Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs

In this sequel to the classic Ratatouille, the red-headed human character has learned all he can from Remy the Rat and now it's time to strike out on his own. I'm surprised by the sophistication of the early plot twist that the filmmakers employed whereby the red-headed would be culinary-genius decides to study molecular gastronomy, the province of blackbelt chefs like Wylie Dufresne or Richard Blaze, but the movie wouldn't work without the whole experiment-gone-haywire trope.

So sure enough, after one too many bad plates of pasta and a running joke about that On Top of Spaghetti song that stales quickly for adults but sends children a'gigglin' every time somebody sneezes, the main dude goes into a lab to perfect his recipe. This being a children's film, the guy has neither genitals nor libido, but what he does have is friendship. Intimate male friendship. In another convention, the friend is slovenly and I suspect that the filmmakers preferred the best friend character to the main dude, but they had to keep the main dude heroic, so they leeched him of quirks and attributed all of the weirdness with which children's authors really identify to the more interesting character- best friend, who could technically be called the protagonist since it's his excitement about the spaghetti that knocks the gamma-leone ray over and it bounces off a mirror that was laying around on their coffee table and hits the sky just as thunderheads are gathering. Now I feel rather strongly that the filmmakers had a grand opportunity to make a Richard Pryor joke in this lab mishap scene, but I don't believe they took it.

In order for this movie to work, you have to be excited about the fact that food begins falling out of the sky. But neither I, nor anyone I know, ever needed such divine intercession to eat. More than a billion people do, of course, but does this film address them? Well, yes. In one of the poorer examples of taste in recent memory, we meet a character named Kookyboo. Kookyboo is an apprentice goatherder, but due to drought and famine, his family has no goats so he practices by herding tumbleweeds along the Serenghetti. I appreciate the film's attempts at dark humor, but the gag where a dog goes after the bone in Kookyboo's nose is not funny and all of the children who laughed at it need punishments, if not serious reeducation.

Anyway, Kookyboo's Uncle Wenstrom tries to take credit for the miracle that has befallen their village. He puts on this surprisingly terrifying witch doctor mask and dances around as if his rattle shaking and general Thoth-like behavior was what brought down the deluge of food, when of course it was the Ratatouille guy's invention ricocheting off a coffee table mirror after his slovenly friend gets too excited about how good the spaghetti is. Duh! Kookyboo doesn't exactly know this, but he's still suspicious of Uncle Wenstrom, and anyway, the goats have come back, but they're so fat from all of the sweet Italian sausage falling from the sky (and if you listen closely, you can hear one tribeswoman chant Oh Oh Oh- Rocco Siffredi! Oh Oh Oh- Rocco Siffredi!) that the goatherder's job is rendered obsolete. With thousands of years of tradition down the African bush version of the toilet, AKA the African bush, Kookyboo and Flakety Flak look for something else to do. As Kookyboo and Flakety Flak the world's leading herder of goats begin their search for a new purpose in life, the village gets hip to Uncle Wenstrom's jive and prepare a giant catapult for him.

Strangely, the film leaves this plot thread dangling until the very end and goes back to our main red-headed guy who is now friends with the President, which is pretty much exactly as it should be. And kudos to the filmmakers for creating a President who is A) Absolutely brilliant! and B) Incredibly fat! So Redhead and the Chunky POTUS realize that this accident is a boon to humanity and now they can worry about stuff other than starvation (and in this movie, President Candy really was concerned about this)- like making sure that at least 20 states elect gay governors, inventing an invention that turns Hot Wheels into real cars, and finding jobs for out of work defense contractors now that food-related wars are a thing of the past.

And here is where it all ties together! You see, Kookyboo gets falsely accused of one of those 419 scams because he actually is a Nigerian Prince. And because he wasn't trying to hide his real identity in the emails he was sending out on something that the filmmakers kinda blurred, but looked an awful lot like Nerve.com, his picture gets circulated and some real scam artists hack into Kookyboo's Hotmail account (looky.kooky.boo.ya@hotmail.com) and blame hundreds of their 419's on him until he becomes an internationally wanted criminal. But Redhead's sloppy roommate is watching the news report on his party-yacht and realizes that he had been Kookyboo's penpal when he was young, but he slacked off because it was back in the days of paper mail, and the postage was too expensive and Kookyboo's English was better than his, which made him ashamed. "KOOKYBOO!" the sloppy friend shouts, knocking his butler into the ocean.

Next thing we know, Kookyboo is herding regular sized goats on the Washington Mall and then we see the butler, still trying to get out of the water, and then SPLASH, Uncle Wenstrom lands right next to him. It was so funny!

Two stars.