THE LEGO MOVIE (2014): Everything is Awesome.

When we were kids we'd occasionally break out all of our action figures and playsets, set them all up opposite each other, and arrange a battle royale in which they all strategized and fought against one another.  Batman and the Ninja Turtles were on the same side.  Mario and Luigi, of course, were the Turtles' enemies, because the Brothers are plumbers and the Turtles are usually the ones getting plumbed.  The Ghostbusters sided with the Marios, as both were fighting monsters from another dimension.  The gang from The Nightmare Before Christmas sided with Batman, for obvious reasons.  The Care Bears attempted to remain neutral.

That's kind of what The Lego Movie is like.  It's a vast collection of recognizable characters from different mythologies, all living in the same city and interacting with one another.  Not since Who Framed Roger Rabbit? has there been such a gathering: there's Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, Gandalf, Han Solo, both Michelangelos, and many more.  Tons of intercorporate legal haranguing will be necessary before we can get all of the Marvel heroes on the same screen, but here is the entire DC universe joining forces with Shaquille O'Neal, Abraham Lincoln, and William Shakespeare.

I never had the patience for Legos, but I always admired those who did.  They're a unique toy in that they require equal parts creativity and order.  Being able to invent is just as important as being able to follow instructions.  Each piece is tiny but integral.  That's the theme of the movie, too.

The hero, Emmet (Chris Pratt), is your average everyday working man in the town of Bricksburg, though a bit of an outcast and a dunderhead.  When he stumbles upon a strange artifact known as the Piece of Resistance, he becomes a target.  The good guys, led by wizard Vetruvius (a self-spoofing Morgan Freeman) and rebel gal Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), need the piece to defend themselves from the evil Lord Business (Will Ferrell), who wants to use the "Kragle" (you'll see) to freeze all of Bricksburg.

The animation, perfectly mimicking stop-motion, is outstanding.  Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, fast becoming the best in their field, fill the screen with constantly dazzling images; each shot is so complex that it may take several viewings to catch every sly gag.  They don't depend heavily on their pop-culture references for laughs; their screenplay is consistently inventive and funny throughout.

The voice cast is spot-on: Pratt is a perfectly dull everyman, and Banks an appropriately standoffish love interest for him.  It's a little jarring at first to hear Ferrell as the bad guy--he doesn't often play heavies--but he does exceptional work here, particularly when his character takes an unexpected turn late in the film.  I won't reveal the actor who provides the voice for "Good Cop/Bad Cop," a policeman whose face literally changes from gentle to severe, but he delivers a performance unlike anything we've ever seen him do.  Will Arnett, as expected, makes for a completely shallow and self-absorbed Batman.

There's an inspiring lesson in the end, championing invention over conformity.  There is, of course, a correct way to assemble Legos, but after a while it's no fun unless you get to create something weird.  That weird thing is The Lego Movie, whose absence in the Best Animated Feature category at this year's Oscars is a travesty.  Few animated films are this creative and clever.  Few will appeal as potently to both kids and adults as it does.

*** 1/2 out of ****

THE INTERVIEW (2014): Beavis and Butt-head Do Pyongyang

"I still haven't watched The Interview yet because of credible threats from reviewers." -Andy Kindler

I imagine that before seeing The Interview became an act of patriotism, it was a better movie.  On its own terms, it's charming and often laugh-out-loud funny.  But it's not the champion for free speech that recent controversy has painted it as, nor is it in a class with the best comedies that have played against real-life political backdrops, like To Be Or Not To Be or The Great Dictator, or even Team America: World Police, the Trey Parker/Matt Stone puppet comedy, also set in North Korea.

It's a smart comedy about two dumb guys who are charged with assassinating a dictator.  It might have been funnier if it were a smart comedy about two smart guys.  It is, thankfully, not a celebration of the Ugly American tourist who lords his American exceptionalism over lesser furr'ners.  It takes a more surprising if less ambitious route and becomes a benign plea for good journalism in the face of unquestioned despotism.

But that's the movie's secondary ambition.  It's primarily a series of teenage boy jokes at the expense of the manhood (and heterosexuality) of its two lead characters, played by James Franco and Seth Rogen.  The gags are funny, if more juvenile than they need to be.  The elevation that the film received from its alleged targeting by North Korea unfortunately raised expectations that the film didn't meet.

Dave Skylark (Franco) is the host of a vapid talk show that specializes in encouraging celebrities to reveal their deepest secrets.  The opening scene, probably the funniest in the movie, has Skylark unwittingly prompting Eminem to come out of the closet (Mr. Mathers, it should be said, delivers an excellent deadpan performance).  When producer Aaron Rapaport (Rogen) demands that the show be taken in a more relevant direction, Skylark seizes upon a newspaper article which claims that North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong-un is a fan of his show.  The two secure an interview with the dictator, leading a CIA agent (Lizzy Caplan) to knock on their door and charge them with "taking him out."

Rogen and his directing partner Evan Goldberg set such a high bar with their debut film, This is the End, that it wasn't unreasonable to expect a thoughtful, complex, honest comedy about North Korea and the concept of assassination in general.  This is the End started out as a simple bro comedy and expanded far beyond that; The Interview goes the other way.  Early scenes promise a clever satire, but the rest of the movie is more concerned with the emasculation of its heroes and of its villain.  Not that the two are mutually exclusive--This is the End had plenty of bodily humor inside of its spiritual context--but by the end of The Interview, it seems that nothing has really been said, other than (1) hey, y'all, world leaders shouldn't be worshiped as gods, and (2) despite what you may have heard, Kim Jong-un has an anus.

As the enigmatic leader, Randall Park gives the most complex, interesting performance in the film, probably better than Mr. Kim deserves.  If anything, his regime has more to gain from this film than to lose; though his character has many embarrassing revelations--not the least of which is his closet affinity for Katy Perry--his character here is far more intelligent, tenacious, and crafty than the timid, oddball daddy's boy that much of the world sees.

Unfortunately he's not well met by Franco and Rogen, who give two of their lazier performances.  Franco plays Dave Skylark as what Ben Stiller might have described as "full r-word," when his character might have been more interesting as a clever but shallow opportunist.  Rogen doesn't have much of a character at all, other than as the harried straight-man to Franco's hysterics.  Women also don't have much of a role in the film, though Diana Bang is a promising talent as Kim's straight-arrow press secretary.  Lizzy Caplan is unfortunately wasted, disappearing for most of the film's second half, but very few actresses are better at playing the straight woman, and it's largely her doing that early "training" sequences for Dave and Aaron are sometimes uproarious.

Because Rogen and Goldberg are expert comedians, much of the lowbrow humor works.  I found myself laughing more than I expected at a scene in which Aaron, threatened by Kim's guards and a Siberian tiger, has to hide an important package in a very uncomfortable place.  Kim's casual seduction of Dave (likely paralleling the real-life Dennis Rodman visit) is a hoot.  The deadpan performances from James Yi and Paul Bae as stiffshirted North Korean guards lead to some of the film's best uncomfortable laughs.

But Rogen and Goldberg, probably unaware that their film would be elevated to national icon, are content to be merely funny without being provocative.  The controversy surrounding the film only reminds us how much better it could have been.  It flirts enough with the complexities of the place of North Korea in world politics for us to know that it has a brain in its head; it just doesn't use it.

** 1/2 out of ****

T.O.K.'s Top 20 Songs of 2014, or: Ariana Not So Grande, or: Iffy Azalea

We at T.O.K. confess that we have no idea how to write about music.  But we know what we don't like.  And 2014 had a lot of it.

Maybe it's just that '13 had a ton of amazing music, mainly from old timers who've still got it, like Bowie, McCartney, Marr, and They Might Be Giants.  There seems to have been little left.

Even the bad music was terrible.  The de facto artist of the year, Iggy Azalea, is as irritating and cloying as she is probably racist.  Her ubiquitous "Fancy" was catchy and earwormy enough to warrant my listening to her entire album, which is painful enough to be fodder for Guantanamo inmates.  The internet keeps insisting that I like Charli XCX, which I have faithfully tried to do.  The other song that was everywhere this year, Magic!'s "Rude," is unlistenable! but I'll cede the rest of that argument to Studio 360's Sideshow podcast, which this summer aired a very precise thesis on why the song is a crime against humanity.  Ariana Grande, another pop idol that seems to have gained popularity for no good reason, seems to have risen from the Disney ashes that respawn late-teen stars every few years or so.

I suppose Grande is just this generation's Britney Spears, but I seem to recall even Britney's music being better than hers.  I don't know if it's just that I'm an old man, but we in the '90s had much better bad music.  We had the rivaling boy bands of 'N Sync and Backstreet Boys, rivaling divas of Britney and Christina, and Limp Bizkit.  What do the kids have now to compete? (Taylor Swift, I suppose, who's growing more adept a businesswoman and less adept a songwriter with each release.)

There were a few bright spots.  Former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, for the second year in a row, released a killer album ("Playland").  There were solid, though not exceptional, albums from Sharon Van Etten and Allo Darlin'.  Stars, whose "The North" was my favorite album of 2012, unfortunately underwhelmed this year, except for one song.  Copeland, one of my favorite emo bands, did not disappoint with their comeback record, "Ixora."  Veruca Salt's reunion, though short, was delightful.  U2, despite the botched publicity stunt around their album's release, came out with some of their best work in years on "Songs of Innocence." "Weird Al" Yankovic might have had the best overall album of the year with his first #1 on the Billboard charts, "Mandatory Fun."

Here are our 20 favorite songs of the year, in descending order.  Let these be an incantation against the rest of 2014.