Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs (2009)

The bar is set low, for me, with these sorts of films: I go not because I desperately want to see them; and not because I particularly want to see them; but rather because the local cinema wouldn't let me take my seven-year-old daughter in to see District 9 even if she wanted to see such fare (she doesn't). But this movie made my inner critic-motherfucker just wither away and die. It's delightful, lovely to look at and very very funny indeed.

Most of this redeeming funniness is the script, which is good on character (I particularly loved the way the nerdy main character manifested his nervous energy in a series of goofy play-acting tics, karate-moves and auto-running-commentary) but especially good on the level of words. I loved the credit-crunchy premise ... that a small Atlantic island whose entire economy depends upon sardine fishing, collapses when the world as a whole suddenly wakes up to the fact that sardines are 'majorly gross'. When the young inventor Flint Lockwood invents a machine for turning water into food, and after said machine zooms accidentlly into the clouds, the sky rains vituals, starting with hamburgers. ('This tastes considerably better than sardines!' cries a delighted somebody in the crowd). Of course it malfunctions, and some of the graphics towards the end have an extraordinary, positively Max Ernst quality to them ... the revolting, bodily hideousness of Too Much Food very nicely brought out. But the heart of the movie is its sheer hilarity. I laughed a lot. Lily loved it too, although she said that some of it towards the end made her feel a bit queasy-sicky in her tum, which (the sheer profusion of junk food on display is gagging). I take that to have been an intentional thing on behalf of the filmmakers.