A Soufflé of a Film

Rating: 8/10 (21 September 2009)

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (PG, 1:30) — SF, 2nd string, original, OSIT romantics
As Edmund Gwenn, best known for his role as Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street, lay on his deathbed, a sorrowing visitor sympathized that dying must be hard. "No," replied Gwenn, "dying is easy; comedy is hard!"
So too with trying to get any respect for comedy in movies. Take Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, for instance. It's a constant delight, chock-full of visual and verbal humor, but because it's (a) animated, (b) skiffy, and (c) not intended to be a (here lower voice an octave) "serious work", nobody will take it seriously. Too dang bad! A soufflé may be light, fluffy, and not very filling, but it too is tasty and requires careful attention to keep it from being ruined.
The plot premise (based on the book by Judi and Ron Barrett) is slight: wacky tinkerer invents machine that makes food from water vapor. That would be Flint Lockwood (voiced by Bill Hader), and the food-making machine with the unpronounceable acronym is just the latest in a long line of gadgets, gimmicks, and goo he's been dreaming up since he was a little kid with a wall full of Tesla posters and a supportive mom.
The movie starts with the question "Have you ever felt that you were a little different?", ostensibly referring to Flint but inescapably hooking all the guy geeks in the audience. Not long afterward, the gal geeks get their role model in the form of Sam Sparks (Anna Faris, world's best sport from the various Scary Movies), intern for the Weather News Network who's been hiding her brains beneath a bimbette facade. In a conventional movie, the mousy little office assistant would take off her glasses, let down her hair, be transformed into, say, Maureen O'Hara, and win the heart of the guy. Here it's done in reverse, as Sam puts on big googly glasses, does her hair up in a ponytail, and lets her intellect shine thru, thereby winning the hearts of Flint and all the nerds like me.
The island community of Swallow Falls (hidden behind the "A" in Atlantic) has fallen on hard times, as demand for its primary product, sardines, has fallen off with global realization that sardines are, well, gross. The town, led by ambitious and semi-scrupulous Mayor Shelbourne (Bruce Campbell), is trying to reinvent itself as a destination for sardine tourism and has enlisted its poster boy, Baby Brent, the Gerber's icon of sardines, to help cut the ribbon on Sardine Land — except that Brent (Andy Samberg) is now a hulking, narcissistic playboy. Nonetheless, things are going OK until Flint takes advantage of the occasion to plug his foodmaker into the town's bazillion-gigajoule power station and ends up rocketing thru the festivities, trailing calamity and disapproval in his wake, until the machine shoots off into the stratosphere, leaving Flint nervously facing a galaxy of lowered eyebrows.
His gruff dad, Tim (James Caan), suggests that maybe the inventor thing isn't working out all that well and that Flint should settle in as the junior partner in the family sardine bait and tackle business. And our lad seems resigned to that fate ... until food starts falling from the sky and he becomes (temporarily) the town hero. But the food keeps falling. And it's getting bigger. Oh-oh.
OK, some quick stuff. There are ratbirds. Steve the monkey speaks English but thinks only monkey thots, particularly about Gummi Bears. Flint has the world's best-developed treehouse. It contains the master control for the foodmaker, including a seldom-consulted Dangeometer. Sam has a serious peanut allergy. Manny the Guatemalan surgeon/pilot/engineer is humble and taciturn but the most competent immigrant in world history. Unwarranted optimism abounds, as embodied in the phrase "This probably won't explode." Mr. T gets a paycheck. And I haven't even touched on the solution to the world's greatest problem: untied shoelaces.
It's in Imax and 3-D. Are they worth the extra price? For something as much fun as this, why stint? (I'm sure Mayor Shelbourne would agree.) Comedy may be hard, but when it really works, enjoying it is easy.