Reviews: The Informant! & Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Whistle-blowhard

There are few filmmakers who have had such a career as Steven Soderbergh. This is a guy who has had ups and downs, but always has an agenda. Even while most people like to say he's wasting his time with the ultra-slick Ocean's remake franchises, he uses the paychecks from those to pay for his ambitious, more intimately detailed smaller projects, usually shot on digital video and employing non-actors. The look of this film resembles his more polished films, as does his plethora of accomplished and well known actors here. However, what results is not something that is enjoyable even on a level that is respectable for this often tedious filmmaker.

Matt Damon, an Ocean's favorite, has the lead role of Mark Whitacre, a high level management guy working for Archer Daniels Midland, a huge agricultural company that specializes in lysine, a food additive. Among some of Mark's daily activities are checking in on the plants, going over the finances, and participating in illegal activities such as receiving kickbacks and sitting in on the company's scheme to meet with competitors in order to engage in price fixing. More so pushed by his wife (Melanie Lynskey), Mark turns informant for the F.B.I., and mainly reports back to two agents (Scott Bakula and The Soup's Joel McHale). But it doesn't take long for the F.B.I. to get suspicious of Mark, and he yo-yos his allegiance to the government and his company.

Some out there may not think I'm the foremost expert on Soderbergh, and I don't claim to be. I mean, I'm the guy who liked The Good German and Ocean's 13. I also think those were better movies as well. For as many problems as those films had, you could see the agenda and the considerable follow through. The Good German wanted the nostalgic style to overwhelm the senses and the caper film wanted to be a slick, ubercool, overindulgent piece of Hollywood schlock. For what its worth, I liked them. Here, Soderbergh's tone is never fully realized, and the pace of the film is often irregular, making the movie seem longer than it is. There's never anything that makes the film come alive off the screen, and it is not helped by the way Soderbergh has shot this (done under his pseudonym Peter Andrews). There's a sterile look to the film that traps the energy and dispels it.

Those faults are also translated to Scott Burns's screenplay, which becomes another in a long line of films to struggle at the attempt to make white collar crimes interesting. There are films that can pull that off, but those are examples where the crime was a means to showcase the characters. Burns's screenplay has little concern for the characters here, and there is hardly a trait that is recognizable to anyone. Every interaction lays still in a flat execution; there is nothing intriguing about these people. They all seem flat, boring and expressionless in the face of the plot's overly complicated structure. The one element of the script that is interesting is when we get these random narrations by Whitacre often about mundane topics. Those are fascinating because they give us insight into the personality of this character, something the rest of the film lacks.

On that note, the one standout would be Damon. We all know he's a good actor, and it is refreshing to seem him take on such an unlikely character. His conviction to this guy is compelling at times, often leading to moments of quick and intelligent humor that can transition well to his thought provoking analyses on life. However, Damon has ultimately been given a character who is uninteresting most of the time, and many times you can see Damon struggling to find enough freshness to bring to the character. With that, all the other characters circle around Damon looking like cardboard cut outs, giving hardly anything to this premise to make it worthwhile to watch.

I was tempted to give a slight pass to this film because of how Soderbergh operates. He isn't always looking for the approval of others, but wants to make a project he has faith in. Even his most frustrating films have a passion behind them. That is missing here as everyone seems to just wander around the film's premise with nobody actually diving into the water and find the treasure. The only one who tries is Damon, and I did appreciate that. But all the other elements, including the incredibly distracting score from Marvin Hamlisch that feels like a redone score to The Sting. I don't always expect to love every Soderbergh film, but I expect to have more admiration for his passion than I do with this one. **1/2 / ****; GRADE: C+

Meat n' Greet

Usually, there is one animated film that generally impresses me in how well it is not only able to tell an interesting story that I can get invested in, but of course provides a great visual spectacle as well for me to gawk at. In the past, these films have included many well known Pixar additions like The Incredibles (still my favorite of theirs), WALL-E, Ratatouille and Fining Nemo along with some non Pixar movies like Monster House and even this year's Coraline. Here is another opportunity for an animated film to try and achieve that, and I can tell you it doesn't hit anywhere near those levels. However, what I can say is that given my low expectations for the film, this actually turned out to not be quite as bad as I imagined it would be. In fact, I thought it was quite enjoyable and a nice surprise.

Based off of the literally paper thin children's book of the same name, the film adaptation centers around the ambitious inventor Flint Lockwood (voiced by Bill Hader) living in the ultra-tinny island named Swallow Falls (I'd have gone with a different title given the film's dozens of unintentional double entendres concerning meat). Most of Flint's inventions never come to their realized goal, except one: a machine that turns water into whatever designated food is ordered. The machine goes up in the air and converts the atmospheric moisture into food for the town, which brings out a cute weather-girl (Anna Farris) for Flint to admire, his increasingly disappointed dad (James Caan), a tenacious policeman (Mr. T) and the greedy mayor (Bruce Campbell) who is the force that ignorantly dooms the town when the machine starts mutating the food into larger quantities.

I was not expecting very much from this film, and it isn't without its flaws mind you. The story itself is pretty basic and doesn't really try for anything new. Every character is predictable, the story arcs are clichéd, and there's an overindulgence on the visuals in the last act when the story itself starts to fall apart. At the same time, directors and adapters Phil Lord and Chris Miller provide more than enough laughs here, and what is surprising is that for every attempt at broad jokes for the kids, there are also smaller moments that exist within the quick banter of dialogue and tiny elements in the background of the frame, reminding me, admittedly, a lot of Airplane! and the Naked Gun series.

To be fair, not every joke works, and a big one would be the continuing use monkeys as humor. Take my word for it, the use of monkeys as a source of comedy is a lazy one that never has great payoffs. The jokes are the broadest they can be, and when they fail, as they often do, they fail big. The humor also isn't helped by the enormous visual spectacle at the end. Some of it looks really good, such as an impressive looking spaghetti tornado, but by the time we get to the climax, the phrase "too much of a good thing" come to mind many times.

Though I would say the voice acting in this film is on a memorable level, at least much more so than last week's animated release. Hader is a pure comedic talent, and he poses a lot of whit and charm in his role. The same thing goes for the sweet voiced Farris, the fatherly tone of Caan, the menacing dirtbag persona of Campbell and the self-consciously mocking tone of Mr. T. There's also a good group of supporting cameo voices from Neil Patrick Harris, Andy Samberg and Benjamin Bratt that add to the film's likability.

There are many moments in this film where it feels like its trying to hard, in the vein of being overly stimulated on the visuals and syrupy sweet on the heartfelt emotions. But underneath all that junkfood is a surprising core; one that manages to still pull you into the story as well as continually laugh at jokes that work well both on the broad humor as well as the subtle ones. That something this particular studio's last animated film, Surf's Up, managed to do well. While neither this film or that one compares to anything of Pixar, I think this is definitely showing promise for something to emerge as a serious contender in the future. *** / ****; GRADE: B