Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Might contain spoilers.
A pretty good movie. I enjoyed all the amusing visual humour. While the animation of the humans is adequate, the star is the delicious-looking food and impressive weather. The cast is reasonably good, especially Bruce Campbell’s fantastic Mayor Shelbourne.[1] The music is very good, particularly the excellent ‘Meatier Shower’ with its memorable motif.
There are many disgusting elements, though. Part of it might be commenting on our modern food habits, although I don’t want to read too much into a story that doesn’t engage fully with the subject. It’s clear, at least, that the image of the food being created by the machine in the end is deliberately offputting.
No one seems to have any sense of hygiene whatsoever: food falls to the ground, people pick it up and eat it, even after swimming or walking around in it. The man putting his arm down in the nacho cheese hot spring and eating a chip barely five inches from his armpit made me gag. I also have to assume jumping through the wall of a house made of jelly would suffocate you to death, good as it might look.
Tim Lockwood is not a good father. He should never have had a child. However many mistakes Flint might make and whatever his flaws, Tim simply has no idea how to communicate with him.
It’s a clever conceptual reversal to have Flint prefer Sam in her nerdy avatar, but I can’t agree
with his assessment in practice. At any rate, the references to the supposed genetic
composition
of water made me laugh.
- Apologies to Andy Samberg, but Baby Brent is repulsive and his ersatz roast chicken suit is nauseating.↩