Leftovers: CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS 2

A major asset of 2009’s zippy pleasure Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs was its sense of surprise. It was an unexpected treat in the form of a zany hilarious contraption of imagination and heart. The bouncily, colorfully animated story of Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader) and his food-generating invention (the FLDSMDFR) that goes very right, then very wrong, is a mile-a-minute joke machine running on slapstick, puns, and running gags of every kind imaginable. The premise was wacky – weather that rains food onto a goofy small town – and the breakneck pacing and deep down heartfelt characterization only helped elevate it into a glorious cartoony experience. Now, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 is not and maybe never could’ve been the total surprise delight of the original. But there’s almost enough diverting silliness here all the same. It is in many ways more conventional and subdued. To say it has half the laughs sounds like an insult until you remember the overwhelming number and variety of jokes that were packed into its predecessor.

Starting exactly eight minutes after the end of Cloudy, the sequel finds Flint and all the citizens of Swallow Falls awestruck by a famous inventor and C.E.O of multinational tech corporation Live Corp. helicoptering into their wrecked food-covered town. Chester V (Will Forte), as limber as he is rich, pays to relocate the townspeople while his crews of researchers clean up the island. Eagerly accepting the offer, the characters move on with their new lives. Six months later, though, clean up hasn’t made much progress because the FLDSMDFR somehow survived the first film and has generated an entire island ecosystem of mutant food. Meanwhile, Flint is having trouble getting promoted out of his entry level position at Chester’s company, so he jumps at his boss’s offer to travel back to island and find the rogue invention and shut down the jungle of “Foodimals” before they can reach the mainland and wreak chewy havoc.

Off Flint goes, with his dad (James Caan), meteorologist girlfriend (Anna Faris), and pet monkey (Neil Patrick Harris), as well as a cameraman (Benjamin Bratt), a chicken-loving bully-turned-friend (Andy Samberg), and the town’s policeman (Terry Crews). A sort of pun-heavy riff on Jurassic Park, the plot of Cloudy 2 finds our intrepid protagonists trudging through a jungle of fruits and veggies, running into all manner of monstrous (and cute) food creatures: smiling berries, grumpy pickles, elephantine melons, a gargantuan “taco-dile,” and hamburger spiders with French fry legs and poppy seed eyes. I especially liked a brief glimpse of a snake with a slice of pie for a head and a Twizzlers tail. Unlike its predecessor's joyfully overcooked disaster movie spoof, this is more of a light kiddie adventure with a dusting of smile-worthy winks to keep things lightly comedic. The characters are appealing and the visual design is delicious. It’s the screenplay cooked up by John Francis Daley, Jonathan M. Goldstein, and Erica Rivinoja (with story credits for Chris Miller and Phil Lord) that could’ve used more time in the oven.

Though even at its most obvious, there are elements that tickled me. The creatures are imaginatively designed and good for fun puns. I enjoyed the not-so-subtle dichotomy of organic goodness versus processed factory food evil that simmers underneath the proceedings. Live Corp is in the tradition of deceptively benign movie corporations that hide evil intentions in cavernous rooms populated by anonymous white lab coats busying themselves with unknown scientific tinkerings. I mean, Chester V’s assistant (Kristen Schaal) is an orangutan with a human brain implanted inside her own. He’s clearly up to no good, even without the most heavy-handed mustache-twirling foreshadowing in the opening scene. (Given the way the rest of the movie plays out, I wonder if that moment was put in specifically to defuse what would’ve otherwise been a little plot twist.)

But compared to the densely hilarious framing and sturdy script of its predecessor, Cloudy 2 feels thinner than it should. (Compared to, say, Turbo or Planes, however, it doesn’t look so bad.) The plotting plays out more or less exactly as you’d expect, with largely easy lessons that don’t really threaten to become anything too emotionally impactful. Pair that with the sparser joke population and the whole thing bakes into a flavorful concoction that could use a bigger does of sugar to get truly tasty. Still, there’s enough imagination in the creatures and silliness in the execution to make the time pass amiably enough. It is, after all, not every day you see a movie with a subplot in which a man teaches a bunch of pickles how to fish. 

Coming to America: THE DICTATOR

In The Dictator, co-writer and star Sacha Baron Cohen gives himself a massive satirical target. How easy is it to make fun of the excesses and egregious views of a megalomaniacal tyrant? His dictator character is General Aladeen, the oppressive ruler of the fictional country of Wadiya. He’s presented as a wealthy, fatuous, violent, misogynistic racist. But, you know, the funny kind. The funniest thing about the movie is how it manages to slip around the target and just about miss it completely simply through the nature of the way the movie is structured. For this conceit to work, Cohen needs to have us either rooting for the downfall of Aladeen or hoping he learns the error of his ways. That’s not exactly what Cohen, collaborating for the third time with director Larry Charles, has in mind here. They want to use the fictional horrible dictator to critique our own society. And they get there, eventually, for one pretty good scene, but they sacrifice the potential for a more successful comedy in the process.

The plot of the movie concerns the dictator’s trip to America to address the United Nations. Once there, right-hand-man Tamir (Ben Kingsley) hires a racist private security guard (John C. Reilly, whose small role is presented almost in full in the trailer) to take the dictator out. Once out of the way, he can be replaced with a stupid lookalike (also Cohen) who will sign an agreement to democratize Wadiya and hand over its oilfields to multinational oil corporations. That’s a funny premise, but instead of running with that, following the innocent doppelganger (a la Chaplin’s great, gutsy 1940 send-up The Great Dictator) and the shadowy backroom deals Kingsley makes with American companies – he essentially sells the country away from one uncaring overlord to another – the film thinks it’s far funnier to follow General Aladeen. He escapes assassination, but ends up beardless and thus (apparently) unrecognizable on the streets of New York.

Cohen gives the character a lot of corrosive satiric energy, but he’s used in a series of broad jokes and sequences that crisscross the line between merely tasteless and out-and-out offensive with staggering frequency. Aladeen is constantly making awful comments about women and minorities, casually referencing rape (not funny at all) and terrorism (sometimes funny), and generally behaving entitled and rude to everyone he meets. This can be a good source of humor. Indeed it is in a very funny scene on a helicopter tour in which he’s talking in the Wadiyan language about his new 2012 model Porsche 911 and scares a couple of tourists. But the entire thrust of the plot is to see him back in power. It’s built into the very core of it all; that’s his entire goal in the film. He schemes with an expatriate Wadiyan nuclear scientist (Jason Mantzoukas) to interrupt Ben Kingsley’s scheme and return his homeland to its proper oppression under his rule.

Aladeen doesn’t learn any lessons along the way, unless you count the love, or something like it, he grows to feel for the earnest fair-trade grocer played by a strangely muted Anna Faris in an unconvincing and distracting subplot. He remains an unrepentantly nasty guy, up to his old tricks of intimidation and casual cruelty, which would be fine if the film weren’t intent on softening him (like with that pesky would-be romance) and losing focus with bizarre digressions of the kind you’d think a savage 83-minute satire wouldn’t need. One surreal gag starts with a grocery-shopper giving birth in the store when the owner asks Aladeen to help. He tries to text his Wadiyan co-conspirator during the birthing and ends up with his cell phone up inside the poor woman. This is just mind-bogglingly unfunny and way off topic. It’s this and moments like this that causes the movie to go minutes on end without a single laugh in sight. And when a movie is so short, these laughless stretches really add up quickly.

It’s just that Aladeen is hard to care about, unlike the endearing qualities that balance out the tone in his previous starring roles. In Cohen’s early film efforts in gonzo comedies Borat and Bruno (also directed by Larry Charles) he fearlessly inhabited deliberately irritating characters from his Ali G HBO series, one a brusque, exaggeratedly prejudiced reporter from Kazakhstan and the other a clueless, vain, gay, Austrian, would-be celebrity fashionista. In each case, he set out across America, causing immediate culture-clash friction by sending out these outlandish characters to interact with real people. Those films contain healthy doses of potent cultural satire, and have plenty of moments that just feel miscalculated, but on some fundamental level, seeing people react so oddly or so blatantly discriminatory towards these characters puts us on their side. The Dictator is almost entirely miscalculation. I just couldn’t care about Aladeen getting his throne back, even at a grating satiric level, and if the film’s plotting is to work, it hinges to some extent on just such investment on the audience’s part. (What about that poor lookalike? He’s pretty funny, but glimpsed in only two or three scenes.)

Where the film’s satire really lands is in a climactic speech in which General Aladeen extols the virtues of a dictatorship. He says that under that form of government all wealth can be concentrated in the top 1%, you can give your buddies tax breaks, the media can appear free but really be controlled by a few powerful men and their families, you can fill your jails with predominantly one race and no one even cares, and etcetera. It’s a powerful left-hook of a political statement, very strong, very funny, and very cynical. But it’s a sharpness that comes too little too late in a movie that has spent a considerable portion of its run time messing around with gross-out gags and purposefully offensive material that just doesn’t add up. It keeps all its most interesting material on the sidelines where it’s least useful to making this an enjoyable experience. It’s a blown opportunity, a satire that aims for such a big target it’s not just disappointing, it’s downright depressing that Cohen largely missed.

You'd Better Shop Around: WHAT'S YOUR NUMBER?

What’s Your Number? is a safe, coarse, and standard romantic comedy trying mightily, and mostly succeeding, to reign in, sand down, and otherwise hide the impressive talent of its lead actress, Anna Faris. Otherwise, the film would float off into infinitely stranger and more delightful directions. With her big eyes, plucky physicality, and total commitment to potentially embarrassing concepts, she’s like a bodacious blonde second coming of Lucille Ball. There’s little wonder why her best role is as the lead in 2008’s The House Bunny, in which she gets to play a fired Playboy bunny who finds work as a sorority mother. It allows her to match the weirdness of a concept and then double down on a hugely appealing bobble-headed bizarreness.

Since the R-rated comedy has been abundant and largely terrible this year, I guess it’s some kind of refreshing that What’s Your Number? is only predictable and mushy instead of actively ugly or distressing. But Farris isn’t allowed to elevate the proceedings. The movie doesn’t insult your patience, only your intelligence and your expectations. It’s all so standard, but at least it’s kind of briskly laborious in its set up. Faris plays a woman we first meet getting brushed off by her latest beau. He was her nineteenth lover. Later that day, on a lonely subway ride after getting fired, she reads a magazine article that claims women who have been with twenty or more men will not get married. Since she’s going to her younger sister’s engagement party that night, marriage is on her mind. She heads out to a bar with her sister (Ari Graynor) and her gal pals to celebrate and after a night of tipsy talk about her nineteen exes, she goes home with number twenty.

The next morning, Farris kicks him out and realizes then and there that the magazine had to be right, so her future husband is one of the previous twenty. She runs into the man (Chris Evans) who lives across the hall and is instantly repulsed, although she agrees to help him hide out from his latest ex, still lingering in his apartment, in exchange for his help tracking down her many exes. It’s a strained circumstance that forces them together and it’s all too obvious how this story is going to end. They don’t seem to like each other very much, but whom are they fooling? They’re attractive, likable performers who are the two above-the-title leads of the film. How are they not going to end up together? It’s hardly a spoiler when the movie is practically spoiling itself.

On the predictable road to the big dramatic race to a conclusion in which they finally realize that they are just perfect for each other, we are presented a troupe of mostly recognizable faces as the exes. We briefly meet Chris Pratt, Mike Vogel, Martin Freeman, Andy Samberg, Thomas Lennon, and Anthony Mackie. They each get a little potentially funny moment or two but it usually passes by without the burden of laughter. Mackie gets one line that made me snicker a little and Pratt has a few as well, but the structure of the film discourages any real connection with the characters who are simply personified obstacles for the plot that keeps the two most likable people apart, denying their true feelings in true rom com fashion.

The relationships and circumstances of the various exes are ill defined, the central flaw in the picture. It doesn’t help that the direction of Mark Mylod is merely functional and the script by Gabrielle Allan and Jennifer Crittenden feels a product of copious compromise. And though she’s thoroughly restrained by it all, Faris kept me interested. There’s a sense that at any moment she might break away from the clutches of mediocrity and surprise. She plays with accents in a fun scene. She slams into physical comedy with exuberance. She throws herself into the role. But the role, and the film, has far too little for her to work with. The film’s a pleasant but dull, predictable missed opportunity, nothing more, and nothing less.

Quick Look: TAKE ME HOME TONIGHT

It’s Labor Day 1988 in Michael Dowse’s Take Me Home Tonight. There’s a big suburban house party being thrown by and for recent college grads as a sort of impromptu early high school reunion arranged by those who were in the popular crowd. Topher Grace goes hoping to impress his high school crush (Teresa Palmer) even though his MIT diploma has so far only landed him a minimum-wage job at Suncoast Video. (Remember those?) His sister (a curiously muted Anna Faris) is there as well because her long-time boyfriend (a strangely low-key Chris Pratt) is the host. This is all affable enough, at times, though Dan Fogler as Grace’s sloppy best friend seems to be in an entirely different movie, falling all over situations of poorly executed slapstick and incongruous sex-and-drugs gags. It’s a frustrating, distracting underbelly to an otherwise pleasant movie that takes place all on one night, mostly in and around this one party overflowing with 80’s music in the speakers and 80’s fashion on the extras. I appreciated the movie’s good-natured romanticism, which is presented in ways that are totally cliché, but at least it’s not a self-conscious and rancid 80’s nostalgia comedy like last year’s Hot Tub Time Machine, a movie that I find curdling in my memory. It’s not making fun of the 80’s or using its period-piece trappings to poke easy fun with anachronistic winks. If it weren’t for the modern cast it could almost pass as a minor 80’s rom-com. But “minor” is the key word here. Though there’s much to like and a little to tolerate, the movie is never more than a minor diversion. It’s sweet, but never charming. It’s likable without ever really getting around to being more than forgettable. It belongs to a certain category of movies that exist in the mind of the viewer just until the credits roll and not too long after.

Short-order Weather: CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS (2009)

I held off on seeing Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs when it was first released. It looked loud and frantic and 3D to boot, not at all what I wanted to see happen to a sweetly whimsical, albeit mostly plotless, picture book about a small town that finds itself the center of a most unusual weather pattern that precipitates food. The mostly lukewarm critical reaction confirmed my suspicions and I stayed away despite the intriguing positive statements from a handful of trusted sources. I recently caught a screening (in 2D, just fine for me) of the movie at my local dollar theater and have been in disbelief ever since that the movie isn’t at all what I thought it was. Instead of an aggressively banal example of non-Pixar computer animation, it’s one of the best times I’ve had at the movies in 2009, a sheer delight from beginning to end. It’s a sprightly and energetic film with nonstop (often running) gags and jokes that are actually funny, never just quickly stale pop culture references. It’s unashamedly a cartoon, think more Looney Tunes than Snow White, with appealingly rubbery visuals. It’s a bouncy, energized, stylized slapstick motion machine that refused to slow down too often, not even to let me catch my breath between laughs.

The opening credits announce, in the location usually reserved for the director’s name, that the movie is “A Film By A Lot of People” and so, fittingly, I have much praise to lavish upon the talented people who created such a great time. The directors, Chris Miller and Phil Lord, do a fine job helming such a meticulous endeavor as a computer animated film and making it seem effortless and spontaneous. As the movie rockets forward it becomes a good-natured parody of disaster movie clichés, all the funnier for appearing in multiplexes so close to 2012. The unobtrusive celebrity voice work, rather than distracting, actually compliments the story with such funny people as Bill Hader, Anna Faris, Neil Patrick Harris, Bruce Campbell, Mr. T and Andy Samberg proving they are wonderfully expressive comedians even when restricted to voice only. The cast carries the rapid-fire vocal comedy as a team of capable animators provide the adorable squishy textures and rounded shapes of the characters and setting, creating a convincing cartoon universe with beautiful food-covered vistas popping with gorgeous colors and sparkling light.

Only stepping back from the experience do I start to realize that the plot itself, including the Big Lesson to be gleaned, is hardly new (though the “it’s good to be smart” message is certainly welcome) and the emotions evoked don’t go quite as deep as Pixar has conditioned us to expect. But that’s not what the filmmakers wanted to do here, was it? This is a movie that doesn’t tread entirely unfamiliar ground in its arc and yet spins wildly inventive imagery and versatile humor around it. None of the small doubts I have ultimately take away from the experience of seeing the movie in action which creates a state of bliss so complete that’s it’s hard to shake. And why would you want to shake off a feeling so good?

Observe and Report (2009)

For years, directors and writers like Kevin Smith and Judd Apatow have been making spectacularly raunchy films that cloak their edginess with soft-hearted sentiment, a technique that has worked quite well quite often. Audiences are used to it now; it makes the edginess palatable, or at least tolerable. With Observe and Report, Jody Hill, following up his overrated first feature The Foot Fist Way, removes the cloak of sentiment leaving all the edges exposed and sharp. This is the bleeding edge of comedy. It casts the loveable Seth Rogen as a violent, bipolar, racist, sexist, gun-nut mall cop. A mall-cop movie could be made into typically middling Hollywood fare – indeed it was just a few months ago – but here it’s uncomfortable and even downright scary. Hill doesn’t just push up against boundaries; he tries his hardest to knock some down in a movie as volatile and unstable as its protagonist.

Throughout the film, Rogen’s mall cop attempts to hunt down a flasher who has been terrorizing customers in the mall parking lot. There are plenty of funny moments of comedy both broad and subtle during the investigation courtesy of a fine ensemble. Celia Watson plays Rogen’s perpetually proud (and drunk) mother. Ray Liotta is a tightly-wound cop who has a low tolerance for Rogen’s antics. Michael Peña puts on a hilarious lisp to play Rogen’s second-in-command. Anna Faris is an alcoholic party-girl who works at the makeup counter who goes on a pity date with Rogen and supplies a very funny scene wherein she spies Rogen’s psychotropic medication. “I didn’t know you partied like that!” she says. He answers “Oh, I do…every four to six hours.”

The date scene ends on a shockingly dark note which helps tilt the movie into darker territory which continues with a parade of ugly emotions and shocking violence. In fact, during the final sequence of the movie, there are two of the sickest shocks I’ve ever encountered in a comedy, especially a sudden moment of violence used as a sort of brutal punch-line that caused me to gasp and literally drop my jaw. It has to do, in part, with the filmmaking of the sequence which plays out in a dreamy slow-motion that suddenly slaps back to normal speed, with little warning, as fast as a bullet out of a gun. The movie gave me a kind of emotional whiplash as my stomach knotted and sank as laughter was cut off in my throat.

Rogen does a fine job in the lead. He never winks at the camera to let us in on the joke. He’s a harsh, irritating character with severe problems and delusions which are off-putting to say the least. Which leads to the question: is the film being ironic or is it complicit with its main character’s startling and unsettling actions. The finale plays out in a squirmy deadpan that borders on congratulations. Is the ending in Rogen’s head, as some have suggested, or is it homage to Scorsese’s film The King of Comedy which follows a similarly unlikable character and sees his dream realized? It may be both (the latter has been explicitly referenced by the director in interviews), but that would give the movie more credit than it deserves, would assume that Jody Hill had control over the tone of the film. At first, I feel the film’s too contradictory and sloppy for me to credit Hill with any control over how the material plays out, but then I step back and begin to wonder if Hill did know what he was doing.

There are certainly great artful flourishes to the visual style that I wasn’t expecting, great energetic editing and fine song choices too. There’s humor and moments of darkness that exist in even the same moment, a testament to at least some degree of skill on Hill’s part. That I laughed and cringed equally may mean that the movie succeeds in the way it was meant too. There’s a great forward leap in filmmaking ability here for Jody Hill, a massive improvement over his first feature. This one doesn’t exactly work – I don’t think Hill pulls off his thematic intent in quite the way he thinks he is and I get the impression he’s often pushing boundaries only because he can – but I applaud Warner Brothers, and all the actors involved, for putting out a movie so singular and strange. This is a movie that is a bit irreconcilable, but it’s a thrilling attempt to do something out of the ordinary, an attempt that’s often fascinating, even entertaining, to watch in the moment and fun to try to puzzle out afterwards. This is a movie that, if nothing else, is full of vitality and complicatedly alive.