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| Mark R. Leeper... |
 Posted: Tue Oct 06, 2009 1:08 pm |
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CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS
(a film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: Yet another digital 3-D animated film comes
out this year. Giant food is falling from the sky
in this un-engaging children's adventure. After UP
set a standard for character development, CLOUDY WITH
A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS falls short. There is not much
logic and not very interesting characters in this
story suggested by (but not taken from) the children's
book of the same name. Phil Lord and Christ Miller
share writing and directing credits. If you are a
little nauseated by the thought of a place like
Candyland, don't go to Swallow Falls where food falls
on you from the sky. Rating: low +1 (-4 to +4) or 5/10
Flint Lockwood (voiced by Bill Hader) lives on Swallow Falls, an
Atlantic island whose major industry is sardines. But sardines are
not popular any more, and the island is in economic crisis. Flint
does not want to go into the dying sardine business. Instead he
wants desperately to be an inventor. Sadly, none of his inventions
ever seem to work as intended. Flint has become the island's joke.
With an echo of OCTOBER SKY, Flint's father has little interest in
his son's inventions and just wants his son to go into the sardine
business. Flint thinks sardines are icky. His new invention turns
water into any food requested. Tell it what food you want and it
is there, not unlike a "Deep Space Nine" food replicator.
For some strange reason the food replicator can fly like a rocket
and ends up sitting motionless over the island replicating
requested food and dropping it on the island in giant food storms.
(No, I mean the storms are giant, not the food. Okay, as the
trailer shows that comes later.) Now Flint has a successful and
even well-loved invention and the town is grateful. But this is
only the start of the situation. Free food in of any type and
quantity is not so good as it seems at first. Some people are
growing very fat. The film has themes of healthy eating; a theme
of people who are afraid to show their intelligence; a related
theme that is it okay to be a nerd; father-son relationship themes;
and more--all on a very superficial level. Just when you start to
dwell on one of the film's messages, an action scene comes along to
distract the viewer. The pace of the films is fast, but the story
seems to make less and less sense as it goes along. It could have
some intelligence if it concentrated on fewer distractions. Maybe
it could have expanded on one theme like the father-son
relationship. But the film seems intent on hiding the intelligence
it might hold.
CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS is full of imaginative food
adventures and visually it is quite creative with visual puns with
edibles. And in digital 3-D these are even nicer to watch. But
once the audience is used to giant foodscapes they do not add a
whole lot.
Somehow the logic of the film just does not work for me. Nobody on
the island seems to notice that Flint has created some potentially
world-shattering inventions, least of all Flint himself. One would
make it possible to understand the language of higher animals, in
this case a monkey. (Didn't we see the same device in UP?) One
creates instant, flexible, permanent, spray-on insulation. One
keeps a craft aloft in the stratosphere indefinitely above a
certain point in the North Atlantic. And one--of particular
interest here--could feed all the hungry of the world using nothing
but water. Any one of these inventions would have fabulous
applications. There are only three problems holding this genius
back. One is that like Wile E. Coyote, Flint gives up on each of
his inventions after the first setback. He has no imagination as
to where his inventions will find their greatest application. Phil
Lord and Chris Miller do not appear to have given any thought at
all to the implications of the situation they have set up. The
character and those situations apparently do not appear in the book
of the same title by Judi and Ron Barrett and were created
exclusively by Lord and Miller.
The film first tempts us with the food and then rubs our noses in
it. A year ago this might have been considered a better 3-D film.
But films like UP have raised the bar and this one does not measure
up. I rate CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS a low +1 on the -4 to
+4 scale or 5/10.
Film Credits: <http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0844471/>
What others are saying: <http://tinyurl.com/cloud-meatball>
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper at (no spam) optonline.net
Copyright 2009 Mark R. Leeper |
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