Here is a link to Amazon UK to get this BLU RAY at the best price:
"…Recipe For Success…" – Cloudy With A Chance Of
Meatballs on BLU RAY
"Have you ever felt like you were a little bit
different?"
It took nearly three years to bring 2009's "Cloudy With
A Chance Of Meatballs" to the big screen - and after watching 86 minutes
of its digitally realized anarchic genius - I can safely say it was money well
spent. Not only is Columbia/Sony Animation Pictures baby a visually sumptuous
watch - it's properly funny for its entire duration, genuinely touching when it
needs to be and endlessly inventive in both character and dialogue. It also
boasts something rarer than a conscience in the UKIP party - a moral centre
that's not stylized schlock - but a story that's loaded with pressing
observations about avarice in our increasingly chubby consumerist society. All
this and it's effortless cool too. The audience was both smiling and applauding
when the credits rolled in our cinema.
Flint Lockwood (voiced to perfection by Bill Hader) is a
nerdy school kid - always inflicting his scatological inventions on his
parents, his classmates and the good townsfolk of Swallow Falls - a tiny island
situated on the map beneath the 'A' on Atlantic. Swallow Falls is the Sardine
Capitol of the World - a town that lives on and off the shiny oily silver mites
- and Flint's Dad (of Tim's Sardine Bait & Tackle Shop) is proud of it.
Flint's father is hard working for sure but since Mom died 10 years back has
become safe and unadventurous and prone to mumbling fish metaphors that don't
make any sense (a stunning turn by James Caan).
Dad also lives in terror of his son creating yet another
'disaster' like his tin of Spray-On Shoes (to solve the epidemic of untied
shoelaces) or his genetically mutated RatBirds (rats with wings that steal kids
lunches), his Hair Un-Balder Potion (that produces a woolly mammoth of a man's
skull instead of an even rug) or his Monkey Thought Translator Machine. But
these are the least of the town's problems - because soon the world discovers
that 'Sardines Are Super Gross' - and all life in Swallow Falls goes grey and
into terminal decline...
Now grown up - Flint is in his homemade computer hub
situated in the Water Tower above a Porta-Dump cubicle in the garden. With his
official lab coat on (given to him by his Mom) and with his trusty pet monkey
Steve by his side (spouting monosyllabic words through the thought translator)
- Flint's working furiously on his ultimate invention - a device that will win
back the town and make him beloved of everybody. It's a 'Flint Lockwood
Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator' - a device that will turn
water into any food you want. "Calibrating flavour patterns, radiation
matrix secure, uploading cool machine voice..." Flint enthuses as he slaps
the keyboard again - his huge bug eyes bulging with madcap inventiveness as he
gazes at his dietary lunar-lander.
Meanwhile - the fame-hungry Mayor of Swallow Falls (a
fabulously sly voiceover by Bruce Campbell of The Evil Dead and Bubba Ho-Tep
fame) tries to reignite interest in the town by opening a boring theme park
called SARDINE LAND with Baby Brent as it's star attraction (a child who used
to be on every Sardine tin but is now a dumb boor with a huge midriff). The scheming
Mayor gingerly tells the gathered populace "without consulting anyone,
I've spent the entire town's budget on this thing..." But again an
over-enthusiastic Flint ruins everything. Needing 17,000 Mega gigajoules to get
his machine to work - he plugs into the island's power grid and wrecks the
whole stage show. To make matters worse - a cute and super-perky WNN Weather
Channel Intern called Sam Sparks (great vocal work from Anna Faris) has come to
town with Manny her pint-sized cameraman to report on the island's re-launch.
But along with a humiliated Dad Tim - she watches the mayhem of yet another
Flint 'disaster' - Swallow Falls loses its 'F' (along with everything else) and
Flint's rocket-propelled food maker disappears upwards into the sky. A mortified
Flint hides down by the Docks with his pet monkey Steve...
But then something magical happens - up in the atmosphere -
the chugging device is sucking in clouds and starts to spit out slices of
cheese and cucumber and then a bap - and the next thing you know it's raining
fully-formed cheeseburgers on Swallow Falls. Now realizing that BIGGER IS
BETTER - the Major wants Flint to run the machine three-times-a-day for 30 days
until the cruise ships arrive and Swallow Falls conquers national TV as a
culinary pig-out destination.
In the meantime Flint's new machine becomes food-request
central for the locals - Eggs, Toast, Orange Juice, Bacon, Ice Cream, Fudge,
Jelly Beans. Cue jokes about "...poultry in motion..." and
"...you may have seen a meteor shower, but you never seen a story meatier
than this!" And the gastronomic overload is kept in check by a
'DangeOMeter' in Flint's lab that will tell him if things are getting out of
mutating hand. But of course they do. Greed begins to take over - and soon a
spaghetti twister is sucking up the buildings and children and a 'Vegas All You
Can Eat' food storm brought on by the hideously bloated Mayor threatens to
engulf every major city in the world unless Flint can stop the gluttonous
madness...
The voices of Mr. T as Earl the Town policeman and Andy
Samberg as Baby Brent add hugely to the great fun set pieces - but it's
Hollywood veteran James Caan with his furrowed eyebrows and croaky mumble who
actually steals the show. His speech to his son Flint at the end of the film is
both funny and emotional - a wonderfully written double whammy for a cartoon.
And the visuals are of course fabulous. Not only does the
food look good enough to eat - there's over 50 different kinds portrayed with
mouth-watering detail - a Nacho Cheese Hot Spring, A Marshmallow Warehouse, an
Anti-Gas Tablet Shop, Mouth Funnels to catch the food as it falls from the sky.
The massive pancake, butter knob and syrup that dollops on an entire house - is
stunning to look at. A cherry lands on top of a leftovers food mountain and the
damn holding it all back finally bursts...
The 'making of' featurettes show you how the scenes are
built up and the painstaking details applied - how to make an olive crush a
building - what does a banana look like when its rolling down a street - how a
burger in a bap falls apart when it hits the ground - how do you capture the
texture and colour of Flint and Sam romancing in a giant Jell-O Castle...
Audio is DTS-HD Master Audio: English 5.1 with an English
Audio Descriptive Track - while Subtitles are in English For The Hard Of
Hearing and Hindi.
Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and adapted by
Rob Greenberg from the Judi and Ron Barrett children's book of the same name -
"Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs" was put onto BLU RAY in early
2010 as a 'Combi Pack' with the DVD (and in a snazzy card slipcase). A 'Cloudy
2' sequel appeared in cinemas September 2013 and the BLU RAY for that came out
in February of this year.
"The world needs your originality Flint..." his
mother tells him. I agree.
In 2014 - you can pick it up the first movie for under a
fiver in the UK. And I'd argue that this is one hydro-genetic mutated chow-down
you should definitely find room for in your mental restaurant.
Pass the Strawberry Ripple...
