Let’s face facts – explosions are great. No one is denying that in the least, but sometimes they just get a little… mundane. Really once you’ve seen the White House explode under an alien disaster beam or get rammed by a giant tidal wave, you don’t really need to see that again. It’s been covered. So let’s take alien beams and tidal waves right off the table and start thinking about some of the more ingenious ways Hollywood has wrecked the place.

For its first  sequel, the newly-minted Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs franchise has decided to take things in a slightly different (and tastier) direction. Instead of putting Flint Lockwood (voice of Bill Hader) and his lovely lady Sam Sparks (Anna Faris) back into harm’s (meatball’s?) way in another town besieged by giant food, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 has organically grown its fresh story, piling on to the logic of the first film in a clever new way. In the new film, Flint has joined The Live Corp Company, run by his idol Chester V (Will Forte) and his “highly evolved orangutan with a human brain” Barb (Kristen Schaal), and he’s happily working away, unaware that his disaster-prone FLDSMDFR machine is actually still running, and it’s evolved quite spectacularly. The FLDSMDFR is now churning out food-animal hybrids, food-imals, and as totally adorable as some of them may be (seriously, they’re cute), not all of them are just around to be squishy-cute (like the tacodiles probably!), and they’re taking over Flint’s island hometown of Swallow Falls. USA Today got the exclusive on some adorable new images (via ComingSoon) of some of the food-imals in the new film, which you can check out after the break. While they are all both cute and inventive, if we had to choose a favorite, it’s easily those pudgy, butter-tongued baked potato hippos (they are called, wait for it, Hippotatomus). Good God, those things are charming. There are also delicious looks at Bananostrich, Cantalope,

Get your eyes (plates?) ready to feast on a delicious new Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs sequel that’s apparently so tasty that almost all of its lead voice cast has returned for seconds. End food puns. Sony Pictures Animation has today announced, quite unsurprisingly, that the voice cast for Cloudy 2: Revenge of the Leftovers will include “Bill Hader as inventor Flint Lockwood; Anna Faris as brainy weather girl Sam Sparks; James Caan as Flint’s technophobic dad, Tim Lockwood; Andy Samberg as Swallow Falls’ local celebrity “Baby” Brent; Neil Patrick Harris as Steve the gummy bear-loving monkey; and Benjamin Bratt as Sam’s mild mannered cameraman Manny.” Joining the cast is Will Forte as “world-famous super-inventor” and head of the Live Corp Company Chester V (Forte played a background character named Joe Towne in the first film), Kristen Schaal as Chester’s talking orangutan Barb (essentially, she’s his Steve), and Terry Crews as local cop Earl (a role that was first played by Mr. T, who reportedly declined an offer to return). The film will return us to the trials and travails of young Flint as he continues on his quest to be recognized as the genius that he is, with his seemingly shutdown food machine back to haunt him.

Though the idea of making a movie about Legos initially sounded like a really bad one, once Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller pitched their take on the material it actually sounded pretty promising. Could a movie about little plastic blocks tell an engaging story that teaches children an important message? That’s a question that we won’t be able to answer for quite some time, but thanks to a report from Variety we now know a whole lot more about what this upcoming Lego movie will look like. First of all, the project’s working title has now been confirmed as the project’s official title – that would be Lego: The Piece of Resistance. Thematically this makes sense, as Lord and Miller’s initial comments said that their main character would be an average guy living in Lego City who has to unlearn the town’s strict rules of always building things according to the instructions and figure out how to create something wholly original. It would seem that The Piece of Resistance’s protagonist is being set up as something of a revolutionary; both figuratively and literally according to new information from the Variety report.

21 Jump Street ain’t no Hot Fuzz, Airplane, or Phil Lord and Chris Miller‘s Cloudy with a Chance of Meetballs. This TV adaptation is no satire or parody. 21 Jump Street is a straight-faced comedy, with only a few pokes at the action genre. Miller and Lord never go further than pointing out the TV adaptation/remake craze and how awesome it is to have doves in your action movie. But like Cloudy with a Chance of Meetballs, 21 Jump Street is a late coming-of-age story. Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) are both nerds. When they join the police force, they want their lives to become Lethal Weapon, Bad Boys II, or Red Heat. As Flint Lockwood did in Cloudy, the duo have to grow up. Here’s what directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller had to say about not making a parody, pro-nerd messages, and invoking the cop genre style:

For the longest time Legos were pretty much the best toy to give a kid who liked to build things or who was showing the first sparks of creativity. They were just a big pile of multi-colored, plastic blocks when you started out, but with a little bit of ingenuity and elbow grease, a kid could spend an afternoon turning a pile of Legos into anything. That’s all changed over the course of the last ten years or so though. These days Legos are all about branding themselves as tie-ins to pre-existing properties. They’re about following a set of instructions to turn those plastic blocks into an X-Wing, just like you saw in Star Wars, or building them into Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, just like you saw in Harry Potter. It’s long felt like those of us who prefer Legos to be a means of creative expression and not a means of further worshipping the work of others have been left out in the dark. But in film directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, we may have a couple of allies. These are the guys who made Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and the upcoming 21 Jump Street, and their next project is going to be a movie about Legos. I know that sounds nauseating at first, but you should hear them out. Their ideas actually sound pretty dang great.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly thing about movies. No big deal. We begin tonight with a new image from The Great Gatsby featuring Leo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan, Tobey Maguire and Joel Edgerton looking quite dapper. One can only imagine how much more dapper this will all look when we see it for the first time in 3D. I like the word dapper.

What is Movie News After Dark? It hasn’t been around for an entire week, so to be honest it’s not really sure. It knows that its primary function is to collect movie news links, but then what? Is there some sort of witty commentary that must be placed before and after said links, or can it just dump the links below? In the haze following its ruckus celebration of America and the death of colonialism, it seems to have forgotten how to do this. Maybe its like riding a bike… with no hands… while holding sprinklers and drinking from a beer helmet… Lets hope so, because that’s all it knows how to do at the moment. Perhaps one of the most overlooked and delightful animated films of the last decade, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs has earned its place atop my Netflix Instant watch queue. I watch it what feels like weekly. And rightly so, as it’s a vibrant display of Sony Pictures Animation’s ability to carve out own unique place inside the shadows of Pixar and Dreamworks. So the fact that Cloudy is getting a sequel makes me happy. Time to go watch it again.

You’ve stumbled upon Circle of Jerks, our sporadically published, weekly feature in which we ask the questions that really matter to our writers and readers. It’s a time to take a break from our busy lives and revel in the one thing that we all share: a deep, passionate love of movies. If you have a question you’d like answered by the FSR readers and staff, send us an email at editors@filmschoolrejects.com. What character do you see yourself the most in? Thanks. – Donald B.

The good news is that Phil Lord and Chris Miller are on a new project. The bad news is that it’s a giant commercial for plastic squares.

Rob Hunter loves movies. He also loves working with NASA on a top-secret project designed to solve world hunger by making tofu cubes fall from the sky. This week… mormons, immigrants woes, 3D Meatballs, and more.

While 2009 may have been a weak year for movies overall, animated films shined in a way they haven’t in a very long time.

Yesterday, Variety published the list of films that have made the cut of 20 for the race to get the Best Animated Feature Oscar. Allow me to break this down for you…

The numbers are in from a surprising weekend at the theaters, with two movies outperforming a lot of the expectations out there by a considerable margin. Seven million for Paranormal Activity? Thirty-five for Couples Retreat? Are you kidding me? No.

It was once again Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs which dominated the weekend box office, with all the new releases Surrogates, Fame, Pandorum and all the rest coming up well short

This week, we have three movies in wide release — Fame, Surrogates and Pandorum rolling out, and they stand the best chance of knocking off Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Or they may not.

I often say it is “feast or famine” at the box office, and as has been the custom for the past several weeks, the trend held true as Cloudy with a Chance of Meetballs won the weekend with a healthy $30.1 million haul.

Some action movies make you drive a little faster once you leave the theater; some dramas make you re-think your life and donate money to the Red Cross. Which movies make you hungry?

Kevin Carr takes a look at this week’s movie releases, including Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The Informant! and Jennifer’s Body.

The Fat Guys take a look at Jennifer’s Body even though Fox (that’d be the studio, not the actress) didn’t screen it for them. They also chew on Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, help Matt Damon squeal in The Informant! and avoid Love Happens like the plague.