Movie Review - Lego Dude vs. Dinosaurs Run Amok

Introduction

This week I thought I’d step aside and let somebody else contribute to albertnet.  In this post, the film critic Maynard Steele reviews my stop-motion animated movie, Lego Dude vs. Dinosaurs Run Amok.  Here is the movie:

Movie Review – Lego Dude vs. Dinosaurs Run Amok

Making movies is one of those vocations that doesn’t require any specific education or credentials.  Many is the actor who, after achieving fame and fortune, tells a fawning magazine, “What I really want to do is direct,” and then proceeds to do just that.  And sometimes a director has no film background whatsoever, such as James Cameron, who was an English major until he dropped out of college to become first a truck driver, then the second highest-grossing film director in the world.

It would seem wise for an industry outsider making his or her first film to start out with something simple.  Top-grossing director Steven Spielberg began his career with Duel, a very basic action movie about a psychotic tanker truck driver terrorizing an innocent motorist.  For Cameron, it was Piranha II – The Spawning, which was about flying piranhas attacking people.  Both directors waited until they had more experience before getting all film-school-y.

At first glance, the debut movie from blogger Dana Albert looks like a safe bet:  a basic action movie about dinosaurs attacking a motorist.  But from the opening frame of the film, we see that Albert is trying to achieve a level of sophistication that a motion picture newbie would be wise to avoid.  His camera fixes its attention not on the action itself, but on the stage set where the stop-motion animation is done.  A weak voice-over from Albert, mumbled and ineloquent, gives us some background on the making of the movie.  This “meta-film” movie-within-a-movie device has stymied far better directors than Albert.  For example, Joe Wright’s recent Anna Karenina featured a stage set where we viewers, as though in the audience at a play, watch the action unfold.  Why not immerse us in Tolstoy’s world, like the novel does?  Such added artifice almost never works, and is particularly weak in Albert’s film.

There’s also the matter of the medium chosen for this film.  When bloviating to the press, Albert has claimed that his decision to use stop-motion animation for Amok was a simple matter of budget:  he couldn’t afford live action special effects or CGI.  But I’d guess there’s more going on here:  I think he secretly hopes reviewers like me will compare him to such icons as Bertolt Brecht, who used absurdly basic props (e.g., a cardboard box labeled “sleigh”) to keep his stage play audience at an intellectual distance from the drama, to ensure that their rational, critical minds weren’t subverted beneath emotions and strong association with his characters.  Only a desire to ape this kind of device could explain Albert’s use of crude plastic dinosaurs and Lego in his film.  It’s a cheeky move, considering the vast intellectual gulf between geniuses like Brecht and mere hacks like Albert.

That said, the action in Amok unfolds crisply and the camera-work—this was shot using a handheld Motorola Droid—is efficient and unfussy.  Albert’s collaborators, other first-timers including his two daughters and his mother, do a great job with characterization.  (Different dinosaurs were manipulated by different hands, and it shows.)  Most of the movie was gratifying to watch.  Seeing the dinosaurs rallying to flip Lego Guy’s car over on him, I found my pulse quickening dramatically; I haven’t had such a satisfying visceral response to cinematic violence since the restaurant assassination scene in The Godfather.  Small details like the way Lego Dude’s arm thrashes wildly as he’s pinned under the car are either a tribute to, or subconscious imitation of, something from a Sam Peckinpah movie.

All of this might have helped me forgive the weak start to the film, except that at the very end, Albert again inserts another blatantly artificial effect:  a giant human hand appears, its finger pointing at—what?  The answer is, who cares?  This kind of abrupt rupture of scene is doubtless meant to recall other, greater works in which the creator shows his hand, dissolving the world of the narrative.  Albert, who wrote his college thesis on Vladimir Nabokov, may well have had Bend Sinister in mind, in which the ill-fated main character is rescued by the author:  “Just a fraction of an instant before another and better bullet hit him, he shouted again:  You, you—and the wall vanished, like a rapidly withdrawn slide, and I stretched myself and got up from among the chaos of written and rewritten pages….”

I can’t help but think how much better Amok might have been with some tighter editing.  Normally there is a post-production process, involving focus groups, that ensures a film doesn’t overly indulge a director’s vain artistic flights-of-fancy—but in this case the producer was the director’s mother, who probably couldn’t bear to oppose her son.  A briefer, leaner Amok might have worked as a straightforward action flick, with the film-school shenanigans held out for the “Director’s Cut” DVD.

At the same time, I have to concede that something would be lost through such a revision.  Clearly Albert had something serious in mind with this movie.  Beyond the crowd-pleasing gore lurks a subtle didactic message that lingers beyond the cheap thrills.  Could we surmise from the film’s shortcomings that this greater meaning is accidental?  No, it’s intentional, and we can tell this, oddly enough, by the film’s MPAA rating.

Your typical action movie is PG-13.  That rating, more than any other, brings in the teenagers, who are the darlings not only of Hollywood but practically every other industry as well.  PG movies strike teens as lame, which is why they’re an endangered species; teens need to know a film will be edgy.  (Before the PG-13 rating, George Lucas fought to have Star Wars rated PG instead of G, for fear it would be thought of as square.)  And yet, Albert campaigned vigorously, and successfully, to have Amok rated G!

Why would he do this?  Is there precedent for a violent movie getting a G rating?  In fact there is:  the 1972 sci-fi flick Silent Running.  Though it’s not a hugely violent movie, every single human character is killed.  The main character, Lowell, objecting to the planned destruction of the last flora from earth, housed in spaceship-attached greenhouses, murders the entire crew—bludgeoning one to death with a shovel—and then kills himself.  Only the plants survive (and a few robots).  Why the G rating?  The MPAA must have decided that the environmental message was just too important to withhold from any part of the moviegoing public.  (Environmental ethics aside, I think it was actually the piped-in Joan Baez music that drove Lowell over the edge.)

Albert also has a message to impart, to as wide an audience as possible.  Through his Brechtian machinery, Albert asks the audience to draw back, detach from the bloodlust, and reflect on what he’s seen.  What really happened here?  At first blush, it seems the simplest of plots:  a car crashes into a dinosaur, and several other dinosaurs converge on it and kill the driver.  But how and why does the driver crash his car?

Watch again:  there’s a passenger on the back, lacking not just a seatbelt but a seat, who falls out and lands grotesquely on his back.  This distracts the driver, who—panicking—actually takes his hands off the steering wheel.  This is why he veers right and plows into the stegosaurus.  He’s immediately attacked by a dinosaur to our right, who might just be hungry, but the other dinosaurs—witnesses to this driver’s incompetence—are clearly retaliating when they roll his car up on him.

Are we supposed to identify with the motorist, or the dinosaurs?  For my money, it’s the dinosaurs.  The movie satisfies because so many of us—as pedestrians or bicyclists—have felt so vulnerable when a car has endangered us … but what if we were giants and could slake on our basest thirst for revenge?  In his blog, Albert is fond of mentioning the “lizard brain,” and what better manifestation of it than the actual walnut-sized brain of Thunder Lizard?  The dinosaurs get to carry out the retaliation we only dream of.

And yet, there’s always that pulling back, that emotional detachment Albert builds in to the movie.  He’s telling us yes, enjoy the revenge theme, but then remember your essential humanity; we had a little fun here, but only giant lizards are allowed to kill.  And there’s more to it:  he’s inviting us to watch again, and look more closely.  What else do we notice about the film, upon repeated viewings?  Did you catch what happens to the passenger, whose fall started the violence in motion?  Apparently unhurt, he gets up and flees the mêlée!  The cause of the crash, the flailing of the arm, the flight of the passenger—we don’t see these at first, just as drivers see so little of what’s going on around them.  It all just happens too fast, which is why we should all drive slower and try to pay more attention.  And that, we realize, is the central message of this film.

Why not just say so, then?  Well, Albert has, but words can be so easily ignored.  Surely Albert has chafed at the limitations of mere text, and nobody likes a high-handed lecture or public service announcement.  The brazen fun of Amok—its rapture of violence—transcends the limitations of priggish, didactic works.  Notwithstanding its art and subtext, Lego Dude vs. Dinosaurs Run Amok is an action flick at heart.

From the Archives - Critique of Alexa's Early Art

Introduction

We got a new fridge. The State of California had a fat rebate set up for purchasers of Energy Star fridges, and that might have been nice except the fridge we needed—short enough to fit under our cabinet—wasn’t on the approved list, though it’s Energy Star certified. There’s a process to add the fridge to the list, but the deadline for doing so preceded the announcement of the rebate itself: a nice Catch-22. So we bought the fridge anyway (our old one was drooling all over our food) and did without a rebate. Thanks for nothing, California!

Part of breaking in a new fridge is, of course, the Kids’ Art Installation. Lindsay had a nice new piece that was too large for the front, so I put it around the side, where it was spattered with spaghetti sauce from the nearby stove until I removed it, and it's now gone missing. D’oh! Here are a couple of the works we have up front now:

Serving as curator for this new fridge exhibit made me think of Alexa’s very first major work, which she completed at age two. In general the public’s response to this work was positive, but one major critic, my friend Michael, was fairly critical of it. I get that being critical is his job as a critic (albeit an amateur one), but I thought he missed some of the artistic nuances of the work. What follows is his critique, and also my response, which ended up blossoming into a full-fledged exegesis of Alexa’s drawing and her artistic sensibility in general.

The work

Happy Face by Alexa Albert. 2004. Mixed Media (digital photo, plastic and magnets). The Museum of CAlbert Art, Albany, California.

The critique – January 27, 2004

I think the use of color needs development. Form and style are good but the inclination toward avant is so euro-yesterday. i'm impressed with the texture--the play toward the pixelization look--but feel the minimalist approach is just not in tune with contemporary artistic values. in essence, the artist appears immature in her approach and execution; however, there are some encouraging attributes warranting encouragement.

My response – January 28, 2004

Your analysis is generally quite valid, but if I may say, you fail to fully consider the context in which we should view this work. Sure, if you came upon it in a gallery, little more could really be said about the fresh young talent who created it. But naturally there is a school of art criticism that goes beyond the surface and considers the context, the background, the circumstantial and sociological texture, if you will, of the art and its artist. From this perspective, the work embodies much more than a quick glance can appreciate.

Young Albert is making grand statements with this early piece. Certainly there is a brashness here, some would even say an insolence or iconoclasm, given the relative lack of education of the artist, in this case a relative autodidact who has never apprenticed to a master and frankly ignores, or even denies, contemporary or historical influences. And yet the treatment of subject here is, above all else, ironic, and throws a harsh light on the current art scene and, indeed, the current psychological and emotional landscape of our time.

You mention the sparse use of color: exactly her point. Her choice of medium, and her truncated palette within that medium, are the equivalent of making an expensive color photocopy of a black-and-white original. (An architecture student I know once played with this as well.) And though you seem to appreciate her experiments in pixilation, perhaps you haven’t fully realized the depth of her statement: she had to know that her picture, coarsely drawn though it is, would be captured with a 2.1 megapixel digital camera. She’s actually bridging the pointillism school (exemplified by Georges Seurat and his followers in late 19th-century France) to the present, invoking the oil-and-water clash between warm French beauty and cold American technology.

Certainly it could be said that young Albert should master the technical aspects of her craft before embarking on grand statements. After all, Picasso almost certainly could have painted in the soulless but technically adept Norman Rockwell style before moving on to the experimentation that become Cubism. One could accuse Albert of not actually recognizing that the nose is between the two eyes and not off to one side, challenging the idea that she is deliberately skewing the loci as did her famous predecessor. But that would be false: she has been able to identify the nose, her own or another person’s, for well over a year, and always points to the right place. (Indeed, the work in question shows a strong command of locus, even if the nose itself is lacking in definition.)

Can’t we forgive Albert’s refusal to get bogged down in technical skill-building when she has so much bottled up, that yearns for alternative modes of expression? This is a person whose entire life has taken place post-9/11. She has never known a government that wasn’t steeped in cynicism and at odds with its society. This is a sensitive soul whose first exposure to mass media included the Teletubbies, those uncanny, unsettling, inexplicable creatures that exist as if to fly in the face of decent artistic temperaments. Sure, Albert’s work may be titled “Happy Face,” but it cannot be an accident that the face is sticking its tongue out at the viewer, as if to say, “I see your cracked polystyrene world and I raise you one flip gesture.”

You charge that the work is avant and euro-yesterday? Exactly Albert’s point: a half-rhetorical question, “Wouldn’t it be nice to revert to an earlier time, and a less crapola culture?” And her refusal to sync up with contemporary artistic values is, above all, an attempt to put the kibosh on our entire shattered American era, art and all, since she can’t cherry-pick what beauty still remains.

Of course it’s still irresponsible and myopic to say she has no influences. Her parents, totally unrecognized by the contemporary art world and for good reason, have taught her every poor technique in the book, and make matters worse by choosing uninspired subject matters for their own art: cats, babies, simple geometric forms that are easy for the untalented to draw. This early exposure has combined with young Albert’s emotional and intellectual underpinnings to establish backlash as a fundamental—if not the fundamental—basis of her oeuvre. Consider the haphazard geometry of “Happy Face.” A slap in the face of realism? Or a realistic representation of a face that’s been slapped? That eye on the right: is it crying? Or does it have an “owie”? (Could it even be based on Albert’s growing understanding that her sister was born with a cataract?) Moving across the (virtual) canvas, we see an irregular form above the eye on the left. A cloud? A hematoma? Why should an ostensibly happy face cause us to ponder such questions?

The answer can, arguably, be given in two words: Thomas Kinkade. Yes, as if Albert’s worldview wasn’t tainted enough by 9/11 and the Teletubbies, she was also exposed to a Kinkade “painting,” reproduced in an advertisement (for Kinkade-branded merchandise) in “Parade” magazine, irresponsibly left around the house with no regard for the possibility of this impressionable young artist seeing it. It is entirely possible—and hideous to contemplate—that Albert is unaware of the almost universal disdain for Kinkade; after all, no two-year-old can be expected to have followed what criticism the art world has bothered to throw in Kinkade’s direction. How could she feel anything but disgust for her fellow man, believing that Kinkade is not just a commercial but a critical success?

We could well expect a less cynical approach were Albert to have read Joan Didion’s latest book, Where I Was From, in which Didion snarls that Kinkade’s “paintings” are “of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel.” (A perfectly appropriate analogy in this case, as young Albert possesses the juicy, sausage-like calves that to a bloodlusting witch would make Hansel and Gretel look, in comparison, like dried-out jerky.) Given this strong dose of grotesquery, and the idea that Kincade is accepted by the art world, any artistic sentiment could be expected to turn immediately to bold, raw, intentionally non-cozy images. Built atop Albert’s other influences, this Kinkade exposure may indeed have been the straw that broke the camel’s back and sent her fleeing to an artistic realm that William Blake might have inhabited had he been painting two centuries later and for “Mad” magazine.

Of course, after such contextual flights of fancy, we must always return to the work itself. And there is certainly room for growth, for maturity, for greater depth in Albert’s work. But if you’d viewed it as the artist had intended—for just a few seconds, before it was wiped out by magnetic eraser wielded by the artist herself—you’d have a better sense for its transitional, flash-of-consciousness intent, its post-MTV artistic-pulse sensibility. By photographing it, I have falsely imbued it with an intellectual permanence, and invitation for study, that were not mine to give. Young Albert is a highly experimental artist-in-transition, and only when she turns her full attention to other media—crayon, ink, clay, paint, motion-picture, holographs, mindoplastiform—will she offer us the kind of craft we can endlessly explore, that will give the true measure of her talent and ambition. dana albert blog