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Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
By Alonso Duralde

When it rains, it pours maple syrup (and hotcakes and bacon and eggs) in the new 3-D animated comedy "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs," a movie overstuffed with enough sight gags to delight children - if the young audience members at a recent advance screening are any indication - while throwing in healthy dollops of wordplay and absurdist humor to keep their adult chaperones entertained as well.

Flint Lockwood (voiced by Bill Hader of "Saturday Night Live" and "Superbad") has spent his life trying desperately to invent something - anything, really - that will make him a legend alongside Edison and Tesla. Even after early failures like spray-on, no-tie shoes (turns out they can't be removed) and a monkey thought translator ("Lick!" and "Gummi bears!" makes up most of what goes through his simian sidekick's mind), Flint remains determined to come up with one great discovery, even though his disapproving father Tim (James Caan) wishes his son would give up on science and come work with him in the bait shop.

The invention that finally earns Flint some recognition - and puts his tiny island town of Swallow Falls on the map - is a machine that transmutes water into food. Of course, getting the necessary wattage to turn the thing on requires Flint to hook it up to the town power supply, which sends the device into the clouds, thus making it rain cheeseburgers down from the sky.

When the food first starts plummeting to earth, directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller parody that stock Spielberg shot where someone looks up into the sky, eyes wide and mouth agape; in this case, the film cuts to almost every single person in town doing that before we finally get to see the shower of snacks.

The Weather News Network ("Whether there's news or not!") sends perky intern Sam Sparks (Anna Faris) out to cover the strange, edible weather over Swallow Falls, but her bubbly blond exterior hides a nerdy, Doppler-radar-loving soul that Flint falls hard for. Their budding romance is threatened, however, by mutations that are dropping ever-larger hot dogs and steaks on the town

When a spaghetti twister, accompanied by meteor-sized meatballs, looms on the horizon, can Flint stop his machine from flooding the world with foodstuffs?

Adults may find themselves tensing up for the inevitable disaster that Flint's food-creating machine is leading to, but if you can put that aside - much less real-world issues like spoilage or famine - there's plenty in "Meatballs" for audience members with driver's licenses to enjoy.

The pop culture references (I spotted nods to "Dial M for Murder," "Mystery Science Theater 3000" and even "Welcome to Mooseport") are subtle enough - and fly by so quickly - that they won't make the movie dated by the time it hits DVD. There's also lots of under-the-breath asides and blink-and-you'll-miss-'em sight gags that will reward multiple views.

And kids will want multiple views, I suspect, even at home without the 3-D glasses. ("Meatballs" uses the technology to make things go further toward the horizon rather than out to the audience's faces, so it should play just fine in two dimensions.) Just make sure your moviegoing budget includes some serious concessions money - all that flying food is liable to rouse your appetite.

'BRIGHT STAR'
AMBLE POETRY
By Sean Chavel

Two hundred years ago smart but ordinary people who had the gusto, if not luck, to fall in love could probably have never anticipated that there would be audiences in the future that would have sighed tenderly over their love affair. John Keats, the 1800's poet of such treasured works as "When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be" and "Ode to a Nightingale," fell in love with Fanny Brawne who became not just his idolized love but his influential muse. Bright Star, which has the makings of a splendid romantic docudrama has instead been made into an inert tea-and-costume recital.

Director Jane Campion's early films "An Angel at My Table" and "The Piano" had a lyrical grace, and while she still has a fancy-quirky way with actors, the swooning passion seems to have abandoned her work that is now replaced by compact mini-series aesthetics - filmmaking that is sluggish and static but not sweeping. Her work has become the very opposite of sumptuous. This void certainly doesn't help "Bright Star" which would have benefitted from some good old-fashioned romantic lushness like the kind we felt, I don't know, say "The Time Traveler's Wife" which wasn't groundbreaking deep but at least had larger-than-life grandeur in it. Campion in contrast doesn't craft romantic tapestries anymore, she stages Social Studies lessons.

All this shouldn't undermine the glow in Ben Whishaw's performance as poet John Keats, a poet who passed through his lifetime penniless before being renowned as one of poetry's greatest (previously I loved Whishaw's work as the lead in "Perfume: A Story of a Murderer"). When Whishaw says such lines as "You attract me, and I don't know why... All women confuse me, even my mother," it does not sound like a script reading, instead to its best intentions it sounds as the words are honestly flowing from his heart. Paul Schneider, as fellow poet Charles Brown, is equally impressive as the snob poet-artist who loves women less than his own pretentious superiority over them. Unfortunately Abbie Cornish, who is supposed to be the womanly heart of the film as Fanny Brawne, has become a liability in whatever film she pops up in. "A Good Year" and "Stop-Loss" are among her forgettable American film credits.

When I reviewed Abbie in the enthralling 2005 Aussie gem "Somersault," and then "Candy" a year later, I predicted a star in the making. Now she acts with a capital A, except there is no poetry in motion with her. Everyday people, like you and me reader, have the capacity to move nonchalantly and mindlessly through our dutiful chores. Abbie always seems to over think gestures in her acting (watching her hold a teacup looks stressful), as a result, she is always fussily laboring in her scenes. When I see the tension in the brow of her forehead, I want to supply her with a tranquilizer to placate her.

John Keats is an interesting subject for a film, and there is certainly some wonderful if short-lived moments in the film, but whatever its undefined aspirations are "Bright Star" amounts to merely average. In preparing for this review, I almost wanted to further study director John Madden and star Gwenyth Paltrows' work in "Shakespeare in Love" to understand what they got right, and compare how Jane Campion and Abbie Cornish have woefully gone wrong. But critical priorities demand that I reserve my heavy thinking lifting for my next film review.

The Informant
By Theron Porrill

Of all the film directors working today, Steven Soderbergh's career is probably the most enviable. For every mainstream Hollywood movie the director makes, he often follows it up with an offbeat independent project whose production costs couldn't even match the catering budget for any given "Ocean's Eleven" film.

What's clear is that Soderbergh can deliver box office hits (the "Oceans" series, "Erin Brockovich," "Traffic,") he seems to be just as content making smaller, less-seen, films' such as this year's earlier release, "The Girlfriend Experience." Soderbergh cleverly uses his mainstream clout to continue his evolution as a independent filmmaker, which began back in 1989 when "sex, lies and videotape" virtually came out of nowhere and started a revolution that led to independent films becoming more, well, mainstream.

Soderbergh's newest film "The Informant!" is something of a hybrid of the prolific director's "One for them, One for me" filmmaking philosophy. While not revolutionary by any means, it's terrifically entertaining in its own modest way.

Set in the early '90s, the film tells the true, yet unbelievable, tale of Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) a biochemist working for agricultural conglomerate named Archer Daniels Midland. Whitacre informs his bosses that ADM is being blackmailed by a Japanese competitor to the tune of $10 million, but when the company contacts the FBI, Whitacre secretly informs them that his bosses have become engaged in a price-fixing scheme.

The news comes as much of a surprise to the incredulous FBI agents as it does to us because up until then, Whitacre seems to be a pretty honest guy. That is, until we realize that there are many things in the film that the main character doesn't explain, like, how does he afford the Porsche whose name he can't even pronounce? Who's paying for the horse and stable that resides in the backyard of his immaculately kept home? And most of all, why is he so keen on giving the FBI so much inside information? Could it be that Whitacre is actually making everything up?

While it doesn't take very long to have that question answered, Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns, who adapted the story from Kurt Eichenwald's book The Informant (A True Story,) do a very daft job at distracting the audience from the truth with Whitacre's inane voiceovers, which often are presented as a stream-of-consciousness in the unreliable narrator's mind. Only in a movie this off-kilter could the main character be wearing a wiretap device in a corporate meeting in Tokyo yet his narration has him explaining how polar bears disguise their black noses to hide from their prey, but, he wonders aloud, how did the polar bear ever realize that his nose is black? Did someone tell the bear? A deep thinker Whitacre ain't.

Matt Damon, an actor not known for comedy, does a very good job at playing an average shlub who obviously wishes his life was more like a John Grisham novel. From the thirty pounds the actor gained to play the role to the bad hairpiece, overgrown moustache and really bad fashion choices, Whitacre is a very bland man living such a bland life that we almost forgive him for wanting to be James Bond. Except, that is, when he brands himself "0014" because that makes him twice as smart as 007.

"The Informant!" is indeed a smart comedy for those who don't like their movie humor telegraphed five minutes before the punch lines are delivered. While the humor isn't quite laugh-out-loud hysterical, you'll find yourself chuckling quite a bit while simultaneously shaking your head in disbelief.

For Soderbergh, this might just be the movie that finds him on middle ground somewhere between big budget blockbusters and micro-budget indies. "The Informant!" proves that a good director is one who adapts to the material and not the other way around and Soderbergh, unlike Mark Whitacre, is one of the most reliable storytellers we have.

WHITEOUT REVIEW
By Jeffrey Harris

September is here. The summer movie season is over, and the holiday movie season has yet to start. As September is a time when fewer people go the movies, the month is typically a period that Hollywood uses as a burial ground for fare that fails to excite movie studios. Hence the new ice-filled thriller, Whiteout. In watching the trailers and TV ads, you might think Whiteout is a supernatural horror thriller like John Carpenter's 1982 classic, The Thing. Set in Antarctica, the incredibly dull and generic movie is in fact nothing more than a glorified who-dunnit.

The story is based on a 1998 Eisner award-winning comic published by Oni Press, created by Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber that spawned several sequels. In Whiteout, the damaged and bored US Marshall, Carrie Stetko (Kate Beckinsale), is stationed at a multinational research base in the South Pole. Fed up with the doldrums of the snowy climate and dealing with petty crimes and misdemeanors, Stetko is ready to resign and turn in her badge for good. In addition, Stetko is continuously haunted by a case in Miami, which actually instigated her stay in the South Pole in the first place. Stetko gets a rude awakening when a mutilated corpse is discovered out on the ice. Upon examination of the corpse, Stetko realizes that the man, a US researcher named Weiss, did not die by accident. Weiss was murdered. With only a short time left before Antarctica plunges into a six-month and deathly dangerous winter, Stetko must unravel the case.

Besides a somewhat unique setting and premise, Whiteout, as a movie offers nothing particularly true or interesting. Supporting characters are incredibly one-dimensional, none more so than the UN operative Pryce (Gabriel Macht), who joins Stetko to insist with the investigation. Pryce's character is more or less a studio executive mandate shoehorned into the story because of Hollywood's current lack of faith in making action thrillers with female leads. Pryce does little to serve the story and neither does the fact that it is way to convenient for Pryce to come to Antarctica. Macht would have made more sense by saying, "The studio executives need me here to bolster the satisfaction of the adolescent male demographic."

Speaking of male demographics, early on there is a gratuitous and saucy shower scene, where Beckinsale or a body double of Beckinsale parades around half-naked in her cabin before stepping into a fog and steam-filled shower. The camera seems to linger too much on these shots of the lovely Beckinsale. The idea is not that Becksinale is not a beautiful woman, but this scene comes off as borderline objectifying and pornographic. The sequence was pointlessly thrown in so the studio executives can guarantee that teenage boys will watch the movie and get their jollies in seeing the scene. Not surprising, that this movie is from the same directing and producing team of the 2001 movie Swordfish. Director Dominic Sena and producer Joel Silver were also responsible for that same cinematic abomination, where Halle Berry did a pointless topless and was apparently paid another half-million in salary for doing so.

And that is really the problem with Sena as a director. Sena tries to make up for weak character and poor execution of storytelling for fast pacing and whiz-bang action scenes. Unfort-unately, none of the action scenes really pop. You have a hard time telling the killer from the protagonists since everyone is dressed exactly the same. The prologue features an incredibly action-packed plane crash of a Russian military plane in the 1950's during the Cold War. However, since the audience has no idea what is transpiring, the viewer simply does not care. Beckinsale is a fine actress, but her performance is phoned in and she telegraphs all the dialogue. Granted, the dialogue is not much to work with when Stetko and cohorts obviously discover a dead body and while doing so say, "There's a body." "There's another one." "And there's another dead body." The theater was filled with the worst kind of laughter - the unintentional kind of laughter in a serious movie. This is the ultimate sign of a movie's failure to the
audience.

'Jennifer's Body'
By Bill Goodykoontz

The body in question in "Jennifer's Body" belongs to Megan Fox, which in retrospect looks like a stroke of casting genius.

Sexually assured, confident, perfectly willing and able to disarm all those around her with her frankness, Jennifer would seem the perfect role for Fox. Fox is, of course, the eye candy in the "Transformers" movies and something of a sensation among the Internet-ogling and lad-mag set. But Diablo Cody wrote the "Jennifer" script a few years ago, before Fox was well known. Chalk it up to luck.

Yet while Fox's performance as a high-school girl possessed by a demon would seem key to the fortunes of the film, Amanda Seyfried, as her unlikely best friend, Needy, makes it more interesting than it would be.

Jennifer and Needy have been best friends since childhood ("sandbox love never dies"). Jennifer is the hot cheerleader who uses her precocious sexuality to get what she wants. Needy is the bookish nice girl (the ugly glasses are the clue) with a steady boyfriend, Chip (Johnny Simmons).

Eventually, at least. The film begins with a framing device in which Needy is housed in a facility for the criminally insane; she's not exactly the model patient. She recalls just a few months ago, when things were normal in the town of Devil's Kettle (subtlety is not always one of Cody's strong suits). That changes when a band from the city, led by singer Nikolai (Adam Brody), comes to town to play. But a fire burns down the venue, killing several people, and Nikolai and his bandmates drive off with Jennifer.

Jennifer shows up later that night at Needy's house (parents are conveniently absent when they need to be), covered in blood and vomiting some sort of gore that looks like tar and needles.

This can't be good.

No dummy, Needy, she picks up on this. But the next day, Jennifer is radiant and happy, even as the rest of the school and town are depressed over the fire. Soon, boys start turning up dead, torn apart.

Movies like this don't have much mystery; you know what's going on practically from the start. They rely more on execution. Fox is able to keep up with Cody's signature overly self-aware hip-teen slang (you're not jealous, you're Jell-O, lime-green Jell-O), but Jennifer isn't exactly a stretch for her. Brody has fun with the singer desperate to make it big. If human sacrifice is what it takes, well, doesn't everyone have to sacrifice to succeed? (Bonus points for suggesting that Maroon 5 is evil.)

The great J.K. Simmons is largely wasted as a clueless teacher with a hook for a hand. But it's Seyfried who is able to make the shift from virginal good girl to vengeance-seeking hellion both plausible (if plausibility exists in a movie like this) and intriguing.
Good thing, because neither Cody nor director Karyn Kusama has come up with anything original here (beyond the admittedly cool idea of what happens when you mean to sacrifice a virgin but your victim isn't one).

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" taught us that high school could be hell. Next time, tell us something we don't know.

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