This past weekend not only saw the first blockbuster of 2014 finally hit theaters, but also the first truly great movie of the year. And it wasn’t the WWII action-adventure epic starring George Clooney and Matt Damon (holy hell was The Monuments Men a terrible movie). No, it was a movie about Lego.The Lego Movie stunned industry pundits by assembling an astounding $69.1 million debut at the box office—the best of the year so far—while also earning raves from critics, with a 95 percent approval rating from Rotten Tomatoes. To put that in perspective, only two Oscar nominees for Best Picture, Gravity and 12 Years a Slave, scored higher. The Lego Movie: Better than American Hustle!It’s the kind of surprise success that inspires scores of think pieces attempting to pick apart—brick by brick, if you will—how a film based on toy building blocks came out of nowhere to become the toast of Hollywood. (A few favorite headlines: “The Lego Movie: Did It Make You Cry?,” “Can The Lego Movie Really Be THAT Good?,” and “Fox Host Calls Lego Movie ‘Anti-Business.’”)
Sifting through the pieces, here’s why The Lego Movie clicked with moviegoers:It’s freaking freezing out. Cars are getting stuck on Atlanta highways for days at a time. It’s not like families are going to spend the weekend at the amusement park. Family films frequently tend to perform better than expected because, when analyzing box-office prospects, pundits often forget to take one key thing into account: families need something to do.Since Frozen was released back in November, it’s been slim pickings for parents at the cineplex. So slim, in fact, that Frozen continued, right up until this weekend, to be either the number one or two movie at the box office…three months into its run. Its dominance is owed to the fact that a) it’s frozen outside (hey-o!) so families keep coming back for repeat outings, b) it’s really, really good (like, incredibly good), and c) the only real supposed-rival family film released since—The Nut Job—wasn’t.Knowing that another frigid weekend was ahead and kids still needed to be entertained, parents raced to theaters to see The Lego Movie.
Not only did the fresh option mean they wouldn’t have to sit through Frozen for a twelfth time—though that sounds like heaven to me—but the rave reviews for the film probably excited them to see it more.Listen, no one is cheering Hollywood for its groan-worthy insistence on mining every single brand name, franchise, and toy for box-office cash. (There were, at times, Stretch Armstrong and Ouija board movies in the works. But it’s next-to-impossible not to be charmed by the idea of Lego on the big screen. Internet culture and the Buzzfeed generation have combined to make nostalgia as much of a dominant force dictating the success of entertainment product as marketing. The triumph of Frozen, which audiences swooned over for its resemblance to the modern Disney classics like The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast, speaks to that.Most people have their own personal connection to Lego: getting their first set when they were 5 or 6, playing for so long the bricks would leave impressions on their thumbs, buying sets for their own kids, nephews, nieces—what have you—when they were older.
For them, the release of The Lego Movie is akin to discovering an old container of their own childhood Lego pieces in the attic of their parents’ house. The movie’s mere existence is a warm and fuzzy feeling, made warmer and fuzzier at the reassurance by critics that the beloved brand hadn’t been bastardized by Hollywood, that the movie was actually really good.Simply put: if you were a father who played with Lego and you had a kid under the age of 10, you were gladly piling them into the minivan and taking them to this movie this weekend.Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are recycling fiends. It may seem weird at first to hear that The Lego Movie—a PG-rated, animated charmer—is from the directors of 21 Jump Street—a raunchy, R-rated comedy romp. But on second thought it actually makes perfect sense. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller not only wrote and directed Lego and directed Jump Street, they wrote and directed 2009’s Oscar-nominated animated film Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.
The throughline with all three films: they’re all based on cherished, already-established properties with rich, almost hallowed histories.In each case, Lord and Miller have managed to pay homage to the property the film was based on while at the same time reinventing and bringing them to the screen in a whole new, fresh light. Did anyone really think that an R-rated comedy reboot of 21 Jump Street starring Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill could really be as inspired as Lord and Miller’s film was? Or that their Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs would end up being such a lovely buffet of whimsy and sly humor?The duo has worked their same magic on The Lego Movie, building a film that’s wacky and irreverent, cinematically dazzling (the CGI is great!), imaginative, unexpectedly moving, and with a script packed jokes firing off at machine-gun pace. For as cute and energetic as the film is, that there crystallizes the success of The Lego Movie to a singular element: it’s awesome. As they say in the film, everything is awesome.
While going through my photos from 2014, I came across these from my tour of the BuzzFeed NYC office with Verizon. It was a bit surreal to be where all those fun BuzzFeed articles and quizzes happen. But it was also major cool to learn more about the company, the people behind the articles and what their "process" was. I learned alot that day. I need to be better with applying some of those lessons. 'Listen to Me Marlon' reveals the real Brando through the actor's own words How a lifetime of audio recordings, from business meetings to self-hypnosis tapes, came together in a new documentary on the legendary actor.A dossier making explosive — but unverified — allegations that the Kremlin has for years been “cultivating” the food porn blog BuzzFeed to attempt to write some “serious news” at their behest and gained compromising information about the “liberal blog” (as Sean Spicer calls it) has been circulating among New York City media insiders for months.
The dossier, which is a collection of disturbing tales from inside BuzzFeed, includes specific yet unverifiable allegations that BuzzFeed’s daily operation looks like that buffet scene in Nutty Professor, graphic claims of disturbing acts of gluttony, and rumors that BuzzFeed treats their interns worse than third world prisoners. Heat Street reporters in the US and our much more cost effective outsourced reporters in Kazakhstan have been unsuccessfully investigating various allegations in the dossier for about 10 minutes, before we just said f—k it, may as well publish. Now in the name of journalism’s bold new era, Heat Street is bravely publishing the full document, no matter what the haters and losers might say, so that Americans make up their own mind on whether or not BuzzFeed is filled with face-stuffing deviants who abuse their interns. BuzzFeed did not respond to Heat Street’s request for comment because we didn’t feel like asking. Read the report here (Full transcript below):
Editor’s Note: Here is the note I bravely sent to Heat Street staff this evening: As you have probably seen, this evening we published an unverified, salacious document we did not bother to fact check which said that the people at BuzzFeed are gross in both what and how they eat while pretending to be a “serious news” organization. I wanted to briefly explain to you how we made the carefully considered decision to publish it. We published the dossier, which we got from a white shoe British security firm hired by Buzzfeed’s bitter rivals at Brazzers , so, as we wrote “Americans can make up their own minds.” Our presumption is to be better than other lamestream media outlets by giving our readers what they want, unverified, but kind of hilarious, allegations against the food porn blog BuzzFeed. In this case the document was already in wide circulation among our staff and we had a good chuckle, so we thought our readers should be let in on the joke, and who really cares whether or not it’s true.
As we noted in our story, there is serious reason to doubt the allegations, but wouldn’t it, like be totally freakin funny if all this stuff were actually true and it would totally make BuzzFeed look bad and give more worthy porn sites a leg up in that fiercely competitive space? After all, not every porn blog gets a 25% investment from NBC. Publishing this document was not an easy or simple call, and many haters may disagree with our choice. But publishing this dossier reflects how we see the job of reporters in 2017 because we all earnestly woke. COMPANY INTELLIGENCE REPORT 2017/090 U.S. MEDIA LANDSCAPE: FOOD AND LISTICLE BLOG BUZZFEED BUILDING “FAILING PILE OF GARBAGE” NEWS ORGANIZATION, BOLSTERED BY DEEPLY COMPROMISING RELATIONSHIP WITH THE KREMLIN WHICH PLIES BUZZFEED EDITORS AND REPORTERS WITH HIGH-SUCROSE CANDY AND SAVORY FOODS. BUZZFEED a website devoted to inexpensive food preparation videos and desert-driven lifestyle “listicles” has been quietly building a news operation to create a fig leaf of prestige over its true nature as a gluttonous purveyor of food pornography.
This news operation is secretly fueled by “fake news” propagated and designed by the Kremlin. The Kremlin is feeding BUZZFEED’s voracious appetite for food by delivering “candy”, cakes, and other confectionaries by the truckload to BUZZFEED’s New York headquarters. In return BUZZFEED has maintained a Potemkin Village “news operation” that largely traffics in unsubstantiated reports, rumors and unproven allegations. The Kremlin has amassed a large file of “kopromat” on BUZZFEED’s top editors and executive, mostly consisting of disturbing acts of gluttony and inappropriate food consumption of meals prepared on “Tasty”, which supplies more than half of BUZZFEED’s video traffic. All BUZZFEED articles are native ads for Golden Corral. Major BUZZFEED investor NBC Universal, which controls 25% of the company, has been kept blissfully in the dark about BUZZFEED’s lack of journalistic integrity and lack of adherence to any news standards whatsoever.
The infusion of NBC funds has gone largely to “candy” purchases. “Candy” may be a code word for children according to leaked John Podesta emails. Speaking to a trusted compatriot in November 2016 sources A and B, a senior very important official of an agency somewhere and an even more important, more secret administrator in some other unverifiable agency, we can conclude that BUZZFEED has been cultivating a sizable stash of “candy” for top BUZZFEED executives. To meet the expanding need for “candy” and other food items to stuff their fat faces, the food porn blog has expanded to (probably fake) news with the help of the FSB. In terms of specifics, Source A confided that the “candy” has become the sole operating purpose of BUZZFEED’s existence, and there apparently can never be enough “candy” which gave the FSB an in to gain leverage over the publication. The “candy” is brought in through a back entrance by interns with draconian NDAs. Interns are hired based on their lack of familial and social ties.
The “candy” room is guarded by Janjaweed militiamen BUZZFEED personally smuggled out of Sudan to avoid war crimes trials at The Hague. However there were other aspects to BUZZFEED’s engagement with “candy” and other food items. The Kremilin agents were able to exploit the publication’s obsessions with sexual perversions and food in order to obtain suitable “kompromat” (compromising material) on them. According to Source PP, BUZZFEED’s (perverted) conduct regarding “candy” and other food items was able to be exploited by the Kremlin. A group of BUZZFEED employees were staying at a Moscow hotel room in 2016 where they knew Chip and Joana Gaines (whom they hated) had stayed the night before when filming HGTV’s Fixer Upper: Russia Edition. BUZZFEED “journalists” had already written a hit piece on the couple because they were jealous of their home improvement skills. BUZZFEED journalists are too weak to improve their own homes so they must conscript the indentured interns to do it for them.
The staff conducted a bizarre revenge ritual orgy around the hotel bed that the Gaines’ had slept in, smearing “candy” and other food items all over the room. After the depraved scene, the “journalists” were not satisfied and marched to the hotel buffet and gorged themselves on the wide assortment of food choices leaving nothing left for other hotel guests. Hotel staff urged them to stop, appealing to their better nature. “I thought you were journalists,” screamed the hotel concierge. “No we’re just food bloggers who write news,” replied BUZZFEED staff in eerie unison that revealed their orgy-induced trancelike state. There’s a tape of all of this somewhere, probably. All BUZZFEED employees own “candy” handkerchiefs. According to source A and C and kind of sort of Source D, BUZZFEED editor-in-chief BEN SMITH had a secret meeting with Ghostbusters producer Amy Pascal in Los Angeles. At the meeting they said racist things about Barack Obama, and SMITH pledged his fealty to the new Ghostbusters movie.
Not only did SMITH agree to uniformly praise the film editorially, he forced all BUZZFEED interns to see the film not once, not twice but three times. Interns were also only allowed to draw sustenance by drinking official Ghostbusters brand Ecto Coolers during the duration of the film’s marketing campaign. The daily news meeting at the publication consists of the journalists sitting around a table stuffing their faces with non fair trade, unsustainable food items, while the malnourished interns stand staring at the food lustfully in the foreground. BUZZFEED management explains this practice by claiming it makes the interns write better food pornography blog posts. In BUZZFEED’s popular web series “Whine About It,” host Matt Bellassai appeared to be drinking wine but the liquid was actually promethazine or “lean” as it is called on the streets. This was SMITH’s idea and it eventually led Bellassai to leave BUZZFEED to become a full time promethazine addict. Now Bellassai ironically sleeps on the very same hard, cold streets that gave nickname to his beloved “lean” syrup.
During the 2015 BUZZFEED holiday office party, Source C says the paid employees lined up all the interns from shortest to tallest then forced the tallest intern to fight the shortest intern. The fight had no clear victor, which angered the BUZZFEED staff. The interns were made to play a game of Russian roulette, except instead of a revolver; they used metal forks and electrical sockets. Neither was heard from again. Interns at BUZZFEED are given a six-digit number on their first day that functions as their name for the duration of the internship. Interns caught using real names to refer to themselves or other interns get their food porn listicle quota doubled. When BUZZFEED founder JONAH PERRETI was initially starting the site he was low on funds, said Source 666. To raise capital he hiked to the center of the Old Woods, bringing with him six goats and a newborn lamb. He slit the throats of the animals and used their bloods to draw eight pentagrams, one on the forest floor and seven more on the chakra centers of his body.