Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

"You may have seen a meteor shower, but I bet you've never seen a shower "meatier" than this."- Sam Sparks

So true. If you get hungry just from going to the grocery store, make sure you bring some snacks to this movie because delicious looking food is given screen time about 95% of the movie. Anything from hamburgers to ice cream to fortune cookies is shown as enormous proportions fall from the sky.


This movie is also loosely based on a book of the same name, but I can not compare it to that as I have not read it in a while, if ever. From what I can tell though, it looks like it takes the main idea from the book about food falling from the sky and then elaborates from there without ruining it like "Where the Wild Things Are" did.

The film follows inventor Flint Lockwood as he tries to create things that people will love. Finally he gets an opportunity when the city gets limited to eating only sardines, which as we all know, everyone hates sardines. Flint answers the problem with his invention called the Flint Lockwood Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator (the FLDSMDFR)! At the sight of hamburgers falling from the sky, the city praises Flint's name and the isolated island get much needed public attention of this event by Weather reporter Sam Sparks.

The story does go further but I will not ruin it for you because this is a great movie. If you do not find this movie believable, then you are not getting the point. Like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, its not supposed to be believable, just fun and quirky. The animation and effects are also really great and and to the theme of the movie. The voices of the actors are also well casted featuring Bill Hader(SNL), Anna Faris, and also Neil Patrick Harris(Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog) as a Monkey with a thought translator. Mr. T even had a part in the film as a policeman, which I found as funny because his character had the opposite haircut that he really has.


Normally I found that Pixar films have a great story and graphics(Up, Toy Story) while Dreamworks movies are just funny with good graphics(Shrek, Madagascar)but Sony seems to have mixed both of these studio's specialties into one great family movie. There is minor cartoon violence, no nudity(except for a man in a diaper played by Andy Samberg), and no bad language unless you want to count crabballs as swearing. My little brother went also and he loved the movie. He gave it a 100,059 thumbs up. Unfortunately I am not Roger or Ebert so I do not do thumbs up(not that I am a genetic freak and I have that many thumbs) instead I use cute little stars as my rating system. This is simply just a fun, creative little movie that was born for a family pizza night.


Note: This film is also featured in 3D in some theaters but I did not see it in that format as I saw it much later than it was released.