The LEGO Movie

Before I compose my thoughts on hit animation The Lego Movie, you need to know a little about me. I quite like Lego. OK, that’s a slight understatement. You could say I enjoy Lego more than the average person. To be perfectly honest, I’m days away from my twenty-eighth birthday and live in a house in which the spare room is begrudgingly titled ‘the Lego room’ by my long suffering girlfriend. I love collecting the stuff, building it, looking at it and have even dabbled in stop motion animation. Hello everyone, my name’s Tom and I’m a Legoaholic. Attempting to put aside my love of the brightly coloured Danish bricks, I saw The Lego Movie and came to the conclusion that, it. is. awesome.

Bought to life via the minds of the wacky duo behind the insanely fun Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, The Lego Movie combines stop motion and GCI animation. Injected with copious amounts of wit and childish humour, it’s unleashed on an imaginative world, packed full of recognisable characters. One of Lego’s strengths in recent years has been its ever expanding universe, creating tie-ins with popular movie franchises. Added to the company’s long history of inventive subjects and sets, the film is given a blank canvas to fill with all manner of characters and creations. The movie’s central theme is that of creativity and individualism and no toy typifies this more than Lego. The main narrative is as unoriginal as a knock-knock joke but it’s surrounded by a colourful universe into which all manner of surprises and joke are crammed. Like a cardboard box surrounded by an acid trip, it’s expanded, melted, twisted and contorted until something hilarious plops out of the backside of a psychedelic aardvark.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s (21 Jump Street) directorial debut, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is a computer animated family pastiche on the disaster film genre. Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader) is an enthusiastic but sometimes misguided inventor who lives on a small island in the Atlantic Ocean which has come on hard times since the local Sardine factory closed its doors. The islanders are left with nothing to eat but the oily fish so in an attempt to create a different source of food for the islands inhabitants, Lockwood invents a device which turns water into food. While an intern weather girl Sam (Anna Faris) is visiting the island from New York to document the opening of the theme park ‘Sardine World’, Lockwood accidentally launches his invention into the sky. After a short time, food begins to fall from the sky and the islanders are overjoyed but soon things take a dramatic turn when Lockwood’s invention becomes sentient and creates food-weather storms which threaten the entire planet.

This is probably the most visually appealing computer animated film I’ve ever seen. The animation is bright, colourful and bold. It really is a joy to look at. Some of the animation such as certain foods and especially water look incredibly real while the human characters have an eccentric and unique look to them. There is also great detail given to the background. In one scene for instance, two children are seen squirming while two adult characters kiss. Although they can barely be seen, it’s a nice little bit of attention to detail.

The script is full of wonderful witty and quirky sight gags and the dialogue had me laughing out loud. The characters are great and well defined. I especially like the way the cop (Mr. T) says ‘Flint Lockwood’ as if it is three separate words. Other fantastic characters include Lockwood Snr (James Caen), a technophobe who only communicates in fishing metaphors and Steve the Monkey (Neil Patrick Harris) who Lockwood has given the power of speech to via a Monkey-translator. I think Steve is funnier than the dog in Up.

The story is obviously crazy but it works. I was enthralled by it and even though most of what was going to happen was pretty obvious, I went with it. Other than the actual premise of precipitating food, there isn’t really anything new here. Like most modern children’s films, there is a strong message which it delivers to its young, captive audience. The film shows the perils of overeating and also warns that actions have consequences.

The film isn’t afraid to make fun of itself but more importantly the disaster film genre. One scene in particular was very amusing. After seeing giant food land in Times Square, on the Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall of China and on Big Ben, a weather man pronounces that the storm is taking a strange course, focusing on the world’s major landmarks before spreading to the rest of the world. The film is full of little nods to disaster films.

Since watching the film, another thing that has amused me has been the discovery of what the film was called in non-English speaking countries. For instance in Poland the title was Little Meatballs and other Weather Conditions. In Russia it was Cloudy, possible precipitation in the form of meatballs. While I could continue to laugh at funny foreigners, I end by saying that Cloudy… is a unique and quirky film which has great visuals and a funny script. The story isn’t groundbreaking but the animation perhaps is.        

9/10

21 Jump Street

21 Jump Street is an action comedy based on the late 80s TV show of the same name. It stars Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum as recently graduated cops who are sent undercover at a High School with a drug problem. The two were never friendly at school but have become best friends as cops. While Jonah Hill’s Schmit finds that he fits in much better at his second chance at High School, previously popular Jenko (Tatum) find that things are drastically different from his days as the popular jock and struggles to find his place.

21 Jump Street was new to me having been too young for the original series and I don’t think it was even shown in the UK anyway. I found it very funny and enjoyed it immensely. It is a laugh a minute comedy with great characters and an attention-grabbing idea. The film is aware of itself but doesn’t take itself too seriously. One policeman even says of the Jump Street unit, “We are cobbling together something from the past and hoping no one will notice” in reference to the original show. As I said, the film is very funny and unusually for most comedies, the funniest parts aren’t in the already hilarious trailer. One scene where the central characters are on drugs had me in stitches. Ultimately the laughs to trail off towards the end in favour of resolving the plot but there are little details such as an uncomfortable looking paramedic which keep the humour going when in lesser films it might not be there.

The odd couple relationship between Tatum and Hill works really well. They seem like total opposites and you can imagine how they wouldn’t have got on in High School, but at the same time their later friendship feels real. Jonah Hill plays his familiar chubby loser character which has worked to varying degrees in the likes of Superbad and The Sitter but here is thoroughly successful. He also brings added depth to the character to make him smarter and more caring than in previous incarnations. I have never seen a Channing Tatum film before having been put off by his annoying name and face as well as the type of romantic films he’s appeared in, but in this I thought he was excellent. He has a great double act partner in Hill and plays the dumb meathead well. His comedic moments are also first-rate. I think he was funnier than Jonah Hill. Maybe this is where his career could end up when he’s finished walking on beaches at sunset?

The supporting cast were all great too. Ice Cube was outstanding as the ‘angry black police sergeant’ although I do wonder what 1992 Ice Cube would think about 2012 Ice Cube playing a cop in a mainstream Hollywood comedy. Dave Franco, who is looking more and more like his brother each time I see him was well cast as the arrogant, cock-sure popular kid and The Office’s Ellie Kemper was very flirtatious and funny as a teacher with a crush on Tatum. Rob Riggle plays a strange character but pulls it off well. There isn’t really a weak link anywhere in the cast.

I didn’t work out who the bad guy was before the reveal but the film had me laughing so much that I didn’t even think about whom it was and when we found out I didn’t really care. On the downside, some of the jokes feel a bit stretched and the love story between Hill and the school girl felt forced. Also, it was obvious as soon as she said “I’m 18” for no reason that it was going to happen. That’s the green light to tell the audience that although she’s in school its all legal and above board. There is a great cameo towards the end which both shocked and delighted my girlfriend and despite the formulaic Hollywood ending this is a successful comedy. I look forward to the sequel which was heavily implied at the end.

8/10