Attending a screening with radio’s sharpest movie critic, Kate Tyler, I’m surprised to say I enjoyed Sony’s animated picture, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, based on a children’s story that Kate tells me she used to read to her kids.
Cloudy’s not a great movie, yet it offers relatively innocuous family fare. Flint (Bill Hader), a creative child striving to become an inventor for the wrong reasons (pleasing others and being of service to the community) discovers as a young adult that one of his wild creations actually works and all hell breaks loose. It’s a visually fast-paced affair with the usual three dimensional (3D) tricks (no big deal) in an involving father-son story with a villain that echoes today’s authoritarian White House. Add an excellent subplot about a romantic interest (Anna Faris) whom Flint encourages to stop hiding her intelligence and a policeman (Mr. T in a fun vocal performance) that loves his work almost as much as he loves his son, who adopts a Tea Party attitude of personal responsibility and fuels the movie’s most exciting scene, and, despite an absurdist streak, you get a decent candidate for an afternoon matinee. Listen for a swipe at the Bush administration’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and other digs at Big Government in a generally entertaining slice of life.
