Cloudy With a Chance Of Meatballs is completely outrageous and seriously hilarious! I definitely wasn’t expecting to enjoy it as much as I did, but it was pretty much perfect. There are a lot of really good laughs to be had from this flick. They’re mostly cheesy and cliché, but they work every time. At the same time, the movie keeps a nice pace with some action spread around and nothing getting too slow for too long. And I’d say that the animation for this one is slightly above average for a non-Pixar CGI flick. It’s very good and definitely included a super cute and nerdy animated chick that I may or may not have a crush on now.
As with a lot of these CGI movies lately, the voice cast is pretty damn stacked. You’ve got Bill Hader, Anna Farris, James Caan, Andy Samberg, Bruce friggn’ Campbell, Mr. T (yup), Bobb’e J. Thompson (that kid from Role Models. I love this kid), NPH, Al Roker, and Will Forte. That’s a lot of great names right there! Loved it!
One of the best things about this movie is the disaster movie parody aspect of it. There were some very clear influences from and references to real disaster movies like Twister, Armageddon, Dante’s Peak, and The Day After Tomorrow. But the it’s done very well and not at all like what I’m sure Disaster Movie, which I haven’t actually seen, was. Instead of just throwing things in just for the sake of being funny, they use a collection of parodies that work together to create the “perfect food storm” which I promise you looked as delicious as it sounds.
Something that I got out of this movie that I didn’t expect though was the realization that I definitely prefer for movies that are based on books, even children’s books, to keep things very different. With a few exceptions, I prefer when movies take the basic idea of a book and then do something different with it. There isn’t much of a point to following the book exactly or even trying to get real close to it. A film will never be exactly the same as the book and when you try to get close, it’s those little differences that tend to take away from the film rather than add to it. And besides, if it’s exactly the same, what’s the point? To reach out to people who are too lazy to read? But if you just take that basic idea and sort of re-imagine it or simply use it as your inspiration, you have many more possibilities. You get to do something different and run less of a risk of completely ruining the book. You get to pay homage while still maintaining your own creativity.
Rating: A
Rango is an animated film that brings us something a little different than other animated films have brought to theaters, Johnny Depp having an existential crisis. This fact alone pushes the film closer to an adult movie than a kids movie, but luckily for children, this starts off heavy in the beginning, but then lightens up a little to a level more palatable to kids.
