I sent my intern Brian to a screening of the new animated film Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs.Check out his review of the new film coming out this weekend.
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs is a little like the junk food that dances so mouth-wateringly across its screen. It’s not very substantial, and there are probably better things you could be consuming, but it’s fun, light, and very sweet.
It’s an irresistible concept, food falling from the sky. One of the reasons the book is so beloved is its breathtaking illustrations of food-as weather. The portrayal in the movie is somewhat less magical. Whereas in the book the town of Chew and swallow was a mythical town where food just happened to fall from the sky, the movie gives a scientific explanation and cause to the phenomenon. The setting is now Swallow Falls, an island town that previously revolved around sardines, but has since faltered with the world’s discovery that sardines are disgusting. The hero is Flint Lockwood, a would-be scientist whose inventions never seem to work. He still can’t take off his Spray-On Shoes from grade school, his Monkey Thought Translator only reveals how little monkeys think, and the less said about the RatBirds, the better. His latest creation is a device that converts water into food. After a bungled trial run the machine ends up in the stratosphere, and the rest is obvious.
Whereas the book was a whimsical fantasy, the movie is sci-fi/disaster parody. At first the citizens of Swallow Falls, later renamed Chewandswallow by the opportunistic mayor, welcome the delicious precipitation. After all they’ve been eating nothing but sardines this whole time. But eventually the process gets out of control, the food gets bigger and more unwieldly, into disaster territory. It all leads to an extended and exhilarating climax where every complication occurs and ever cliché is played with.
There’s no doubt Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs contains some tasty visuals. In 3D, the food jumps right off the screen. The movie has fun playing the idea of food as weather. There’s a delightful sequence with an ice-cream snow day, and that tornado? Spaghetti. At the heart is a simple human story about a guy trying to make his father proud. Flint may be an oddball to his fisherman Dad, but he made cheeseburgers rain from the sky. That should impress anybody.
While not as memorable as the book which loosely inspired it Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs is funny, visually impressive and overall entertaining. It’s worth seeing once, if not going back for seconds.
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