the voice cast.The original 3D computer animated story follows Emmet, an ordinary, rules-following, perfectly average LEGO minifigure who is mistakenly identified as the most extraordinary person and the key to saving the world. He is drafted into a fellowship of strangers on an epic quest to stop an evil tyrant, a journey for which Emmet is hopelessly and hilariously underprepared. Cool Posts From Around the Web: ZergNetVulture is speaking to the screenwriters behind 2014's most acclaimed movies about the scenes they found most difficult to crack. Which pivotal sequences underwent the biggest transformations on their way from script to screen?
Today, we talked to Phil Lord, who wrote and directed the animated hit The Lego Movie with his creative partner Christopher Miller. The scene Lord picked is one that features a major spoiler, so if you haven't seen the film, read no further, as it's excerpted below. The whole movie got rewritten, thrown out, rewritten again, thrown out in production, rewritten again ... so many scenes felt tough to write. That's definitely the case with animated movies, and since we were writing and directing, it was even harder. The writer in you writes a script that you think is perfect, and then the director in you reads it and throws it out and tells you to go back to the drawing board! That's a very schizophrenic approach to filmmaking. The live-action segment with Will Ferrell definitely went through the most iterations. It was baked in from the beginning, but it changed and changed and changed. We knew we were gonna do it and I had faith it was going to work, but it was a lot of buttressing and throwing things out.
How much live action should we reveal before we got to that moment? We storyboarded that sequence for a year and a half before we got to it, and tried it a million different ways. The son wasn't always in the movie. That was a thing that happened two years ago, when we finally figured the scene out. It was just going to be about Will Ferrell, but we thought, The movie can't just be about one character, it has to be about a relationship. Maybe this movie is about a father and a son. And that's what opened it up for us, and seemed to resonate for a lot of people. When we pitched it, we could definitely tell that people were thinking to themselves, Well, if it doesn't work, we can always cut it out. Certainly, we thought that maybe we would do that. Right before we shot it, we promised everybody that if it didn't work, we had an alternative that was animated. But that was a lie. We were betting on ourselves that we were right two years earlier when we thought it would be surprising and delightful.
Contribute to This PageBack to full review Back to full reviewWho was the best actor to play Batman? The answer is easy: It’s Christian Bale. If you want to get specific, it’s when Christian Bale played Batman in 2008’s The Dark Knight, the best Batman movie that’s ever been made.Who was the worst actor to play Batman? That answer is even easier: It’s George Clooney. If you want to get specific, it’s when he said, “This is why Superman works alone” in 1997’s Batman & Robin, because Clooney said it like he says all of his lines in all of his movies, which is to say, like he’s filming an Ocean’s 11 movie. That’s why the Ocean’s 11 movies are so great but why this particular Batman movie was so bad.Somewhere in between those endpoints on the Batman Scale of Excellence is Will Arnett’s Lego Batman in The Lego Batman Movie, which I watched this weekend with my youngest son (4 years old), his older brothers (twin 9-year-olds), and my wife (___ years old).
It’s a fun enough movie, and had it come out before 2014’s The Lego Movie, an exceptional and truly special outing, I’d probably have liked it even more. It’s a Lego movie, but not the Lego movie, you know what I’m saying?(And of course there are some spoilers here, but if you’re the type of person who gets upset at spoilers in a Lego movie, then maybe you have some bigger things to worry about than spoilers in a Lego movie.)5. The scene where the kid who eventually becomes Robin chooses his outfit. (It’s not quite as good as that scene in Toy Story 3 when the Ken Doll goes through his wardrobe, but it’s energetic enough to be sweet.)4. The scene where Batgirl pokes Batman in the eye because she has to be BatGIRL while he gets to be BatMAN.3. The scene where Batman comes home after defeating some bad guys and he microwaves lobster thermidor and then eats it alone, in silence, while floating in his pool, and then as soon he’s done he takes out an electric guitar and starts playing it.2.
The scene where they point out that Batman has been fighting crime in Gotham for decades and that Gotham is no better than when he started (and, in fact, it might have gotten worse on his watch). This, to me, was the most profound moment. I guess I just never really thought much about it. I like when movies do things like this — when they point out a thing that you should’ve noticed. The whole point of the movie is that working alone isn’t as good as working with a team*, and that’s fine. That’s a fine philosophical premise. But I liked the Batman Isn’t Effective At All reveal more.*Most every animated movie has a Main Point like the “Work together” angle in The Lego Batman Movie. To wit: Inside Out = “Humans are complicated”; Wall-E = “Stop looking at your phone”; The Lion King = “Sometimes your family sucks”; Up = “Old people love balloons”; Ratatouille = “Rats should not be allowed in kitchens no matter how good they are at cooking”; Monsters, Inc. = “People are terrifying, until they’re not”;
Beauty and the Beast = “Date ugly men”; Pocahontas = “Don’t trust white men”; Big Hero 6 = “Your whole family is going to die eventually so good luck, bro”; The Princess and the Frog = “Here, we finally gave you a black princess”; Toy Story = “Stay 10 toes down for your people”; and Zootopia = “Animals are racist, too.”1. The revelation that the Joker is mad that Batman will not admit he’s his nemesis, except they treat it like when two people are in a relationship and one wants to get serious and the other is afraid to. The Joker says things close to, “Admit that you hate me, that I’m your greatest enemy.” Batman says things close to, “I don’t hate you. I don’t feel that toward you. I don’t feel anything. I’m not just fighting you. I’m fighting a lot of people. I like to fight around.” It’s a funny moment, but also touching, because as Batman explains several different ways that he doesn’t feel feelings, the Joker — that poor lovebird — his face just keeps getting sadder and sadder and sadder.
Let me tell you something: It’s a weird feeling to be a 35-year-old nearly tearing up because a Lego version of a bad guy is getting his heart broken over and over again, but sometimes that’s just how life goes. (The movie ends with Batman finally admitting that he has feelings for the Joker, which he had denied because he was afraid of admitting he had any kind of emotions because his family was blahblahblah-ed when he was a kid. Then they save the city together by having really good abs. Three days after we’d watched the movie, I asked each of my sons if they had learned any big lessons about life from watching it. Boy B, the slickest of the three, said, “Yes, sir.” Then he started to walk away before I could ask him to explain because that’s about how long our conversations last. Like what,” and he had a look on his face that very much said that his answer was reflexive and had been given with absolutely no intention of providing a follow-up. He said, “Well … I guess … the main lesson of it was …
Oh, that it’s better if you work with a team than if you work alone,” and he was proud of himself, and I was very proud of him too for being able to materialize an answer that quickly. He’s a smart kid (or a sneaky kid, which is basically the same thing when you’re 9 years old).When I asked the youngest one, the Baby, he just looked at me and laughed one of those halfway laughs you do when you’re not sure how you’re supposed to respond to a situation. I said, “Do you understand the question?” He said, “No, sir.” I said, “That’s fair, given that you’re a 4-year-old. What about a favorite part? Did you have a favorite part?” He thought for a second, then he smiled real big and said, “Yes! When Batman was eating a crawfish,” and I was like, “It was actually a lobster,” and then I felt like a dick for “Well actually”-ing a 4-year-old talking about his favorite part of a movie starring Legos. Then he said, “Daddy, look, I have one big foot,” and when I looked at him I saw that he’d shoved both of his feet into one of my slides.
When I asked the other twin, Boy A, I caught him as he was walking past me into the hallway as I finished my conversation with the Baby. He said, “No, sir,” and I could hear in his voice that he was crying. Why are you crying? His eyes were red and wet and he was very obviously crying, so I silently and very quickly in my head went through a list of all the things I’d said and done in the prior five minutes to see if it was something I’d done or said. Again, I said, “Why are you crying?” And again, he didn’t answer. Then I realized he was holding a large comb and that the kitchen faucet behind me was running, which meant that he was minutes away from getting his hair — otherwise a tangled palm tree growing out of the top of his head — washed and detangled. To hear him describe it, getting your hair done is no different than getting your fingers closed in a door for 45 minutes straight. “You getting your hair done?” He shook his head yes. I said, “Got it.