Sunday 17 January 2010

Movie 17: Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs

A young boys dreams of being an inventor, but all of his inventions go slightly and disastrously wrong. The young boy becomes a young man, but nothing much changes. The down he lives in is a sardine fishing port but falls to ruin when everyone realises that sardines aren’t very nice. Flint, the inventor, comes up with a new invention that will change water in to food but it fails to work due to lack of power.

While the mayor is unveiling a new “Sardine Land” to attract tourism to the town/island he takes advantage of the distraction to hook his invention to the power station. The thing turns in to a rocket, destroys Sardine Land and shoots in to the sky. While Flint faces the towns wrath it starts to rain…cheese burgers.

And from that you get an idea of how crazy bat shit insane this film is. Surreal doesn’t come close to some of the idea floating about. But you know what? It works. It’s wall to wall madness yes, but its well thought out madness. Little things from earlier are paid off later, there character development there’s a talking monkey that’s still just a monkey so his thoughts are far from intelligent, there’s nods at some of the stupid film conventions from a few genres.

Sure, this is a kids film. And kids will love it for its balls out nuttyness. But like all the good crazy kid shit, there’s plenty of stuff for those of us with hair on our bad parts. Well, if your still a little childish anyway. There’s a reason that adults can watch Spongebob, Ren and Stimpy and Animaniacs. Or at least I can. And Cloudy has the same ingredients.

Add to that the fact that there’s one hell of a cast in this. Well, side cast anyway. I don’t know enough about Bill Hader to rate him at all. Anna Faris I’ve always thought was wasted. She has talent but she makes some damned awful choices. But I guess she enjoys the crap she’s in so who am I to argue. But outside the main characters you’ve got James Caan as Flint’s closed off father, Bruce Motherfuckin Campbell as the Mayor, Mr T (!!!!1!!) as the towns cop who for some reason does a lot of flips around, Benjamin Bratt as the mysteriously talented camera man and NEIL PATRICK HARRIS (his name is capitalised now, right?) as the voice of the TALKING MONKEY! How can a film with the Barnster, Dougie Howser himself, DOCTOR HORRIBLE as a talking monkey NOT be good?

Well I can’t answer that question as this ruled. There might be a slight bump in the middle where it gets a little slow, alas my viewing was interrupted a few times so I’m not sure on that, but I enjoyed the hell out of this. As you can probably tell at this point so I can shut up.

Next up: The Happening. Which apparently sucks, and won’t have any talking monkeys.

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