Food From The Sky? I'm Game!

Inspired by Ron and Judi Barrett's beloved children's book of the same name, Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs follows inventor Flint Lockwood (voice of Bill Hader) and brainy weathergirl Sam Sparks (voice of Anna Faris) as they attempt to discover why the rain in their small town has stopped while food is falling in its place. Meanwhile, lifelong bully Brent (voice of Adam Samberg) relishes in tormenting Flint just as he did when they were kids, and Mayor Shelbourne (voice of Bruce Campbell) schemes to use Flint's latest invention--a device designed to improve everyone's lives--for his own personal gain.

Chances are, any movie with the word "meatball" in the title isn't going to be high art. So Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs landed into theaters with the advantage of low expectations. As it turns out, however, the 3-D animated film based on the children's book dishes out oodles of good, goofy, family-friendly fun. Directed by animation newcomers Phil Lord and Chris Miller, it features the voice of "Saturday Night Live" cutup Bill Hader as a bumbling, small-town inventor named Flint who creates a machine that can turn water into whatever food its operator requests. When the darn thing gets accidentally blasted off into the troposphere, all heck breaks loose. The first instinct of the townspeople is to throttle him. (Mr. T is a highlight as the town's no-nonsense top cop, who has a singular way of sensing impending disorder: "My chest hairs are tinglin'!") But then Flint's machine begins sucking in the moisture from the atmosphere and raining food onto the town. From his lab, Flint can order up a doughnut downpour, a hail of ham -- whatever his neighbors are hungry for. Since the townsfolk, to that point, had subsisted solely on sardines, he goes from goat to hero.

Of course, things eventually go haywire -- otherwise there really wouldn't be much of a need for a movie -- and it's up to Flint to save the day. Beneath the stacks of pancakes and ice-cream blizzards, there's a half-hearted message about being true to yourself, but the message isn't really the thing here. Lord and Miller's silly story is. Not that they've made a perfect movie. A lull in the story briefly threatens its momentum and it succumbs to what has become an epidemic in animation films: wasting talent. Benjamin Bratt, Lauren Graham, Will Forte and real-life weather guy Al Roker all have tiny roles, but the most most glaring example is Neil Patrick Harris, as the voice of a monkey who, speaking through a syntehsized "thought translator" gets only about a dozen lines -- many just one-word sentences. Here's the funny thing -- and this probably says more than anything about how well-assembled Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs is -- even with plates of spaghetti splashing out into the audience, the movie was still loads of fun. This gets a 4 on my "Go See" scale with a cherry on top.