The Lego Movie - 2014

"The Lego Movie" - 2014
Dir. by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller - 1 hr. 40 min.

Official Main Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

First off, I'm still mad that my girlfriend went to see this without me, and that I had to wait until it was on TV to finally see it.  Unaccompanied men over thirty years old can't really go see "children's movies" in a theatre without an escort, lest you get peppered with stares and dirty looks that make baseless criminal accusations.  I LIKE CARTOONS, OKAY?  You worry about your children, and I'll worry about the quality of the animation, and hopefully our two worlds will never meet.  Secondly, the idea of a full movie made out of Legos is something that appeals to me very much, ever since Lego put out a kit that included software and a stop-motion camera so that you could make your own home Lego movies with a minimum of fuss.  Granted, this movie is far more visually sophisticated than anything anyone could have made with their set, but it's just very polished version of the things floating around my head.

Emmet (Chris Pratt) is a generic, forgettable construction worker, who strives to be likable and to be part of a team (there's a whole song about this).  When he goes missing because he's found the Piece of Resistance, and ushered into an underground society of master builders by Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), Emmet discovers that he's forgettable (via testimony from his co-workers), not a master builder, and generally not good at much.  But he still has to lead the fight against President Business (Will Ferrell), who wants to use the kragle to freeze everyone in place forever.

First, off, the Lego stuff is completely awesome.  For anyone who ever blew afternoon after afternoon building spaceships and cars and weird-ass buildings waiting for their parents to get home from work, delving into a completely Lego world is going to stir up some pleasant memories.  Secondly, the animation is pleasantly blocky and clunky; the whole point of Legos is to build something and let your imagination fill in the rest.  So we get weird lazer blasts that look like chunks of pipe cleaners, and weird dances, and when things blow up, they break down into Lego blocks.  It's all perfect.

Beyond all of that, "The Lego Movie" is peppy, fun, well-paced, and fun for everyone.  One of my all-time favorite video games is "Micro Machines," which takes the basic car-race game and makes it awesome by changing the scale of the course.  "The Lego Movie" has a similar appeal; it's very easy to get lost into the world of these toys, and the barely-detailed faces of the characters make the voice-work resonate more.  And there are tons of characters!  Everyone from Shaquille O'Neal (who was part of a NBA All-Stars Lego set at some point) to Han Solo to the whole pantheon of DC superheroes (which officially makes "The Lego Movie" the greatest Green Lantern movie of all-time), which leads me to Batman (voiced by Will Arnett).  I would watch a nearly endless stream of films that featured this version of Batman; he's like an overgrown emo tween.  And this is also the only funny version of Batman since Adam West that actually works!

So yeah, I totally enjoyed "The Lego Movie."  Maybe not as much as if I'd gotten to see it in a theatre, with a crowd, so that I could have joined in in all the "Everything Is Awesome" jokes for the last few months, but I still enjoyed it.  I generally don't enjoy it when animated films bounce back and forth between animated scenes and live-action ones, and I did think that was a bit of a detriment to "The Lego Movie."  Blah blah father/son bonding blah blah blah.  Whatevs.  I wanted another fifteen minutes in the Lego world, Will Ferrell can puppy dog eye his son some other time.  That's what deleted scenes (or even an inevitable extended version of the film) are for.  But the rest of the movie was pretty awesome.

3.5 / 5 - TV (HD)

Guardians of the Galaxy - 2014

"Guardians of the Galaxy" - 2014
Dir. by James Gunn - 2 hrs. 1 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

By now, I have a good expectation for what I want to get out of a "Marvel Movie."  I mean, after three Iron Mans, two Captain Americas and two Thors, and the best of the lot, "The Avengers," there's a certain approach, charm, and skill that are an expected part of the package.  Thankfully, the first movie since the first "Iron Man" that doesn't have any real continuity propping it up completely fulfills that promise.  "Guardians of the Galaxy" is a little funnier, a little weirder than the "Avengers" line of films, but still has the familiar banter set against people in very tight outfits punching the crap out of everything in sight.

Peter Quill, you may know him by his other name, Star Lord (Chris Pratt), is abducted from Earth as a child, and has grown into something of an a-hole (the film's words, to be clear).  He's like a younger Han Solo, looting everything he can get his hands on (including, and especially women).  One of his jobs involves retrieving an orb from a desolate, formerly populated planet, but it turns out that he's not the only person interested in it, nor the only person on the planet.  A lot people are very focused on this orb, which eventually lands Star Lord, a pair of bounty hunters in the form of a very unpleasant intelligent raccoon named Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) and a giant tree person named Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), and a cosmic deity's adopted daughter, Gamora (Zoe Saldana) in the slammer together.  With Drax's (Dave Bautista) help, they all break out of this space prison, with the goal of selling the orb, getting rich, and heading their different ways.  Which is, of course, exactly how things play out.

On one hand, I kind of envy people who are introduced to material like this for the first time, and through film.  Being a long-time comics reader, a talking raccoon bounty-hunter and his tree-based Chewbacca is the sort of thing that you just take for granted in comics.  That's not to say that it doesn't come across as weird when you're reading it, but it's there in ink just like everything else, and you accept that things like this are part of the deal.  But if you don't have that background, a film like "Guardians of the Galaxy" might come off like a surrealist action film, where insanity is the rule, and nothing makes any sense.  It would be awesome to see "Guardians" under those circumstances.  But I knew about Rocket and Groot way before the film, so I wasn't really struck by the weirdness of them.  They're just characters, albeit ones you might not run across in real life.  One of the achievements of "Guardians" is that both characters (well, all of the Guardians, really) are well-rounded enough that you can just take them as characters, and not have their very existence be a hit-or-miss joke.

Visually, there's plenty to feast on.  The cosmic backgrounds that are a part of the Thor films are everywhere here (and so much fun to look at).  There are tie-fighter...  I mean spaceship shoot-outs, there's hand-to-hand combat, there's chases, there's escapes...  I know that I keep making "Star Wars" references here, but "Guardians" really feels like a film made in the Cantina, in a world made up solely of Cantinas.  Only instead of the Cantina band, we've got Star Lord's mix tape of '70s and '80s soft-rock hits.  Normally, I'd instinctively hate anything that borrows so heavily from "Star Wars," but it works here.  "Guardians" is tight, action-filled, clever, and layered with great dialogue (there are at least a couple of instances of people misunderstanding Star Lord's colloquialisms, to great effect).  It's also been cast extremely well; Pratt is a great lead character, because he's able to be crude and awful at times, but with a lack of malice that suits the movie well.  Dave Bautista (WWE's Batista) does a great job playing a straight man, and also seems comfortable spending an entire film with no shirt on.  Rocket and Groot are fun together, and are integrated into the live-action material seamlessly.

In a broader sense, the one thing that I hate about the Marvel movies is that they've applied the "Fantastic Four" bickering-family dynamic to every team, and every interaction, and yet we still don't have a good FF movie, and even if they completely nail it next time around, the dynamic will seem old, or at least familiar.  Each of the teams (at least in the comics world) have their own personality, but the Guardians interact in pretty much the same way that the Avengers do.  And both teams act the way that the Fantastic Four do/did originally.  That's perhaps my only complaint about "Guardians," that there's a plug-and-play element to the interaction between the characters, even if the details do keep the characters distinct.  Also, in "Guardians'" favor, Gamora used the phrase "pelvic sorcery," which goes a long way with me.

I think there's almost no way anyone's going to be disappointed with "Guardians of the Galaxy."  If you've been on the "Avengers" ride since "Iron Man," no problem.  If this is the first "Marvel Movie" you've seen, probably even better!  "Guardians" is a fun ride, tonally consistent with the films that have preceded it, and has a lot of familiar faces in it.  I was happy to see the bit on the credits that said the Guardians would return.  I'm not sure what that means - another film, or being incorporated into an Avengers sequel - and I'm not going to research to figure it out.  I'll be happy to see them show up again in whatever form.  Any complaints that I have with "Guardians" is pretty much down to having seen enough movies in this series to start seeing duplication in structure and approach, and that I was never a fan of the comics, but I still enjoyed the film, and I'm pretty sure everyone else will, too.  It's a crowd-pleaser, not a challenging art film, and it delivers completely on that front.

3.5 / 5 - Theatre (3D)