Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009)
Directed by Phil Lord
Inventor Flint Lockwood creates a machine that makes clouds rain food, enabling the down-and-out citizens of Chewandswallow to feed themselves. But when the falling food reaches gargantuan proportions, Flint must scramble to avert disaster. Can he regain control of the machine and put an end to the wild weather before the town is destroyed?
11 connections found
View:
11 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs to
These scenes reminded me of a truism relayed in the fabulous 2009 film Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs: “You can’t run away from your own feet.”
Co-directors and writers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, whose growing collaborative résumé includes the movies 21 Jump Street and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and TV’s How I Met Your Mother and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, weave themes of creativity, independence and cooperation into a story that runs on a crazy rail of nearly nonstop pop-cultural riffs and satirical references, understated comedic nuance as well as explosively absurd visual magic, and just the right tones of subversive cool for a movie that needs to appeal to children as well as parents.
Thankfully, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have created a film every bit as imaginative, colourful and cleverly constructed as their plastic inspiration.
Typical of Lord and Miller (whose previous outings including adapting a much-loved children’s book with Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and updating a cult television series with 22 Jump Street), The Lego Movie is packed wall to wall with wicked one-liners, cracking visual gags, loaded pop culture references and a plethora of cameos.
Sight gags, pop-culture references and inside jokes zing by lickety-split, a problem with Lord and Miller’s first feature, “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.”
A movie based on LEGO building blocks seems like a far-fetched premise for a feature film - but thanks to the imaginative powers and heart of directors Chris Miller and Phil Lord ( Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs , 21 Jump Street ) The LEGO Movie is one of the most clever, original and fun adaptations of a toy or game ever put to screen.
That can be attributed to the vision of the directing and writing team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, probably best known for the two Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs films.
Roxanne Ritchi (voice of Tina Fey) is a TV news reporter whose cameraman Bernard (voice of Jonah Hill) has a serious crush (a device overused already in "Scream" and as recently as "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs").
Roxanne also could have afforded to be a little softer as a heroine, sort of like Anna Faris' lovable reporter from 2009's wonderful " Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs ;" for a woman who claims that you "shouldn't judge a person from what's on the outside," she comes off as hypocritical in the way she's always shrugging off nerdy Hal's initially harmless, sincere advances.
Sony Pictures Animation put out Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs earlier this year, in 3D – the story of a brilliant inventor with no social skills who made a gizmo that turned weather into food.
Further, news reporter Roxanne is borrowed from the spunky weather girl of Sony's Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.
Only on the surface do Phil Lord and Chris Miller — co-directors of the PG-animation “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” — seem ill matched to the frantic, foulmouthed R-rated comedy of “21 Jump Street.”
Directed by Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs’ Phil Lord and Chris Miller, their influence has a lot to do with how funny the film is, playing on action stereotypes and referencing other genre staples to great effect.
The tone adapted by directors Chris Miller and Phil Lord (2009â??s goofy-brilliant Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and the cult cartoon â??Clone Highâ??) is a proudly juvenile one, treating the material as something of a post-modern playground without relying solely on winks to inch the film past its requisite conflicts (ex: Schmidt can never close the deal with either perps or ladies; Jenko canâ??t even recall his Miranda rights).
Directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, whose last film was the magnificent Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs , 21 Jump Street combines improv-heavy surrealism with high-octane action and some seriously offensive language to create a film quite unlike anything else you're likely to see this year.
Hill shares story credit with screenwriter Michael Bacall, but what little actual story is here serves only as the setup for an anything-goes approach by the cast and directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (making their live-action debut after collaborating on the animated hit "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs").
Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who teamed up on the engaging animated tale Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs in 2009, don't fare too well in their live-action debut.
Advertisement
Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have a talent for spinning gold out of franchise dross: They turned a slender children’s picturebook into Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs , revived a disposable late-1980s Fox TV procedural for the inspired buddy comedy 21 Jump Street , and earlier this year, made The Lego Movie seem as if the merchandising cart wasn’t driving the creative horse.
Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller make good on their background in animation (Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, The Lego Movie); the action sequences, unlike those of the first movie, have a sustained kinetic energy, and the throwaway gags are delivered at such breakneck speed that this occasionally evokes old Looney Tunes cartoons.
Phil Lord and Chris Miller—who, in addition to 21 Jump Street, have also made two triumphant animated films, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and The Lego Movie —stuff every scene with an excess of verbal and visual gags that pay homage to a wide range of comic influences.
A pack of credited writers, and the co-directors of the first film, those “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” guys Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, conjure up good, quick footed and foul-mouthed fun.
Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the minds behind Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and The Leo Movie, spun a shoddy ‘90s cop drama and turned it into comedy gold.
Animated hit “Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs” (2009) made filmmakers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller a known commodity, “21 Jump Street” (2012) pummeled any notions of a sophomore slump, and this year’s “Lego Movie” catapulted the duo to Hollywood darling status.
The screenplay is by Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman, the former of Lord and Miller, the team that brought us the wildly inventive Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs movies, The Lego Movie , and the delightfully bonkers Jump Street reboots; Rothman contributed to the script for 22 Jump Street .
The masterminds behind “The Lego Movie,” the “Jump Street” films and “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” have turned out one of the most memorable of the “Spider-Man” movies with “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.”
But the screenplay, by Phil Lord (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, the LEGO movies) and Rodney Rothman (22 Jump Street), is smart, funny, and mature, treating viewers with respect rather than pandering to them.
The two have previously given us “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs,” “The Lego Movie,” and other slices of unexpected pop-movie bliss.
Lord and Miller, as many might know by this point, were the minds behind snappy, witty, and self-reflexive bits of entertainment like 21 Jump Street, The Lego Movie, and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (not to mention television’s beloved and dearly missed Clone High, which gets a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it visual shout-out here).
Screenwriter/co-producer Phil Lord (The Lego Movie, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) takes the classic Spider-Man lore and puts it into a blender on high speed.
Why, then, is the character design of Giulia’s father wholesale cribbed from the design of Flint’s dad from Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs?
Giulia’s one-armed fisherman father (reminiscent of Flint’s father in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs ) and his Mussolini-mustachioed cat are two highlights amongst the rich tapestry of characters.
Disney/Pixar’s animated “Luca” is “The Little Mermaid” without the heart, “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” without the laughs.
After being pleasantly surprised with 2009's "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs," I was hoping that the same sense of invention and humor that made the first entry in this series so charming would be present in the follow-up.
Advertisement
It's the directorial debut of veteran animator Clay Kaytis ("Frozen," ''Tangled") and storyboard artist Fergal Reilly ("Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs," ''The Iron Giant"), who are working off a script from "The Simpsons" alum Jon Vitti.
Despicable Me, one of those non-Pixar animated efforts that actually turns out to be good (happily, we’ve seen an upswing in the number of such worthy achievements, as evidenced by the likes of How to Train Your Dragon and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs), is a witty, congenial lark that obviously won’t have the staying power of Toy Story 3 but serves quite nicely as a pleasing placeholder in the cinematic summer of 2010.
Despicable Me falls somewhere in the middle range of animated films targeted at kids, featuring none of the delirious wit of How to Train Your Dragon and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and certainly not the outright Pixar genius, but also absent the mindless pandering and obvious plotting we all fear in children's films.
Forget comparisons with Pixar, hardly a fair first-time benchmark; it’s closer to the nimble work of Sony’s guys on the underrated Monster House and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.