Work in Progress screened as SXSW -
A rauncy and witty animated comedy that definitely isn't kids' stuff.
For those of you who have ever envisioned Seth Rogen reconstituted as an anthropomorphic processed meat product — and you know who you are — “Sausage Party” may be savored as, if not a dream come true, then a drug-fueled hallucination without the potentially harmful side effects. A madcap crazy salad of industrial-strength raunch, Tex Avery-level visual inventiveness and, no kidding, seriocomic religious allegory, this computer-animated comedy about the secret lives of supermarket merchandise had its premiere as a “work-in-progress” at the SXSW Film Festival prior to a scheduled Aug. 12 theatrical release. Rough edges are glaringly apparent in the film’s current, not-quite-complete state — indeed, a handful of scenes remain represented only by hand-drawings — but it’s already obvious that Sony could have a mid-sized late-summer hit on its hands.
Naturally, many parents will not appreciate having to tell their young offspring who see trailers and TV spots that, yes, this is a cartoon, but, no, it most certainly is not kids’ stuff. (The MPAA folks haven’t officially weighed in yet, but the movie was aptly hyped at SXSW as “the first R-rated CG animated movie.”) Just as naturally, however, the allure of an animated feature that is far closer in tone and content to Zap Comix than Pixar will be impossible for many grown-ups — and most arrested adolescents — to resist. Working from a script credited to Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Kyle Hunter and Ariel Shaffir, co-directors Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan immerse viewers in a world where food, beverages and sundry other items on supermarket shelves are sentient entities who yearn to selected by benevolent “giants” for transportation to the “promised land” they’ve long been promised.
Frank (voiced by Rogen), the most outspoken of the links in a package of sausages, eagerly awaits the happy day when he can nestle inside a sexy hot-dog bun (Kristen Wiig) and, ahem, cut the mustard. But the happy couple’s great expectations are upended by a shopping-cart collision that triggers a long after-shopping-hours journey toward rude awakenings, inconvenient truths and, during an extended climax, what very likely is the first food-on-food polysexual orgy in film history.
“Sausage Party” is something far short of Shavian in terms of sophisticated dialogue — really, there is just so much novelty value one can milk from repetitious fusillades of F-bombs launched by animated characters — but it is difficult to deny the hilarity quotient of a movie so exuberantly and unapologetically rude and crude. Racial, ethnic, sexual and sociopolitical stereotypes are shamelessly exaggerated and honed to satirical edges, so that a Jewish bagel (Edward Norton) and an Arabic flatbread (David Krumholtz) squabble about territorial incursions in the shopping aisles; a Sapphic taco (Salma Hayek) attempts to lure a reasonably straight innocent into a walk on the wild side; a diminutive sausage (Michael Cena) worries whether girth really is more important than length; and the most obnoxious character by far is … well, a douche (Nick Kroll). No, really.
Complications arise when Frank discovers the truth about what happens to edibles like himself once they’re carted out the door and taken home. And, more important, he learns that influential “non-perishables” have manufactured a mythos of a happily-ever-after afterlife just to keep the supermarket products from knowing anything about the nothingness that awaits them. Not at all surprisingly, those products don’t appreciate (or even believe) the bad news when Frank attempts to elevate their consciousness.
All of which suggests, with “Sausage Party” following “This Is the End” (which he also co-wrote with Goldberg), that Seth Rogen may be the most subversively sincere religious allegorist working in movies today. Better still, he can be pretty damn funny while spiking freewheeling zaniness with food for thought.
Note: The print screened at SXSW did not have closing credits, leaving an incomplete running time of 85 minutes.
http://variety.com/2016/film/festivals/ ... 201730120/
Foodstuffs, metaphysics and a heap of raunchy action add up to something surprisingly hilarious.
Sausage Party, an R-rated comedy about food products waiting to be sold at a supermarket, begins unpromisingly, with a musical number so effing gratuitously overstuffed with effed-up f-bomb adjectives — most of them irrelevant to the jokes being made — one fears numbness will set in before anything really funny happens. But then a crude hot dog-meets-bun joke hits its mark, and within moments of the song's end it's clear that this raunchy, raucous comedy — a Seth Rogen/Evan Goldberg passion project directed by Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan — is going somewhere. The laughs barely let up after that first scene, in fact, in a film that proves to be not just more than a boundary-stretching exercise but one of the funniest arguments for the non-existence of God in some time. (Ricky Gervais and Bill Maher could take a lesson.) Fans of This is the End and similar Rogen & Co. outrages will eat it up.
The pic's conceit is that the contents of this store, from cantaloupes to cans of beans, are sentient beings who start every day in the hopes of being chosen by those shopping-cart-pushing gods who'll carry them out to the heavenlike "Great Beyond." All they have to do is stay fresh and pristine until chosen — that is to say, a packaged weenie like Frank (Rogen) is not able to act on the lust he feels for a shapely bun named Brenda (Kristen Wiig). If all goes well, they'll be able to consummate their relationship in the afterlife — which nobody here realizes involves being chopped up, cooked, and consumed by the gods.
But then a jar of honey mustard is bought by accident and returned to the store after being taken to one of the gods' homes. Shaken by the horrors he witnessed there, he tries to tell his fellow products, who aren't buying it. Put into another grocery cart the following day, Mr. Honey Mustard leaps to his death, upturning the cart and causing a "cleanup on aisle 2" situation the film depicts with carnage worthy of a war film. Call it Saving Private Spaghetti-O's.
In the chaos, Frank is stranded far from his shelf with Brenda and two other bread products — a Woody Allen-like bagel and a loaf of lavash that talks about the bottles of extra-virgin olive oil awaiting him in the next life. No: Sausage Party is not subtle in its lampooning of the conflict in the Middle East — and when it later gets to other "ethnic foods," it happily plays with all sorts of stereotypes, from a bottle of firewater that sounds like Johnny Depp's Tonto to a box of grits with a grudge against crackers.
Frank feels compelled to investigate these new claims about what lies beyond the supermarket's auto-open doors, and gets separated from his gluten-heavy friends while seeking wisdom from the store's non-perishable products. Meanwhile, his fellow groceries who were purchased and taken home for a July 4th picnic have confronted the hellish Great Beyond, and one, a deformed sausage named Barry (Michael Cera), is on an odyssey back to warn his friends.
Some of this action plays like a twisted riff on Finding Nemo, though Nemo never had to contend with a sleazeball human who was tripping balls after shooting up bath salts, encounter a talking used condom, or flee from a roid-ragey, douchey villain who was, literally, a douche.
Sausage Party, billed as a work-in-progress screening, was, unlike similar events here, actually that. As Rogen said in his intro, this was not some practically-done studio feature where "they haven't color timed it or some s--t. You will very quickly see this is not semantical trickery — it's not f--king done yet." True enough, several scenes were still in one crude animatic stage or another; a couple barely had any movement at all. But even in this state, it was clear that the film plays strongly enough to deserve the outrages it perpetrates in its final scenes, when an all-out war on human consumers gives way to a pansexual orgy any pornographer would be proud to have imagined.
Not content with this exhaustive exploration of the carnal possibilities of foodstuffs, the film then gets meta, with a coda crossing over into the world of live action. Look out, Hollywood: These groceries are tired of being manipulated for the amusement of those who eat their brethren. They're coming for you, Seth Rogen — wipe that mustard and relish off your face.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review ... iew-875703
