Hacker Cinema
The Lego Movie
2014 · Film · 100 min
Directed by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller
AnimationFamilyAdventureComedyFantasy
An ordinary Lego mini-figure, mistakenly thought to be the extraordinary MasterBuilder, is recruited to join a quest to stop an evil Lego tyrant from conquering the universe.
27 positive7 negative65 neutralfrom 99 commenters
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105 comments on Hacker News
It was kinda funny to see the Lego Movie, which puts a bunch of emphasis on breaking the rules and mixing and matching everything, and then seeing them release the sets for the movie. I mean, it makes perfect sense. But it was still kinda lowkey humorous. But imo they're still a great toy; very fun to go to conventions and the like, where people just have giant piles of loose pieces you can buy by weight.
I dunno, the original Lego movie had people's personalities permanently removed by using acetate to wipe off their faces. I don't see how headless Legos could be more disturbing than that...
This would go well in a darker / horror version of the Lego movie. Maybe one for a reboot in 20 years time.
I suspect as I said elsewhere that "feature length movie with no dialogue that's actually good" was enough to get people watching it, even seeking it out. We're more than a hundred years out from silent movies, so it's a curiosity by that metric alone.
And then it turns out to be actually good!
It's similar to the Lego Movie in that respect, everyone had assumptions about what it was and then it went and was well done and hit you right in the feels.
Moana
Frozen
Lego movie
Mulan
101 Dalmatians
Super Mario Bros
——
Having kids does that to you.
The LEGO Movie's double-decker couches are also coming to mind. Double-decker desks both solves the problem and alliterates nicely, making it easy to fit into a Corporate Strategy slide deck ("We plan on increasing RoI with our best-of-breed D3-based RTO strategy in the new quarter, driving measurable revenue growth to the top and bottom couches... errr... lines. Six months after deployment we expect to utilize data-based business decision making analyzing whether top or bottom D3 positions drive more customer engagement to our platforms.").
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> One day, a talented lass or fellow, a special one with face of yellow, will make the Piece of Resistance found from it's hiding refuge underground, and with a noble army at the helm, this Master Builder will thwart the Kragle and save the realm, and be the greatest, most interesting, most important person of all times. All this is true because it rhymes.
The Lego Movie.
Real-time is unfortunately a sort of vague term.
If you mean raster rendering pipelines then I don’t believe it’s possible because the nature of the GPU pipelines precludes it. You’d likely need to make use of compute shaders to create it at which point you’ve just written a patthtracer anyway.
If you mean a pathtracer , then real-time becomes wholly dependent on what your parameters are. With a small enough resolution, Mitsuba with Dr.JIT could theoretically start rendering frames after the first one in a reasonable time to be considered realtime.
However the reality is just that even in film, with offline rendering, very few studios find the gains of spectral rendering to be worth the effort. Outside of Wētā with Manuka , nobody else really uses spectral rendering. Animal Logic did for LEGO movie but solely for lens flares.
The workflow change to make things work with a spectral renderer and the very subtle differences are just not worth the high increase in render time
1) these static built once and super glue in place are antithesis of the LEGO movie, I just find that amusing
2) these are barely LEGO constructs and much more click together models — there are so many custom pieces specific to this one design. It’s not like you start with 10k grey rectangular blocks and end with a millenium falcon — though I believe that was how old LEGO statues at the parks were built?
Because they’re designed for a common denominator audience.
It takes exceptional skill to make a multi-layered script that talks at various levels. It’s rare enough that we’re shocked when we encounter it - perhaps in older kids movies, maybe in things like the Lego movie.
It’s much easier to rewrite various similar stories with various tropes mixed in. Not to say these are not enjoyable! Many times you just want to see the same story different this time.
Think of all the romance novels pumped out that have the same basic plot, but the people who read them demand more and more.
At this point I think it's the principle of the thing. I mean I have premium but I still want them to get smacked down for this because Google made one of the endgame moves to drink verification can.
Ads are supposed to incidental, you run ads and if too many people block them because they suck then congrats sucks for you. If no one sees them then sucks for you. Most people put up with TV ads when they're not even hard to skip. And for some reason IG ads are well liked. Forcing them harder I think has to make us confront what we're really doing here and what we're gaining by all this. Just pay for premium sounds nice when you don't think about it. If there's no universe where someone might actually prefer the ads if they were the same price then we're kinda admitting they have literally zero value to the viewer.
And that paints a very different picture of advertising than "the grease of the economic wheel" ya know? And clearly all advertising isn't like this, like I paid to see the Lego movie, Barbie was fantastic. I watched a YT video of a woman showing her design process for a product she's selling and it was fascinating but it was also just an ad. But if YT are there to suck just so you'll pay for it to suck less than that's not mutually beneficial trade that's extortion.
This thread is about Google or Netflix blocking in-video/in-movie ads. It's a freedom to experience a creative expression in the way its creator made it. Should Netflix just never air Barbie or Transformers or LEGO movie because they are basically just one big ad? Should Google or Netflix even be in the business of deciding which part of a movie or an uploaded video is an ad or a sponsorship or monetize-able? matheusmoreira is suggesting they check with him first and he can decide which part should be blocked and which is ok.
What if you have a product placement for jack daniels because the character in your movie is the type of character that will chug jack. Should it be up to Netflix to decide "umm, no, this character now drinks Mack Lanyals" who cares what the film maker made?
This is literally the plot of the LEGO movie.
Did we learn nothing from The Lego Movie?
Instructions are the dark side. Master Builders use The Force.
The Lego movie was awesome, and there's a good chance this brand will also put some perspective on certain childhood memories. Even down to having Will Ferrell in it.
As a concept I don’t think it’s any sillier than a “LEGO movie,” which was a huge hit with multiple sequels.
It’s all about execution, and the Barbie movie has a promising set of creative people involved.
By the same token, would as many people be excited about an Oppenheimer bio if it wasn’t Chris Nolan in the directors chair? Doubtful.
I think having sets that you like to keep together and you don't want to mix up is fine. Too many people saw the Lego Movie and took it to mean that keeping sets as sets is bad. Note that the person you responded to isn't stopping their kids even as they cause more destruction than the Lego Movie showed, they're simply complaining about it here because what _they_ had is gone.
Yes, let kids mix and match and play. But also acknowledge that we all play differently, and for some people having a model of something that they built is where the fun lies. People who like organization can still have fun, let's not shame them for their preferences.
It sounds like you should watch The Lego Movie (:
To be honest The Lego Movie franchise was annoyingly American for my Danish taste. It doesn't surprise me that many people think Lego and other European companies are American when they behave and market themselves as pseudo-American companies and insert themselves in American socio-politican issues.
As I said earlier, almost all media directed at children aims to create a brand loyalty and will try to convince them to buy more. In this case I'm talking about the actual card game - it's good and features cute pretend animals, thus it makes children want related merchandise.
Moreover, Pokemon was never immune to that. The very first game already introduced the mechanic where you couldn't actually get all the creatures, which was one of the goals. In order to do that, you had to trade with friends that happened to buy a different color version. That's great, because it created engagement and communities around the game, but it's also clearly a marketing ploy.
If you fail to see this in that case, what about The Lego Movie? It's was made to make Lego relevant with the next generation of kids. It's also a good movie. And Lego sets are not bad toys to have.
It's simply not black and white and there's a big difference between Studio Ghibli selling Totoro merch and placing unhealthy snacks at a 5 year old eye level in a checkout aisle.
Honestly, I think it has more to do with the gutting of Pixar and Disney studios after Lassiter was forced out. I believe I heard that that Encanto was the last Lassiter idea that he pitched to Lin Miranda before he left. I think that probably helps explain why it seems cohesive. Versus almost all of the more recent Disney and Pixar stuff feels like poor copies or overly targeted identity flicks. Disney studios is kind of a mess, almost all of the innovation is now happening outside of Disney. Lego movie, spider verse, etc.
Everything is adtech,
Everything is marketing, surveillance, and spam...
(to tune of "Everything Is Awesome" from The Lego Movie)
There is still Rambo McBiceps. It's the character who literally punches through every problem.
Baaghi 1, 2, and 3 have pushed this character trope to the breaking point, and it's hilarious.
I'm happy that we now have male lead who are weak, yet still win. Emmett in the Lego movie, Rango, the guy from Fantastic Beasts. They don't win by becoming more violent, but by providing an alternative to violence.
Lord of the Rings is also a treasure trove of great male role models.
supposedly the entire LEGO Movie was used as a YouTube ad for its sequel...
The Lego Movie
no, really
I wonder if this is done with CGI or real Legos. The texture on the prices is excellent but The LEGO Movie achieved this level or realism in CGI.
Edit: looked at the rest of his channel. It’s a mix of stop motion, rigs to throw bricks/simulate brick explosions, and CGI.
Yeah, the lego people where just building and destroying and weren’t allowed to think outside that norm. Master builders were outlawed and creativity was frowned upon.
Lego movie is a movie from the perspective of the kid who wants to play but his father who is also represented as the CEO / absolute ruler wants to keep his lego world as he once made it (the kragl glue superweapon)
>” The original Lego Movie (2014) has a wonderful, cheerful, catchy, and quite literally and deliberately fascist theme song (Everything is Awesome)”
I’m sorry, what? I know the label “fascist” gets thrown around with reckless abandon these days, but in what way is the everting is awesome song fascistic? To me it’s just a catchy children's song.
The original Lego Movie (2014) has a wonderful, cheerful, catchy, and quite literally and deliberately fascist theme song (Everything is Awesome). You could say the entire (surprisingly good) film is an explanation of why it’s not as good a thing as it seems to be.
(Yes, that’s all kinds of ironic for what is at the same time essentially a feature-length commercial.)
This is literally the core conflict driving the plot of the Lego Movie.
Saw the 1st Lego movie on a plane once, did not expect to tear up. Spaceship!
That's the core beauty of Lego, I think. There are so many meta games one can decide to play with a single bucket, and at least one caters to pretty much everyone under the sun.
And then you get amazing synergies when people who play differently combine their efforts.
Which is one of the reasons I'll admit I cried during the first Lego movie ending. They nailed that aspect.
I already said this above but
The source of experimentation have been Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who have been pushing for experimentation ever since they directed the extremely successful Lego Movie. They also did Cloudy with Meatballs.
They were producers in both Into the Spider Verse and Mitchell’s vs the Machines. They are the reason why this “willingness to do experiment” has happened - they succeeded beyond everyone’s dreams with Lego Movie and have taken a producer role in films that want to push the artistic envelope in 3D animation.
The source of experimentation have been Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who have been pushing for experimentation ever since they directed the extremely successful Lego Movie.
They were producers in both Into the Spider Verse and Mitchell’s vs the Machines. They are the reason why this “willingness to do experiment” has happened - they succeeded beyond everyone’s dreams with Lego Movie and have taken a producer role in films that want to push the artistic envelope in 3D animation.
It’s now part of their MO to push the envelope and have each of these films “be their own thing”.
Fortiche has no relationship with them, but they would have never been allowed to do what they did here without those films having been produced IMO.
If you’re interested to know more I recommend you listen to the Roger Deakins’ podcast with them.
What if this article is missing the forest for the trees a bit? In my experience performance advertising is almost always paired with awareness advertising. The latter makes you aware of the brand/product/whatever then the former nudges you to act/buy/whatever.
So if you’re buying or even just evaluating performance ads without considering the bigger picture you might come to erroneous conclusions.
Take the Lego Movie example from the article. The $65 million movie is no doubt an awareness play. Could you make the case that you should also increase your performance budget to help capture more of the demand you just generated with the movie? Or should you just hope that people go from the movie theater to buy Lego unprompted? Is it worth it for Lego to advertise to people who walk out of the theater and search for “Lego Batman set” or whatever? I think so, even though evaluating such branded search campaigns individually might make them seem inefficient.
It seems very easy to dismiss the performance advertising as a scam when you evaluate it in a vacuum. As noted in the article it’s important (and very difficult) to understand the incremental outcome of any channel or campaign. That incrementality includes awareness campaigns.
After more than a decade in advertising and marketing I am now more than ever unwilling to accept simple or definitive answers to highly complicated questions. At best I hope that we can unwind some of the overall complexity so we can have a chance to trust some of those definitive answers.
Sorry it was a long time ago and I looked it up and actually it was more than I said. I bought it on Amazon, not eBay it turned out, and I paid closer to what you said.
I ordered mine in October of 2016 according to my Amazon history (holy shit, time flies! I would have guessed 2018 or 2017), and I paid $130 for it at the time. New in box. It came bundled with a Lego Movie game and a DualShock 3 controller, and I bought some second hand Vita games that I played on it.
I used my PS4 controller with it instead of the PS3 controller that came with it, and let a friend borrow the PS3 controller for use with her PS3. She never returned the controller actually, but that's ok – she gave me a hoodie once, and I don't like PS3 controllers all that much anyways :p
I have actually heard about this effect when I was in university, that if we are happy with a product we tend after a while to think we paid less for it than we did. So at least it might be an additional indicator to anyone reading this that I really was happy about my PSTV :^)
Is it just me or does the word "learnings" make others cringe? There's a perfectly cromulent word, "lessons" that are the nouns of the things that you "learned" as a verb.
Along with "socializing" instead of "distributing", it's the latest in using stupid words to sound "business like". It reminds me of the kitty in the Lego Movie bouncing through shouting "numbers, numbers, numbers, business, business, business" to avoid detection.
Comedies - Spontaneous, Popstar, Everybody Wants Some
Deconstruction/Meta/Anti-trope -Jump Street movies (count for both this and comedy as do some of the others), The Lego Movie, Cabin in the Woods, Better Watch Out, I'm Thinking of Ending Things
'Film' instead of movie - Another Round, Thorougbreads, The Lighthouse, Ex Machina
> Only in the second century did the medical poet Marcellus Sidetes develop the term lykanthrōpos, “lycanthrope,”
Medical poet. From his Wikipedia page:
> He wrote a long medical poem in Greek hexameter verse, consisting of forty-two books
I'm picturing Vitruvius from the LEGO Movie saying "All this is true because it rhymes" and it passing for esteemed medical advice.
Determinism together with quantum "many worlds hypothesis" implies that the world is in a superposition of vast amounts of states. Some of them contain the Lego movie (different versions of), most of them don't. The initial conditions of the universe lead to this superposition.
So even if it was inevitable from the beginning of the universe that the Lego movie will exist in some states, you (your version in this state of universe) can still be surprised to see that the Lego movie exists here.
Yes, essentially that is what the laws of physics as we understand them lead to as a conclusion[0].
An equivalent view is that the whole universe is a static object, including "the future" just the same as the "the past".
At first this seems difficult to accept, but if you spend some time thinking about it and thinking of the laws of physics, even the intuitive ones such as classical mechanics, it's actually difficult to imagine an alternative. How could a law even look like that allowed some agents (humans? mammals? all living things? all things in general?) any amount of behavior that is not pre-determined by the past? Could a billiard ball that is hit by the tip of the cue decide not to move? And if the billiard ball can't, why could you?
Try to imagine your brain in that moment of decision: this one neuron may fire or not. If it fires, you'll watch the Lego movie right now, if it doesn't you'll eat some candy corn instead. Looking even deeper, inside that neuron, some electro-chemical processes are building up a particular neuro-transmitter - if they build up enough, the neuron will fire, otherwise it won't. Looking even deeper, photons are "flying" around between electrons and nuclei - if one gets absorbed by this electron, the potential will be met, otherwise it won't. Who could decide whether the photon is absorbed or not, except for the past states of the photon, the neuro-transmitter soup, the neuron, the brain? How would that extra decision be factored into the laws of motion of the photon?
Of course, there is always the possibility of postulating extra-physical notions, such as God or the simulation hypothesis, that would not necessarily bend to any of the laws of physics, and are not required to be understandable in any sense. It's also possible to believe that there exists some kind of law of free will and that we have just not come to understand it yet, though maybe some day we will.
[0] though possibly there is some pure randomness built-in depending on the what the solution will turn out to be for some problems in Quantum Mechanics (the measurement problem and its possibly random outcomes), and on your preferred interpretation of it. This doesn't fundamentally help or hinder determinism, it just means that instead of a single fixed outcome being pre-determined, some dice are thrown and one of many possible outcomes happens. The Lego movie, candy corn, Youtube, they are all predictable from the initial conditions at the Big Bang, but they are just not uniquely determined.
The thing I always want to know in discussions of free will or determinism is whether a determinist believes that the initial conditions of the universe lead to the creation of the world we live in, such that (to choose some absurd examples) the Lego movie, candy corn, and Youtube were all 100% inevitable and predetermined by physics, and could not have failed to have been created exactly as they are, at the exact moment they were created. That's what seems unbelievable to me. Maybe I don't get what determinism is?
Time Warner has the Harry Potter license, Nolan's Batman movies and Joker, The Hobbit, Lego Movie, Wonder Woman, and all of Turner Communications, including CNN & Adult Swim / Cartoon Network.
Definitely a thing on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/Wellthatsucks/comments/9l6jsa/this_2_hours_long_unskippable_ad/, https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/dj0v2d/2_hour_ad_of_people_building_pallets_on_youtube/) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/search?q=2%20hour%20ad%20youtube).
Some posts go back to 2018 when the whole Lego movie was an ad.
YouTube guidelines say 6 minutes maximum for an in-stream ad (https://support.google.com/displayspecs/answer/6244563?hl=en) and 3 minutes for a TrueView ad (https://support.google.com/displayspecs/answer/6055025). I think these ads are TrueView ads because they show up on TVs etc. but maybe they're from some other program.
YouTube is a black hole though so either they've already noticed it and deprioritized it to 10 years out or, more likely, it's just not something they're monitoring closely enough to notice.
Apparently the "commercialized junk" sells better, though. Lego was close to going bankrupt in the 90ies.
Apart from the price, I personally can't really complain about the modern Lego sets, either. They are nice puzzles, and my kids like to play with them. After a while they fall apart, and new things can be built.
I don't think Lego wants to pay for expensive Hollywood brands. They always try to establish their own brands, too, like Ninjago, Lego Movie, Nexo Knights. Often it seems the Hollywood stuff simply sells better.
I think a quote from The LEGO Movie sums it up best:
> You accidentally, expertly, carefully took the entire top off of that tower?
> so if you have to do it, you'd better love it in the first place.
Depends on how much you think anything else sucks. Compared to physical labor you're not breaking your back over things.
Compared to other jobs you get paid relatively ok (EU centric view).
Compared to some jobs the hours aren't that crazy: hey McKinsey folk! How are you doing? :D
Really, it isn't that simple. It depends.
It helps if you like it, but a job is a job and if you can perform it, then why do you need to like it?
Moreover, did you ever read about the overjustification effect [0]? Long story short, if you like something, you might dislike it after you get paid for it.
Also, if you love programming you might be biased in always solving a problem in a technical way. You'd become that guy from the LEGO movie that always screams "SPACESHIP!" [2]
Full disclosure: I like programming and sometimes can force myself into loving it [1]. The consequences of loving programming: no social life, no normal diet, sleep rhythm is off. I'm basically just doing one thing as much as possible: programming.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect
[1] As a mettamage I have some control over my psyche and I can quite often, but not always, force myself to like or even love things that I initially hate ;-)
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TYJyCCO8Dc
And many of us do have a problem with advertising in general. Most people don't want to see ads. At best we put up with them or manage to ignore them. Very rarely, do we actively seek out ads. Usually we only do that when we get lots of entertainment from the ad itself, as in the Lego Movie
There has to be a better way to make sure the internet doesn't starve than ads, and not seeing that way doesn't mean that ads and manipulative marketing are inevitable.
The Lego Movie got to it first.
I wonder if they've tried a rigid-plastic-or-ceramic base, coated in PLA.
They probably have.
Pla takes colors well. Another, more rigid form would keep the element's form intact, so long as the PLA were the right thickness to maintain "springiness" (and thus uncracked rigid form under pressure) and color.
I hope they do well! Those movies boosted sales well enough - maybe a Lego star wars movie could help, if done well by the same Lego Movie team. Lets not pretend that Disney would forego that money.
https://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Movie-71004-Random-Pack/dp/B00GSI56IO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1524728870&sr=8-2&keywords=mystery+lego+packs
LEGO has been on the ropes before. Generic blocks became a race to the bottom. LEGO pulled a Hail Mary and saved itself mostly by associating with popular kids' brands (and leveraging that association to create their own popular brands, like Lego Friends, Legends of Chima, and The LEGO Movie).
The irony of that is that most LEGO brick sets are now pre-cut and specially made so that they're hard to use beyond their specific design. Kids don't really buy giant sets of generic, inter-compatible LEGO anymore. They buy licensed LEGO that allow them to rebuild a single figure (potentially with minor customizations), and it seems completely powered by imitating the characters and properties they enjoy, and not the joy of construction.
First row of results on Offical LEGO Google Shopping page is 6 pre-cuts: Mercedes AMG GT3, "Expert Assembly Square", Cinderella Castle, VW Bug, Ferrari SF16-H, and "Winter Toy Shop". Screenshot at https://i.imgur.com/c0tP7b4.jpg . Notice all of these are pre-cuts, and only two are non-licensed (Toy Shop/Assembly Square).
Minecraft is different in that to this point, licensing has made only minimal excursions (the Mario packs probably being the most prominent example).
I'll just quote the Lego Movie here, "Everything is awesome"
Are you the developer of Frozen Elsa Anna Lego Movie Pregnant Tooth Extraction and Foot Doctor 7 by any chance?
Newsflash: People already work in the car, I see it every fucking morning and they are a scourge to safety and insurance premiums. Adding a self-driving car and infrastructure is adding a bunch of overhead you're not even stopping to consider. Zoom out a little bit and Andreessen's vision of the future is the opening sequence to the Lego Movie. Shit you not.
Gravity was spectacular in 3D, but I have a much larger list of films (many of which aren't great) that have immersive and not distracting 3D. Off the top of my head:
Life of Pi
Pretty much every Marvel movie
The new Star Trek films
Star Wars: Episode VII
The Martian
The Hobbit films
How to Train Your Dragon and sequel
Finding Dory
The LEGO Movie
I still look at most of the modern, themed Lego sets with a sense of sadness. They seem to inspire the "you have to follow the instructions" mentality so apply demonstrated in the father in the Lego movie. The older sets did include instructions, but the older blocks seemed more generic to building a wide variety of things, versus the "this is a piece for the Batmobile engine."
I still have my 80s space pieces (some still in boxed sets) from when I was a kid, so I really enjoyed it when The Lego Movie had the "80s space man" who always wanted to build a spaceship. When I got back from the theater, I built a space ship from those parts (of my own design, in the spirit of the movie.) I'll probably pass them down to grandkids some day. :)
Funny enough, that is one of the core messages of the Lego Movie, that it is okay to be creative and mix and match things, as opposed to the collector's impulse to keep everything mint.
As a counter-counter point, I tried it as something of a last-ditch effort after having daily panic attacks for a year. I haven't had one since and I'm depressed much less often.
I took a hell of a lot less and made extra care to do it with kind, experienced people in a safe environment with incredibly joyful activities lined up (The Lego movie is a favorite; starts with a song called 'everything is awesome'). A friend who is a clinical psychologist lived nearby which didn't hurt if things went south.
Maybe the brain is somewhat more plastic for the duration, I'm not sure, but I do think caution should be used. In research contexts a professional is there to keep you on the right track. I'm willing to bet that if I had been alone, I would have ended up worse than I started.
There's very little reliable (read: modern) academic research out there, but looking for it can probably give a little piece of mind. I'm on my phone, but there's a paper (linked to in this article; not sure how permanent that is) that shows that mental disorders in psychedelic users appears similar to mental disorders in the regular population.
There's also some personality studies showing a long-term increase in the openness trait which is an incredibly unusual occurance.
Edit: I considered posting this under a throwaway, but it's sort of a shame that we can't talk about these things at least a little openly.
What a wonderful story! The friend in the story began to remind me of the character Emmet from The Lego Movie: an oddball whose quirks ultimately make him a hero.
I think the smart move for the time being for VR is to put realism to the side in favor of strongly art-directed stylized content that focuses on the strengths that the platform has right now and worry about realism later.
I think films are a great example of demonstrating that realism =/= immersion. Movies like Lego Movie, The Incredibles, etc can be just as immersive as live action. The secret sauce isn't realism, it's choosing the right style for the content, gameplay and theme you are going for.
That's exactly what the Lego movie was about!
When a publication like The Atlantic Monthly, one of the most venerable and critically acclaimed bastions of the English language, literature, and culture, refers to them as "Legos" (http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/02/-em-the-lego-movie-em-further-evidence-of-will-ferrells-subversive-genius/283739/), it means you can finally crawl down off your absurd high horse and give it a rest. Thank you for your service, sir. Here's your lapel pin. There's a doctor down the hall if you need to talk about your feelings.
I just can't bring myself to care. I'm a life-long lego fan, been playing with them since I was old enough to play with Duplo. As an adult, I've got shelves covered in lego sets, a lego brick tattooed on my wrist, and saw Lego Movie on release day. And I don't give a single shit what people call the bricks so long as it's not megablok, one of the other knockoff brands, or for some reason K'Nex.
I'm not lego's marketing department, I'm not their lawyer, I'm not their CEO. It's not up to me to give a crap about the pedantic nonsense that is their preference for how you refer to their product. It's not brand confusion. Lego, Legos, LEGO, LEGOS, whatever. People know what you're talking about, and they aren't getting the name "lego" mixed up with anything. People that see the Megabloks and other knock offs and think that they're legos are what they need to worry about. But an informed child, consumer, etc. knows better already. It didn't take very many Megablok sets before I realize they were incredibly inferior in quality and the colors were way off. Lego is obviously the superior product even to a child.
Okay so I lied. I do care, a lot. More than I should. But I'm just so sick of pedantic idiots hopping into conversations like some sort of know it all "WELL ACTUALLY....". Fuck off. Lego, legos, LEGOS, LEGO, doesn't matter we all know what's being talked about. And derailing discussions over that nonsense is obnoxious.
When I saw that The LEGO Movie had not even been nominated for the Academy Award for best animated picture, I immediately stopped the recording of the awards show, and deleted it from my DVR.
The decision to buy the DVD was absolutely effortless.
With respect to the team behind the Angry Birds movie, they're using Sony Pictures. On the one hand, they have a couple Aardman releases and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. But on the other, they have The Smurfs.
That was my initial response to The LEGO Movie, which wound up being one of the best movies of the year. It'll all depend on the team behind it.
No, the corporations will simply adapt and learn to play the anti-corporate tune to turn a profit.
See Continuum, American Odyssey, Mr. Robot, The Lego Movie, and so on. You want an anti-corporate message and you are willing to pay for it? There are corporations ready to fulfill your need :-)
This reddit comment by Hyroero:
>It's kids. They literally all have ipads or some other tablet (most of the children I look after even at the age of 1 or 2 have their own tablet...).
>Cars 2 was craaaaazy popular with children, it's the same as how frozen is crazy popular right now.
>That explains a few other entries in the list like Pocoyo which is a popular kids show too.
>These children basically watch the same video over and over and over (not sure if that gives additional views or not) then select what ever looks cool in related videos, rinse and repeat.
>Edit: Just felt like adding another example, one of the children I care for is obsessed with the Lego movie and is often watching random game play from the Lego movie video game as if it were a show. He doesn't understand it's a game, in fact his parents don't play games either so he's had no contact with games.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/38xjhp/i_created_a_list_of_the_top_mostviewed_gaming/cryoei0
I totally agree. My five year old can't get enough of Legos and I am in continuous awe of the sets that Lego is putting out these days. Even the small sets (mixels I think) are incredible.
While I enjoy the process of building, creating and playing Legos with my sons, I also find myself trying to imagine the business cases that happen at Lego to create each set – like what's the process for creating a new mold? Do people have to lobby or build a case for why a certain shape or connection should be created?
The other thing I start thinking about is the behind the scenes digitalization of Lego as a company. Flipping through the instruction books it's apparent that the ability to design, model, and generate instructions has been streamlined through what I can only imagine is a robust piece database. May be totally unrelated, but when you go down that path it makes the Lego movie seem like they already had the technology to create those scenes, they just needed to animate it all.
I'm more interested in what those 20 movies are. I found:
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=1981
1 Raiders of the Lost Ark 2 On Golden Pond 3 Superman II 4 Arthur 5 Stripes 6 The Cannonball Run 7 Chariots of Fire 8 For Your Eyes Only 9 The Four Seasons 10 Time Bandits
Of which I guess 2, 3, 8 isn't original.
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2:w014
1 American Sniper 2 The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 3 Guardians of the Galaxy 4 Captain America: The Winter Soldier 5 The LEGO Movie 6 The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies 7 Transformers: Age of Extinction 8 Maleficent 9 X-Men: Days of Future Past 10 Big Hero 6
Of which only 10 is original.
You are underestimating how creative children are. I used to get a lot of Lego sets as a kid, and they would get assembled and then disassembled within two days max. And yes, I can confirm that a Lego Technic excavator with an electric motor and pneumatic controls can be used to make a dinosaur(and then to make a city block. And a spaceship. And a train.).
And in fact, it looks like Lego company is encouraging you to experiment too - look at the Lego Movie sets. Every single one uses weird, "specific use" pieces which are used for something completely different than what they were originally intended for.
Wasn't the whole Lego Movie about taking the kits apart and mixing them up and not worrying about it?
it's expected that you play within the existing marketeer-created universe
Maybe that's how you or your kids play with them, but here we have no problem kitbashing the branded sets. Their parts end up in the color-sorted bins along with all the rest, and the kids build crazy stuff out of whatever. The last round included parts from a city, a dinosaur, and a submarine, and those were just the ones I recognized. We even mix Megabloks and Duplo with our Legos. Now, if I could only get the kids to pick up the parts when they finish...
Kitbashing is _the_ plot driver of the Lego movie, in that it's what Master Builders do.
Notice how the Lego Club magazine highlights people's creative builds.
I want to postulate that Lego's endpoint is not static sculpture, but active imagination. Consider fan fiction. Sometimes we want to create stories inside someone else's universe. Hasn't your imagination been sparked by some favorite movie or book or artwork? Have you ever wanted to tell the rest of the story? I know I did! That's why I flew my Duplo Millenium Falcon around the living room. I don't see how a more realistic version would have been less fun, or less imaginative. And that's the point of the branded sets. They're fun! With any luck someday soon I will be able to build model rockets that look a lot like what explodes on my launchpad in KSP, only my kids and I will be able to fly those around the living room, pretending the sofa is Planet Klystron, home of the savage (but peaceful) race of Mer-mole-men (Lego people with frickin' sharks heads!) Meanwhile, Superman arrives to rescue our stranded Kerbals, whose ship (naturally) blew up upon launch.
And so on.
It's about the stories we can tell ourselves and each other. In-universe. Something wholly new. It doesn't matter. Do whatever it takes to get you or your kids' imaginations jumpstarted.
Or at least that's what I'm after when I buy a Lego set (branded or not). It looks cool, and it sets my imagination racing.
I actually think that the "Lego Movie" set is a perfect example of unbound creativity. Pretty much every set uses parts which do not match with their original use,and yet they are all used to build interesting things. The worst Lego bricks are the ones which have something painted/written on them, that usually does limit the applications.
I'm jealous of that giant rock you're living under. How did you avoid the marketing campaign for the lego movie?
Except LEGO is a product and the LEGO movie is nothing but an off shoot.
If LEGO the movie is a flop, that in no way relates to the success of LEGO product.
LEGO has been selling bricks for decades and their volumes just continue to increase.
>I really fail to see what they are trying to do with this. That game has hardly any "story" behind it
That hardly troubled tons of other movies that did the same, from Garfield (comic strip, not much of a plot), Prince of Persia (prince saves princess for evil guy, that sums it), to the Lego movie, etc. They can always write a plot involving pigs and birds fighting.
Plus, there's the existing Angry Birds cartoon series: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angry_Birds_Toons
>and the characters are not really that interesting.
They are funny looking enough to sell hundreds of millions of merchandize with them on. And the interesting story wont be in the game, it will be in the movie (if they succeed).
The benefits though are obvious: if they succeed with the movie, they can tap into kids minds like Mickey Mouse, not just like some forgotten in 5 years game fad.
The difference is that the Lego movie was dreamed up by someone outside Lego (Dan Lin) who then got the Lego company on board, not an exec at Lego deciding that they "need to capture the film adjacency in 2014."
I thought the same thing when I first heard of the Lego movie. I'm not nearly as much of an angry birds fan as I am a lego fan, but from that experience I learned to reserve judgement before I see it.
Interesting to see films like this and the Lego movie relying on proprietary renderers instead of industry-proven solutions like: Renderman or Arnold.
You could say the same about LEGO, and the LEGO movie did great. In many ways Minecraft is just video game LEGO. Battleship is a board game some people like or at least know but that's about it.
Minecraft on the other hand has a giant fan base that loves it and will buy anything related to it. Just look at all the merchandise that's started coming out over the last few years and now is everywhere. It's basically Angry Birds 2.0, just 10 times bigger, and Angry Birds it's still making tons of cash.
Minecraft is huge right now, there's a lot of money to be made by someone who knows how to properly milk it for all it's worth and has no problem with doing so.
> Is it an amorphous blob like an oil spill?
That's certainly how it works in the Lego Movie!
The title sounds fine to me. I would say "a Lego block" rather than "a Lego" too, similar to how I wouldn't say, "an oil". So calling it an "amorphous blob" sounds about right.
So, after hearing of something rotten in Minecraft Denmark, you delivered an anguished soliloquy wondering whether it's nobler to suffer these slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?
Very interesting.
This incident is also suspiciously like the plot of "The Lego Movie". Are those sneaky Danes doing some metadiegetic guerrilla marketing in advance of the DVD release?
"Thought" might be a better term than "ideas". The purpose of such a tool is not to brainstorm, but to communicate.
We communicate using natural languages. If you check Twitter, you'll see people write down all kind of thoughts and information. But this information is not semantic, and only a human (or NLP) can make sense of what is said.
When people communicate, it's either to make a statement about the past ("I ate sushis"), about the present ("I'm in Las Vegas"), or about the future ("I want to watch Terminator 2").
The past and present (which actually are the same) are simple declaration about reality. The future is all about wishes and intents.
Of course, you could add another dimension/mode (reality/fiction). In fiction, past/present could be "I wish Hitler wasn't born" and the future could be "I want to work at Google". In reality, you would say "Dinosaurs existed" (past/present) and "There will be an hurricane tomorrow" (future). The difference is that the future is no longer a wish, but a prediction (as we're dealing with reality).
I want people to be able to communicate the following ideas without just relying on boring text:
- The Lego Movie was great.
- I want to be in NYC by noon.
- I'm interested in Bitcoin.
- Lock my house's doors.
- I want to wake up at 7AM every monday.
- I'd love to attent to the next Metallica concert in Barcelona.
- It's rainy in Vancouver.
- Where is my car?
- Turn on the oven to high.
The above statements should be purely semantic. I should be able to click on "Metallica" and get more information about them. I should be able to click on "event" and see where and when it takes place. I should be able to click on "car" and see exactly what car he's referring to. I want statements to be elevated to a level where they have meaning, and that text only is a single representation of these ideas.
You're in Vancouver? You won't see "It's rainy in Vancouver". You'll see "It's rainy (here)". If you don't know what Bitcoin is, you might see "John Doe is interested in [insert a short summary about what Bitcoin is]". If you're metallica, you'll probably see "3723 people want to see you in Barcelona". If you're the oven, you'll probably understand "Heat up to 500 F".
Now, the above statements are simple and don't show why someone would need an IDE for thoughts (NLP + manual confirmation would be enough in many cases). But people shouldn't limit what they think to 140 characters either. They should be able to express complex ideas such as (a product review):
"iphone" -> "Do you mean iPhone 5S ..." -> Yes
"display" -> "Are you referring to the display of the iPhone ..." -> Yes
- Glossy - Cracked - Too Dim -> Yes - _____________
...
As you can see above, it's not easy to express complex interactions with text. But the idea is that you can input any keyword representing a "thing" (object, attribute, value), and continue adding nodes by searching for them with keywords until you have the elements you want to refer to. Then, you can drag relations between them and see suggestions based on likeliness and what not. It would of course infer things based on past statements and what it knows about you.
When writing a product review, people don't always know where to start, and often repeat things that other have said. By being able to refer to specific aspects of a product, see what others have said and confirm/infirm their statement (upvote/downvote), as well as build on top of it is probably a better way to converge meaning than to ask potential buyers to read through all of them manually. Maybe this should have his own idea thread.
Basically, I want a semantic version of Twitter that can suggest me things I can say about things I want to talk about, and let me endorse an existing statement instead of repeating it.
I have a 3 year old and he's too young to make lego city sets from the instructions but he loves playing with them and watching me make a set and helping. However, when I leave him with the bricks, he plays on his own, makes funky looking cars and planes. I've seen him spent a lot of time figuring a brick out by keep trying it with different bricks. It's very cool to see the learning process in real time.
I think children learn more by mixing, matching and making their own creations not just following the instructions. It was nice to see that the Lego movie was about this too.
I've been a subscriber for months.
Their selection of the larger sets is limited, which is understandable. They've been getting better, but there have been times when it took days or weeks to ship the next set because I only wanted a 1000+ piece set, and they didn't have enough of them.
The sets I've received have either been brand new (still in original plastic bags), or missing several minor pieces. You can log in and tell them which exact pieces are missing and they'll ship them to you (or supposedly add them to the set for the next person), but it's only after you've tried to build the full thing that you know all the pieces that are missing.
Unlike Netlix DVDs, it's hard to turn around a set quickly. I end up holding onto each one for a week or three.
I enjoyed the Lego Movie, it touched on the idea of following the instructions vs building something unique. Pley/Pleygo is trying to encourage inventiveness, with photo contests.
Still, I'm happy with the service, and have recommended it to friends.
There is some discussion about the importance of story on the latest edition of Blender Guru.
http://www.blenderguru.com/podcast-beorn-leonard-working-on-sintel-and-the-lego-movie/
It's a good interview with Beorn Leonard, one of the animators on Sintel, and most recently the Lego movie.
I just successfully changed the lego movie from dont waste your time to see at theaters by clicking a ton....
here: t.string "ip_address"
@link = Link.find_by_code!(params[:id])
then if that link.hits.find_by_ip_address(request.remote_ip) == nil Continue with adding a .new(:ip_address => request.remote_ip)
I can vote multiple times and it is counted. I successfully reversed the vote on the lego movie to "Don't waste your time".
Nice fluid site, but I don't understand why this is better then seeing the user reviews on imdb/rt. As someone who looks at a lot of movie reviews and is a huge movie buff I find number ratings to be: useless, detrimental to the viewing experience, and massively effected by things unrelated to the movie or its quality. I have realized that any review above 5.5 on imdb has the potential to be a good movie to an excellent movie regardless of its actual rating.
I personally find I get much more from reading one upvoted review on imdb, scanning the message board topic titles and then deciding if I would like the film or not. Once I know the things to look for in those I found it to be far more telling of whether I will like a film or not then any RT/Imdb score. My point is that I don't think ratings like this are useful at all and movie rating/recommendation sites need to look in other directions.
Well, I guess I can't necessarily disagree since your explanation requires admitting things that cannot be proven. I can say that I don't "feel" more inclined to purchase LEGOs, movie or not, then before. I see lots of the Ninjago show on Netflix because my daughter likes it, but I don't buy them that often and she doesn't ask for them.
I guess I would say that any positive mental associations I have is for the entertainment factor as I liked the movie and the Ninjago show. It certainly hasn't resulted in a positive enough influence to make purchases. That's the focus of my comments, that the article that started this discussion seems off to me because it suggests that the LEGO movie is just a huge branding effort to convince people they must buy LEGOs. Your comments are much softer than that viewpoint so I think I'd be more agreeable to your viewpoint than the article's.
You might not care, but many think it is a fascinating topic. It blends elememts of social science, economics, business strategy, and psychology in interesting ways. Marketing is very powerful, in ways we don't even fully understand.
I don't think The Lego Movie is 100% pure marketing, but it sure isn't 0%. They did a fantastic job with it however. It is the only branding effort I know of that has reached this level (which is a hard level to even describe, hence the struggle encountered by the author of the article). Has anyone heard of other high quality movies produced by product companies?
Awesome! I won't lie, it's my favorite movie too (perhaps there is a support group for us somewhere?). I also got a kick out of transformers prime. The megatron-starscream interactions were always hilarious.
SPOILER BELOW
And as someone who recently built a 4x8 table with a full sheet of plywood to build legos with my 4 year old son, I got a huge kick out of the end of the lego movie. It had some surprisingly dark scenes, but I didn't notice the product placement - but then again, legos were/are my favorite toy.
The idea that a legitimately great movie can't be based on a product doesn't make any sense to me. My reigning, hardly ever challenged, favorite movie of all time was based on a line of toys, and could have been called an advertisement. But if so it was an ad with a huge all-star cast, one of the greatest wall-to-wall soundtracks ever arranged, action unrelenting in its cadence, an epic reveal, and a great script with dozens of memorable one-liners. The fact that it was part of a larger mini-storm of culture that included selling toys... means what? Now I have to find room somewhere in my top 5 for The Lego Movie, because it was that good. What do I care that it was about a well-known toy? Why would I care whether it was good or bad for the line of toys? Why would I care whether the toy company influenced the script at all, when the script is that good?
The Lego Movie inserted itself directly into my top five of all time. Every line of the script is brilliantly written, it is roll-on-the-ground hilarious, the comedic timing of the action is perfect, and it even hits philosophical points. It's like an older Pixar movie on speed.
However, I couldn't be less interested in what anybody thinks the 'message' is.
I could be totally wrong but I think she dislikes herself more than LEGO. She too easily gives in to simple marketing to do things she feels she should not be doing, she buys things she shouldn't be buying, and doesn't the spend the kind of time with her kids she feels would be best. LEGO is a scapegoat for her own perceived failings with her kids.
I bet her kids would disagree. After all, they are just kids playing with kid toys.
I saw the LEGO movie, I thought it was really good. It's a good story about being yourself, being creative, and standing up for what you feel is right. I saw the movie with my children and none of us felt the need to suddenly go buy LEGOs afterwards. We didn't see the movie as a big infomercial, it's just a movie for gosh sakes. An enjoyable one at that.
Every movie that resulted in retail items selling big was not necessarily intended to be an infomercial. And the movies that were? So what?
As for her complaint about the girl sets not having fire fighters, why not buy the sets that have fire fighters? If she only buys the sets supposedly made only for girls then who is at fault with that?
Meta-marketing strategies aren't new, but the LEGO movie is a brilliant example.
David Foster Wallace covered the topic in his essay, "E unibus pluram":
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/E+unibus+pluram%3A+television+and+U.S.+fiction.-a013952319
> You can find successful television ads that mock TV-ad conventions almost anywhere you look, from Settlemeyer's Federal Express and Wendy's spots, with their wizened, sped-up burlesques of commercial characters, to those hip Doritos splices of commercial spokesmen and campy old clips of Beaver and Mr. Ed.
> Plus you can see this tactic of heaping scorn on pretensions to those old commercial virtues of authority and sincerity - thus (1) shielding the heaper of scorn from scorn and (2) congratulating the patron of scorn for rising above the mass of people who still fall for outmoded pretensions - employed to serious advantage on many of the television programs the commercials support. Show after show, for years now, has been either a self-acknowledged blank, visual, postmodern allusion- and attitude-fest,
You left out a lot of context for that quote. Here's the full paragraph:
> No wonder I feel guilty as I’m driving my children to see “The Lego Movie.” I should be taking them on a long hike or handing out aprons and baking cookies. But we aren’t doing those things; instead we spend our weekends hunched over expensive plastic bricks, and now we’re going to watch them on the big screen. I have filled my daughters’ empty minds with a blind devotion to an indifferent commercial empire.
The issue isn't just the ads, or just the expensive bricks, it's how the two come together to form a feedback loop. The kids enjoy playing with legos, so they want to see the movie. They see the movie, which makes them want to buy more bricks. Lego Movie 2 comes out and the process repeats. The main thing the author seems to dislike is manipulation.
Re "message provided by the hero, is that it's okay to be a cog in the machine." Well that's kind of true to life - a lot of people do fine in regular corporate jobs and a lot of creative types have problems. Many of the best movies show some part the world that's mucked up eg. the top three movies on imdb are about a corrupt prison system and the mafia. You can like a movie without it saying everything is rainbows. Maybe that's why the Lego movie is more enjoyable for adults than most of the kiddie pap.
The Lego movie didn't strike me as hyper-consumerist, and I saw it twice. It mentioned a lot of sets but didn't promote collecting them or anything. I figure a lot of people will download the soundtrack, since it's pop electronica that also works as a hipster-ironic parody of itself.
What I got from the movie was a well-developed cynicism of authority. It wasn't nihilist, but very anarchic. The message I got was: have fun making things, but don't expect anyone else to respect or even understand them.
Remarkably, the Lego Movie is PG. I used this as the excuse to keep my wife from taking the kids. I'm a huge fan of the toys, less so of the advertising. I used Legos as building blocks to teach the kids letters. They build trucks, castles, and learn to count with them. I've even been to Legoland, which is great for kids.
To the point of the original post, it's just the branding and consumerism that's over the top. I can't wait for them to replace all the Lego Movie ads at the bus stops and train stations.
tl;dr: the author thinks the movie is about corporations and seeks for meta-buzzwords
The beginning of the movie (until the escape) is more of a double-reference to 1984 and A Brave New World. What comes next emphasizes more on the philosophy of Lego construction: combining and inventing instead of following the instructions. At no point in the movie the means of productions and the society based consumption are questioned. There is not even one clear reference to liberalism/communism (or such). Some satires do critic specific things (Starbucks), but that's it.
If you are looking for a hidden marketing message in a movie named "The Lego Movie", you probably have time to waste. I may sound a little aggressive but I was unnerved by the fact that the author consider plain activities as hiking or cooking as necessarily better than creative ones (well, maybe I do not identify sarcasm). I really don't get how playing with games from Lego can be such a bad thing: it's just a game, you are not locking them in some corporation's golden prison.
I don't see that she stated outright or even implied that LEGO was evil, as such. Just an overpriced, indifferent corporate empire with brilliant, unnerving meta-marketing. I would say that meta-marketing is the focus of the article, with the LEGO movie merely being the centerpiece. And I'm really not sure where you got "apparently LEGO is being held responsible for girls liking pink now" - the only reference to pink was a quote from the movie in question.
If Lego Movie is any indication of the price of coffee it's around $37.