'Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs'

LOS ANGELES, CA - SEPTEMBER 12: Actress Miranda Cosgrove arrives to the premiere of Sony's 'Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs' at the Mann Village Theater on September 12, 2009 in Los Angeles, California.



LOS ANGELES, CA - SEPTEMBER 12: Actor Mr. T arrives to the premiere of Sony's 'Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs' at the Mann Village Theater on September 12, 2009 in Los Angeles, California.




LOS ANGELES, CA - SEPTEMBER 12: Director/writer Phil Lord, actress Anna Faris, director/writer Chris Miller and actor Bill Hader arrive to the premiere of Sony's 'Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs' at the Mann Village Theater on September 12, 2009 in Los Angeles, California.



LOS ANGELES, CA - SEPTEMBER 12: Bill Hader and Anna Faris pose for a picture at the premiere of 'Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs' held at the Mann Village Theatre on September 12, 2009 in Los Angeles, California.




LOS ANGELES, CA - SEPTEMBER 12: Anna Faris poses for a picture at the premiere of 'Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs' held at the Mann Village Theatre on September 12, 2009 in Los Angeles, California.




LOS ANGELES, CA - SEPTEMBER 12: Actress Anna Faris arrives to the premiere of Sony's 'Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs' at the Mann Village Theater on September 12, 2009 in Los Angeles, California.




LOS ANGELES, CA - SEPTEMBER 12: Actress Kim Raver arrives to the premiere of Sony's 'Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs' at the Mann Village Theater on September 12, 2009 in Los Angeles, California.


Once upon a big screen ...
Hollywood begins new chapter for classic tales

By MICHAEL LONG, Entertainment Editor

In 1978, when husband-and-wife duo Judi and Ron Barrett published their now-classic children's book "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs," I had just mastered tying my shoes.



Kindergarteners of my day were being fed a steady diet of endearing, yet predominately tame books that had persisted for decades. These offerings included "Curious George," "Madeline," "Peter Rabbit," "Caps for Sale" and "Harold and the Purple Crayon," among others.

Before writers of kiddie lit started juicing up their books to hold the attention of the ADD generation, a story like "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs," about a town whose meals fall from the sky, captured our imaginations.

A turn of the page revealed storm clouds swelling with hamburgers, or a school buried under a giant, syrupy pancake. The thought of school being canceled by showers of oversize breakfast food was enough to send 5- and 6-year-olds into giddy fits. At the time, that was edgy stuff for us, a true landmark.

It's taken Hollywood three decades to get around to giving "Meatballs" the big-screen treatment, and its Sept. 18 box-office debut comes amid a flurry of big-budget movie adaptations of beloved children's books including Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are" and Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland."

Featuring the vocal talents of Anna Faris, James Caan, Mr. T and Al Roker, Sony Pictures' animated "Meatballs" serves as a prequel of sorts to the book, explaining how the town of Swallow Falls (in the book, Chewandswallow) acquired its unusual weather.

While the movie appears exceedingly gimmicky, it nonetheless puts the power of computer-generated imagery behind the scenarios we once conjured in our little heads as we sat in a circle on carpet squares.

Children of the '80s will likely feel a certain sense of gratification in seeing a book from their formative years leading the marquee and will plunk down their hard-earned cash regardless of the quality of the film. "Meatballs" has nothing to lose.

The same cannot be said for "Where the Wild Things Are," a flesh-and-blood, costumed imagining of Sendak's 1963 illustrated masterpiece, directed by Spike Jonze, whose résumé includes calling the shots for the self-conscious Charlie Kaufman dramas "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation."



When the film premieres Oct. 16, the stakes will be considerably higher. "Where the Wild Things Are," about a rambunctious boy named Max who travels in his mind to the land of the Wild Things, ranks among the most cherished children's books of all time, and critics will be weighing in without reserve.

The last time a book of this import made a run at the silver screen, the result was disastrous. No one should be permitted to do to a book what Mike Myers did to "The Cat in the Hat" in 2003. The legacy of Dr. Seuss will long outlast that of a wrongheaded comedian, but Myers' take on the mischievous feline perverted the essence of the material and damages the literature by mere association.

Fortunately, Jonze appears to have understood the gravity of his task. Sendak waited a long time to find the right person to adapt his book and chose Jonze for his unique vision. Sendak has seen the film and sanctions it enthusiastically.

Other promising signs: a cast including Catherine Keener, Forest Whitaker, Paul Dano, James Gandolfini, Lauren Ambrose and Mark Ruffalo; and a trailer scored by Arcade Fire's exhilarating anthem "Wake Up." While there's no judging a movie by its trailer, Jonze, a music aficionado, surely chose a song that embodied the spirit of the picture. "Wake Up" is the kind of tune that lifts you from the inside, and it promises as much for the film.

Following along a theme of quirky directors projecting their vision onto the work of prominent authors, director Wes Anderson, the man behind the lens for the dark, comedic, somewhat bizarre family dramas "The Royal Tenenbaums" and "The Darjeeling Limited," has fashioned a stop-motion-animation adaptation of the Roald Dahl chapter book "Fantastic Mr. Fox," due in theaters in limited release Nov. 13.

Anderson, who wrote the screenplay, assembled a heavyweight vocal cast with Meryl Streep, George Clooney, Willem Dafoe, Anjelica Huston and Adrien Brody, but the title hasn't generated anything close to the buzz of Disney's latest iteration of "Alice in Wonderland," set to debut March 5, 2010.

The peculiar vision of "Alice" director Tim Burton is his biggest selling point. Burton has made a career of his goth-lite, carnival-freak-show-meets-Broadway sensibility, and for "Alice" he enlisted two of his most-trusted collaborators, Johnny Depp (the Mad Hatter) and Helena Bonham Carter (the Red Queen).

Nearly 150 years removed from the source material — Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" — the film will take its measure more from previous interpretations of the literature than from the work itself.



As a child, I never read the story but was reeled in by the 1951 Disney film, featuring the merry "unbirthday" party of Ed Wynn's doddering Mad Hatter and the blood-curdling proclamations of the Queen of Hearts, expertly voiced by Disney regular Verna Felton: "Off with their heads!"

Only as an adult did I come to appreciate the groundbreaking language and playful logic of the actual text. With any luck, Burton will have retained some the book's more academic nuances while preserving the spectacle for the children.


credit photo: Gettyimages
source: www.articles.lancasteronline.com