On VOD: Cloudy Satire and Helen Mirren's Nude Debut

It's a hard thing not to love: the fast, funny, adept digitally animated kids' movie that actually, even secretly, comes packing double barrels of satiric subtext. Sure, you think of WALL-E, which for my money painted the most lacerating portrait anyone has seen this century of American consumerism run amok. Did those millions of happy Pixar consumers not get the point? More to the point, did the millions of chortling filmgoers absorbing Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs have any trouble last year shoveling the popcorn and Raisinets? As of today, it's on demand...

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Starz on Demand)

See how you fare with that big bowl of chips. The spectacle of this vivid, often sickening comedy is something to behold. Look at it from a step back: a Surrealist scenario (explained away by cartoon science) in which a town is showered by mountains of pre-prepared food falling from the sky, eventually arriving in mutant supersizes that present us with Dantean visions of greedy all-American gluttons woofing down five-foot-long hot dogs and the like. Ten minutes of this is funny, but 90 minutes is devastating, a Super Size Me of nauseating proportions, aimed directly at kids. Ask your kids what they think that town smells like.

Lovely & Amazing (Cinemax on Demand)

Nicole Holofcener's second film, and like the current release Please Give, a shoot-the-wounded chick indie analyzing and dissecting the dysfunction of the modern American woman. But what makes this 2002 farce so barbed and memorable is its focus on food and body image, actively contrasting the self-hating travails of an obese black girl (Raven Goodwin) and an anorexic actress (Emily Mortimer), amid a family of similarly troubled women. Holofcener's scripts are sharp and always reflect contemporary female worries to such a degree that discussions and/or arguments are mandatory afterwards.

Stay Hungry (Flix on Demand)

Or, you could answer your anxieties by pumping yourself into a behemoth, which is about as sensible as eating a five-foot-long hot dog, and potentially as funny. Bob Rafelson's 1976 film is the best American comedy ever made about the "sport," and while Jeff Bridges stars (in a non-competitive role), the real meat is the young Arnold Schwarzenegger, acting relaxed but looking like 200 pounds of tense self-esteem issues packed into a hundred-pound bag.

The Age of Consent (Vudu)

Or you could not worry about your body at all, as the 23-year-old, practically-all-nude Helen Mirren does in this fluffy, vampy vacation movie, director Michael Powell's last. James Mason is a cynical artist who relocates from New York to an Australia island, but is distracted from his work by, among other things, his teenage model. This 1969 lark is certainly not up to Powell's standards, but aging giants can indulge themselves, just as Mason does with Mirren, who began one of cinema's great nude-scene careers right here.

Vertigo (Universal on Demand)

Or, someone else could worry about your body until he virtually explodes with fiery-eyed perversion. That is, if you're Kim Novak. The 1958 Hitchcock classic should be as familiar to you now as the wallpaper facing the toilet in your house, but in case it's not, see it again and remember: It's not about murder and conspiracy. It's about desire, and the need to fill an emptiness. James Stewart wants the blonde Kim, but he could just as easily satisfy his neuroses with a pile of sky-delivered monster pancakes.