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Too much of everything

Excellent but underrated film

Dreadfully Boring

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

It's a new summer at Camp North Star for kids from six to fourteen. Morty "Mickey" Melnick runs the camp and Tripper Harrison (Bill Murray) is the irreverent senior counselor. He keeps flirting with fellow lead counselor Roxanne. Spaz is one of the CITs (counselor in training). Rudy Gerner (Chris Makepeace) is a lonely kid who doesn't fit in. He and Tripper form a close connection. They have been beaten by neighboring Camp Mohawk for the last 12 years. In the annual competition, they are getting crashed by the cheating Camp Mohawk on the first day. They rally with Tripper's sarcastic chant "It just doesn't matter."This movie suffers from a lack of solid secondary actors. Murray is doing his utmost. He and Makepeace provide the heart. Spaz and his chubby friend have a few moments. Most of the rest are simply amateurs unable to deliver the jokes. For example, Roxanne needs to be either hot or funny. The actress is neither. Matt Craven is probably the only one out of that group who would go on to do more stuff. Director Ivan Reitman does his best with who he had. It's a small Canadian production that is most important for bringing together Reitman and Murray early in their careers. It's cute innocent fun.

I watched Meatball several times in preteen years shortly after it was released, and remember loving it. Finally got the chance to see it again and became depressed. Found it cheesy and not funny. I know many of the movies from that time were cheesy, but they were genuinely funny, e.g., Stripes, Revenge of the Nerds, Strange Brew. I love Bill Murray but hated "Tripper". The movie did do a good job in defining the "summer camp movie". I hear about people recalling this fondly. It has developed a cult following. I thought about watching this with my kids (once they are 17 of course . . .), but after seeing it again I am glad that I didn't. Would of lost all my street cred. Lame jokes, lame characters, lame movie.

It's funny how your perspective changes after going several years between seeing the same movie, as I recently did with Meatballs. If anyone were to ask me if I recommend this film, I would say only see this for a pretty funny performance by Bill Murray, who portrays Tripper, the counselor more interested in cracking jokes than actual "counseling". I wished for a few serious scenes between Tripper and Rudy, the very shy camper who feels left out from the cool crowd, but perhaps Murray didn't have the acting chops yet to pull that off. That being said, most of his scenes are very funny, as are the quips he spews to any who'll listen to him. There's a few more well known comedic moments revolving around Spaz, Fink, and Morty's sleeping habits and they all work for the most part, especially Tripper's speech the night before challenging Camp Mohawk and Spaz's game of stacking. Overall, Meatballs is about what I expected, and I had quite a few laughs along the way.

A year after John Belushi hit it big in the movies with Animal House, fellow SNLer Bill Murray would do the same with Meatballs with help from director Ivan Reitman-who was a producer on AH-and that film's co-writer Harold Ramis. Also from the Belushi picture was music composer Elmer Bernstein who would provide scores for other Reitman/Murray/Ramis movies like Stripes and Ghostbusters. Anyway, Murray provides great laughs with his charismatic wild-man persona as a camp counselor who helps a shy young boy (Chris Makepace) get out of his shell and a fellow female staff member (Kate Lynch) fall for him. Another staff member is Morty (Harvey Atkin) who falls victim to many of Bill's practical jokes. Then there's Spaz (Jack Blum, brother of the movie's co-writer Len Blum) and his buddy Fink (Keith Knight) who provide a touchingly humorous nerd-&-tubby vibe. There's also some sex appeal in the person of Wendy (Cindy Girling) and a girl-next-door one in A.L. (Kristine DeBell though she's probably best known for being Alice in the X-rated version of Alice in Wonderland). In other words, there's a nice mix of one-liners, slapstick, and sentimentality though it doesn't go overboard on the latter. Not everything works but Meatballs is still-all these years later-a good comedy worth watching especially for the first starring role of Bill Murray. Oh, how I loved hearing "Spaz! Spaz! "Spaz!" and "It just doesn't matter!" once again...