1. For me, watching TV or movies is a social experience: half the fun is discussing/ joking about/ expanding on what I've seen after, so it's not something I do by myself. This means, of course, that I do not always pick what to watch. So sometimes the Decline of Western Civilization is the title of a documentary I watch, and sometimes it's just the phenomenon I'm experiencing.
2. Sausage Party is beautifully animated. The food items, rendered as living talking beings, have the usual googly eyes, and gloved hands, and strikingly unusual limbs the thickness of popsicle sticks, but everything colorful, expressive, and as almost-convincingly 3-dimensional as any computer art I've run across yet. An exceptional amount of loving care has been put into bringing jars of mustard that yell "Holy shit, I've been chosen. Booyah, bitches!" to life.
3. Sausage Party is rated R and came out via Columbia Pictures, not Disney, but it's a logical extension of the Pixar line. Pixar has given us "what if fish have feelings?" (even though Kurt Cobain already pointed out it couldn't happen), "what if toys have feelings?", "what if cars have feelings?", "what if robots have feelings?", and "what if feelings have feelings?". Sausage Party asks "what if supermarket food has feelings?", and answers -- sensibly enough -- that it would yell "Look at me! I ain't got no legs, you fuck! You ate my goddamn legs!"
3a. My OK Cupid profile anticipated this all the way back in 2015, in a way. Asked about my favorite foods, I added "in particular, I'm a vegetarian. I do love animals, but mostly I just really have it in for those goddam plants".
4. The opening song, "the Great Beyond", is a thing of beauty: well-crafted Broadway style, perky and pretty, comfortable in ballad and high-energy mode, and ironic without even the tiniest hint of subtlety. "Once we're out the sliding doors things will all be grand/ We will live our dreams together in the promised land/ The Gods control our fate so we all know we're in good hands/ We're super sure there's nothing shitty waiting for us in the great beyond" -- not to mention "The Gods will always care for us/ They won't squeeze us out their butts".
The quirky specificity of it has an in-plot explanation. I just think it would be interesting to teach a version of the Lord's Prayer that goes "Though we walk through our slightly declining town, we shall fear no drunk drivers, or earthquakes, or burglars, or serial killers, or family members turning into meth addicts, or poisonous spiders hidden under our toilet seat, or layoffs that mean we can't afford a toilet seat anymore, or....", and compare its relative reassurance value to the current version.
5. "The Great Beyond" suggests we're in for stereotypical views of male
and female attitudes towards sex, as the sausages Frank, Barry,
and Carl briefly duet with Brenda, the bun, on the happy post-purchase
time when "In other words we finally get to fuck (And love)/ And fuck
(And hug)/ And fuck (And feel)/ And fuck (And share)" -- with Brenda
getting the lines in parentheses. This mostly doesn't get contradicted, on the whole. But a scene where Brenda taunts Carl has her doubting his skill at giving pleasure as a lover. And when she asks "I mean honestly, guys! Who in this package would ever let Carl get up in them?", another bun raises her hand. "Roberta, put your fucking hand down, you're ruining my joke", yelps Brenda. I say points to Roberta for owning her desires.
6. The central theme of Sausage Party is that religion is a lie. This is not me working hard on interpretation. "The Great Beyond"'s holy devotion is a lie; we meet the liars who wrote it; we are asked to mourn for the orgies that this religious devotion is preventing. A stereotypical nerdy-Jew bagel and a stereotypical crabby-fanatic Islamic lavash are forced to travel together, and their religious rivalry is viewed as obviously ridiculous (and mostly the lavash's fault). Eventually the lie is exposed and pansexual orgies happen and everything is groovy. (I should specify that *even in this context*, "pansexual" does not mean "having sex with stovetop cookware". Discrimination!)
I am certain any of this would cause a religious conservative to say "My goodness, these are fascinating points. I must ponder the errors of my ways!". Although I'm almost as certain they'd be referring to the ways that led to them somehow watching Sausage Party.
7. So it's more interesting, for me as a writer, to point out that Sausage Party works just as well as a pro-religion movie; hey, when Karl Marx called religion "the opiate of the masses", context made it clear that he wasn't really insulting it. The rationale behind the movie's tissue-of-lies religion is that if food items know they're going to be viciously slaughtered alive once they leave the store, that won't make them able to do anything about it: *they can't move* in any way perceptible by the non-food world. "You're doomed to torture and death, but don't think about it" is a tough sell.
Luckily, it has nothing to do with our world, where billions of people now living have never died, so obviously our individual odds aren't bad in the long run at all.
8. James Franco is cast as an addled drug addict. It is one of the most convincing casting choices I've ever seen. Elsewhere in the movie, a customer urgently tries to convince a checkout clerk that he should be allowed to return a jar of mustard to the shelf and get a different one that he'd meant to grab all along; "I don't give a flying fuuuuuck!!", she trills in reply, permitting him to make the exchange. It is one of the most convincing displays of customer service life I've ever seen.
9. SPOILER ALERT! If you're afraid of not allowing the tale of animate grocery items to unfold at its natural sequential pace, afraid of spoiling the simmering tension and mystery and "what-happens-next?" that drives all Seth Rogen films, DO NOT READ THIS POINT YET. Although it's a shame, because it's about my single favorite aspect of this movie:
Innocent people are slaughtered, by non-humans, and this is the emotional high point of the film.
Actually, how old is Hobbes the tiger now? Even if we assume his aging process was suspended with Calvin's from 1985 to 1995, he's have to be a fully grown tiger now. I don't see his name in the movie credits, and I'm assuming it's some complex legal shenanigans designed to trick him. Because if a climax like that is being written and Hobbes didn't have a hand in it, the universe is wrong. And there's no evidence, otherwise, of that.
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