Seller:Amazon Video On Demand Rating:79 reviews Sales Rank:392
Genre:Family Cinema Media:Video On Demand Running Time:91 Minutes
Theatrical Release Date:September 18, 2009 Release Date:January 5, 2010 Availability:Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Synopsis:
When Flint Lockwood's (Bill Hader) latest contraption accidentally destroys the town square and rockets up into the clouds, he thinks his inventing career is over. Then something amazing happens as delicious cheeseburgers start raining from the sky. His machine actually works! But when people greedily ask for more and more food, the machine starts to run amok, unleashing spaghetti tornadoes and giant meatballs that threaten the world! Now it's up to Flint, with the help of weather girl Sam Sparks (Anna Faris) and Steve, his talking monkey assistant, to find some way to shut down the machine before the world is covered in super-sized meatballs!
It's Raining Burgers and FriesOctober 7, 2009 John F. Rooney 9 out of 10 found this review helpful
"Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" is sunny with a clear opportunity for fun and entertainment. I saw it in 3D at an Imax theater, and the special effects were stunning in this animated film. A boy named Flint wants one thing out of life--it would be peaches and cream to be a famous scientist and inventor. When he's given a lab coat, he really goes bananas and invents some weird things. Later, grown up, how he acquired such an expensive and elaborate lab in his backyard is never explained. His widowed father (voice of James Caan) couldn't be nicer and more supportive. The dad's eyebrows are so thick and bushy we seldom see his eyes.
They live on an island in the Atlantic (not far from the letter A in Atlantic on a map) where the chief occupation used to be catching and canning sardines. The sardines were canned under the "Baby Brent" brand, and Baby is now a big overgrown oaf who wears diapers for promos. When sardines go out of style, off the radar for people's tastes, the gluttonous and avaricious mayor wants to make the island into a tourist attraction as Sardineland with Baby as part of the promo campaign.
Flint invents a machine that can seed the clouds and make all kinds of food rain down on the town. It starts with what looks like Big Macs. They are delicious and eagerly consumed by the residents, but they don't always come down neatly and splatter around like garbage. The kind of food varies as all sorts of goodies including rich desserts flop down. The amount of food and the size of the food proliferate so that a giant food dump held back by a dam has to be built.
A TV weather girl, Sam Sparks, comes to the town to record the cascading food, and she and Flint fall for each other like two peas in a pod. The mayor, as he gets fatter, promotes the food drops as a tourist attraction, and cruise ships loaded with hungry sightseers crowd the island. Soon, though, the food flood becomes a problem. The town is in a stew when huge helpings of oversized spaghetti and meatballs descend from on high. Flint and Sam have to go up in the clouds to stop Flint's machine from producing the food glut.
Indirectly the film could be an attack on overeating and bad eating habits. Also, it says, be careful what you wish for, because your wish may be granted. It's a very funny, exciting movie. Be on the look-out for a sequel. All ages will enjoy the food mayhem and have a feast with this one.
Great!January 13, 2010 Fab5(Pennsylvania) 3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This movie was one of the best animated movies that I've seen in a while. The humor was so refreshing and clever. It was so hilarious from the beginning to the end and the acrobatic Mr. T. cop was brilliant.
Fun film, an outstanding BluJanuary 4, 2010 Steve Kuehl(Ben Lomond, CA) 2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Another great BD by Sony that makes it a family event worth sitting together and exploring. The whole process takes about six hours to get through everything so probably a decent investment if you are sitting on the fence about cost.
The picture quality is flawless but admittedly you might have to set your color saturation/temp a little differently as the spectrum is very heavy towards the reds, oranges and purples (Up had a certain clarity definition for tons of colors, this is more a bright/soft saturation). The DTS sounded great and all of the channels got used extensively, reference the mayor's scene where he appears on each side of our main character several times in the lab - plus plenty of others. The supplements are both fun and informative and include:
* Splat Mode. Turning this option on allows you to watch the film while throwing varities of food onto the characters in the film. Both of my kids had fun doing this and lasted for a few scenes before they were ready for the next option.
* Food Fight game. This was actually enjoyable for me too - the kids each took turns and found themselves ready to achieve higher scores. Very similar to the old Centipede game as you try to shoot the food before it enters the machine, followed by a higher level where a horde of gummy bears descend toward your flying car.
* Commentary with the makers and Hader. The filmmakers are young and they really should stay behind the camera as their parts in the supplements were either corny or dry. But Hader adds a refreshing touch.
* Making of, 10:50 minutes. Almost a skipper as this one centers on the two makers showing their comic schtick in the kitchen, supplemented with some snippets about logistics, unfunny.
* Voices of, 11:50 minutes. Worth the watch and the best supplement for behind the scenes. Farris, Mr. T and Hader give some great interviews and insight.
* Extended Scenes, 2 @ 2:35 minutes. 1 in HD and 1 in lowdef. Added some cool info to the battle scene in the lab.
* Early Development scenes, 2 @ 5:39 minutes. The whole storyboard thing, skipper unless you are into it.
* Progression reels, 5 @ 7:51 minutes. Much more informative on the making of process/colorization. I would say watch this over the other making of - hands down.
* Cosgrove Sunshine Video. My daughter loves iCarly so we had to watch every option here. You can watch the video by itself or watch with a sing-along option, we did both. There is a brief making-of regarding the video which only had a couple brief interview snippets with Ms. Cosgrove but you know the story if you have a young daughter - we had to watch it twice.
* Make it Rain Food. A brief ad plug for helping the hungry.
* BD Live. Had a fair amount of material that is accessible via the Labyrinth [Blu-ray] and The Dark Crystal [Blu-ray] products, including another Jim Henson interview and the extra features from those BDs.
DISC 2: The Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Single-Disc Edition) item - and I verified everything is there as to avoid the mistake I made with the Up (4 Disc Combo Pack with Digital Copy and DVD) [Blu-ray] version. So all subs, languages and features are identical.
The movie plays great in the store and that Mr. T rendition of "Flintlock Wood" has overtaken "squirrel" (from Up) as the go-to catchphrase amongst the young ones. Region A/B/C, French DTS and Spanish language (we tried the French but the loss of Mr. T's inflection killed it fast) with English subs, SDH, French and Spanish subs also. Great film on a great Blu - enjoy.
Stupidly awesome and a total original.January 10, 2010 Anthony Spears(Chicago, IL) 2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is just a hilarious movie. I've watched this movie several times, and each time I watch it, there is something new and funny that I notice.
CWACOM is about an aspiring inventor, Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader), and his attempts to live up to the legacies of the greatest inventors in history. Flint is a grown-up child whose eccentric behavior is only bested by his enthusiasm to create the greatest invention mankind has ever known.
So far, his inventions have only been notorious for ending in disaster -- either personally (the spray-on shoes he applied in class, only to find out they would not come off), or for the entire town (the ratbirds that escaped and bred at an alarming rate).
His pursuit of this legacy is stymied by Earl Deveraux (Mr. T), a local cop who has his eye on Flint, and is half-superhero; and his Father, Tim (James Caan), a Sardine Bait & Tackle shop owner who is losing faith in his son's ability to invent anything meaningful, and wants him to work in the tackle shop. Tim is a very strong character, one of the funniest, and he does it without trying (he delivers some of the funniest "lines" in the movie without uttering a word.)
For his latest invention, Flint is working on the "Flint Lockwood Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator," or FLDSMDFR for short (pronounced FLI-dis-m'duh-fur). Once the FLDSMDFR works, water will go in the top, and the food of your choice will come out at the bottom. Flint just needs a little more power, and the town will no longer be stuck eating the sardines that the world recently declared to be "super gross."
Cloudy does not have a single dull moment. If you blink, you might miss one of the most hilarous parts of the movie, but there are so many of those instances that it's hard to say when that would be. It's chock-full of sight gags, wacky sound effects, stupidly great jokes & puns, and Flint Lockwood's nerdy attempts to impress weathergirl Sam Sparks (Anna Faris) with his intelligence, humor, or his claim to have an allergy in common with her.
The animation can only be described as Ren & Stimpy meets Warner Brothers, meets Muppets. You also have the hilarious Looney Tunes-esque sound effects, intentionally "lame" humor, ironic use of disaster movie cliche's (weather anchor Patrick (Al Roker) even observes that the storm is "following an unusual pattern of hitting all of the worlds major landmarks first, and then spreading across the rest of the globe,") and an awesome soundtrack by Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh to give it the 80's retro-futuristic tone. It has become one of my favorite movies of all time. It's purely entertaining from start to finish.
Smart, funny, movie the Whole family will love.January 12, 2010 A. Woodley(New Zealand) 2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is a hilarious story told on several levels and appealing to the whole family. It references various movies and advertisements from the last 40 or so years which keep you spotting things, is slyly humourous, and is wonderfully animated. My 6 and 7 year girls loved it, and so did I. Fact everyone does that I know. It has messages about everything, from bullying, to wasting food, to envirconmental issues - but all told with such good humour that they make you laugh too.
Story of a young mad inventor (he invented spray on shoes, you just can't get them off again) and a ex-nerd weather reporter) and small island whose sole industry is sardine fishing and canning, until the world realises that actually sardines are really yucky.
He invents a machine that can turn water into food - while subversively hooking the machine up to the towns power generator he inadvertently rockets it into the sky where it causes a cheeseburger storm. He realises that he can harness the energy by beaming messages to it via sattelite - now the town gets all its food rained down on it - and all the waste is scooped up and thrown into a town dump concealed behind a damn on the outskirts of town where they don't have to see it.
Of course things go wrong, there is a mad mayor, and everyone wanting their choice of food raining down and as the machine goes out of control it is up to an intrepid group to fly into the sky in a modified car (the difference between this flying car and the one he tried to make before, is this one has wings!) But the machine has got a life of its own (queue 2001 a space odyssey) and it looks like teh Death star (star wars). Even the food has gone bad - that is, the food which has been created tries to attack them - the attack of the roasted chickens was both wildly funny and mildly disquieting.
However, all works out ok in the end.
There are so many bits and pieces in this movie that add colour and perspective to it and pad it out into a truly great movie. The inventors best buddy is a Monkey called Steve and he has a thought analyser which expresses what he is thinking. Usually the words "Steve" or "Lick" or something equally banal. The town's previous star was 'baby Brent' who appeared on all the packs of Sardines in a coppertone style add. Now a grossly overweight man with a mullet haircut, he still strips off wearing a nappy for openings etc - only his body fat judders when he does.
I really loved the small animations which made the characters so expressive. The father doesn't really change expression - yet the animators have relied on really tiny alterations of body language to show what he is thinking. Quite wonderfully done.
I could go on about the cleverness, the colour, the texture of this, the rapid dialogue both at the forefront and in the background. But take my word for it, this movie is GREAT - and you will enjoy it immensely. i am off to buy the book next.
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