NYTimes.com
Sarah Owen
December 17, 2010

It’s easy to paint Alex Eylar as your typical nerd. He keeps a list of every movie he’s seen since 2001 — 1,627 films and counting. He has an annual pass to Disneyland. And, at 22 years old, his massive Lego collection — an estimated 30,000 pieces — can’t exactly help things with the ladies. But Eylar has found a way to merge his dorky pursuits into an online art project that’s turned him into something of a celebrity, at least on Flickr. That’s where you’ll find over 20 of his carefully constructed Lego tableaus, each of which recreates famous movie scenes, from the 007 gun barrel sequence to the shower scene from “Psycho.”

There are different strategies and special effects — dry ice creates the mist for his “Harry Potter” scene, and there’s a touch of trompe l’oeil in his “Inception” hallway.

“Everything I do starts in a Word document on my desktop, full of ideas of things to build,” he says. Eylar is from from Oakland, Calif., and he’s currently earning a master’s degree in screenwriting at Chapman University in nearby Orange. The wry use of Legos is nothing new — see work by Christoph Niemann, Nathan Sawaya and Sean Kenney, for starters — but Eylar isn’t aiming for the artistic elite as much as he’s interested in wowing other Lego geeks, who meet regularly at conventions. “The next is going to be Brickworld in Chicago,” he said. “That’s the big one — the mecca.”