Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

A really funny children's book by Judi Barrett, and illustrated by Ron Barrett. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs is about the town of Chewandswallow where instead of going to the store to buy your food it rains down from the sky. Instead of rain or hail things like pancakes and orange juice would come from sky. Things were pretty good in the town of Chewandswallow until the weather started to act up, for instance a giant pancake shuts down school when in lands on the roof of the school building. There is a sequel called Pickles over Pittsburgh.

This children's story was adapted to a CGI 3D film in 2009. The film was directed by Chris Miller, who directed the teen sex spoof Extreme Movie and writes for the sitcom "How I Met Your Mother". I have not seen either of those last two things but I do encourage you to check out this film if you want to watch something light and silly with a healthy dose of morality.

The story details the struggle of a young man who wants to Do Good on his own terms while pleasing his father. They live in the small town of Chewsandswallow where nothing grows and so everyone eats fish. His father just wants him to fish, like he does. The boy is sick of eating fish but really loves science. The boy is an inventor with big aspirations. In fact he even has a couple of sweet posters of his heroes hanging up in his room (Thanks to Tem42 for reminding me about the posters!). When the boy invents a machine that makes food fall from the sky he quickly becomes the talk of the town and gets rich (while hurting his father's livelihood).

Naturally the boy has a love interest, a girl who is delightfully not stereotypical in that she wears glasses and is totally smarter than the boy. Ironically, said girl is voiced by Anna Faris who, although she appears to be nothing more than the typical blonde-haired comely film star, actually has some interesting titles to her credit—in addition to one or two where she seems to play a parody of her image. 

The other characters are voiced by such big names as Mr. T, Bruce Campbell and Neil Patrick Harris. The inventor boy's father is voiced by James Caan (Sonny from The Godfather).

Despite not having read the book first, I saw it in the theater and bought the glasses, so to get the full effect of meatballs falling from the sky. After the movie I was dismayed to find bins collecting used 3-D glasses to be cleaned and reused. I decided to keep mine for my next foray into the world 3D cinema (which has yet to happen & now I no longer even have the darn things, so oh well).  Overall, It was fun— a real heartwarming story. I think that you should definitely watch it (or read the book) if you are looking for some light entertainment that is not trite.