Sausage Party

(Movie Review)

Why I Saw This Movie
This movie was not even on my radar until it came out a couple weeks ago, and then I started seeing reviews for it pop up all over the Internet.   (See here, here, here and here, for example). And the reviews made it sound like the movie might just be bizarre and twisted enough to be kind of interesting.

To the best of my knowledge, this movie is not hitting cinemas in Vietnam (where I'm currently living), but a pirated copy was uploaded to Kisscartoon, and I watched it there.

[The link is HERE, for anyone else who's interested.  The quality of the video isn't great--it's a video camera in a cinema type deal--but it's adequate for at least getting the idea of what this movie is about.]

I know, I'm a bad person for watching an illegal copy.  But since seeing it in the cinema wasn't an option over here, I'm giving myself a pass.
Plus, when I read that Sausage Party had created terrible conditions for their workers, and forced them to work unpaid overtime, I felt even less guilty about it.
See Washington Post Article: The working conditions for some ‘Sausage Party’ animators were pretty terrible
  (Seriously, if Hollywood is not going to pay the workers who actually work on their movies, then why should we consumers feel guilty about not paying to watch it?  If all that money is just going to the CEO's pocket anyway, and not to the actual workers, I feel zero guilt.)

That being said, I am able to separate my feelings about the conditions on the production of the film from the review of the actual merits of the film itself.  And on the whole, I liked this film

Positives
* A brilliant parody of the Pixar movies.
When watching a Pixar movie, I'm sure I'm not the only person who has thought: "Actually, if these inanimate objects really were sentient, in reality they would have a very hellish existence".  Of course to acknowledge this would be to ruin the whole Pixar film, so we have to constantly fight to keep that thought out of our brain when enjoying something like Toy Story.
Which is all the more reason why it feels very liberating to have a film openly acknowledge this fact, and take it as its main premise.

* The philosophy of this film is clever.
Like The Invention of Lying before it, this film does a very good job of dramatizing how much of religious "truth" appears to be based on wish fulfillment rather than a rational examination of the evidence.

* The humor is dark, and sick, and twisted.  I know that probably should be a negative, but it's also what makes this film so interesting.
Stories like this are unpredictable.  You never know what sick twisted plot twists the film makers are going to throw in next.  No character is safe.  And therein lies the interest of the film.

Negatives
* Ever since South Park and Family Guy, it's been fashionable for hip comedians to try to offend everyone.  And this is true in this movie as well.  There's things in here designed to offend both the religious right, and also to offend the left.
Since this is the intent, it seems counterproductive to complain about it.  The moment I've admitted I'm offended, it's a victory for the film makers.
But that being said, I don't understand what constructive purpose is served by the continued use of ethnic stereotypes.
It just seems to be perpetrating the myth that the human race is divided into us and them--that there are normal people, like ourselves, and then there are all the strange foreigners.

* A lot of comedy writers seem to think that sex is inherently funny, but it's often not as funny as Hollywood thinks it is.
There's a certain shock value associated with breaking taboos, which can make sexual humor seem funny for a little bit.  But once that shock value wears off, then the joke has to earn its laugh on its own merits.  Sexual innuendos are, in-and-of-themselves, not enough to earn a laugh just by existing.
Unfortunately, the jokes in this movie get lazy by assuming sexual innuendos are inherently funny.

The Review
A bizarre little story that easily held my interest just by being so bizarre.
In a world where Hollywood movies are getting increasingly predictable, this movie was anything but.  (No one could have predicted the bizarre plot twists and turns that this movie would take).
The humor in this film was good in the broad strokes as a genre parody, but at an individual level, most of the jokes failed to make me laugh.
Still, it held my interest for the 90 minutes.

Rating :
7 out of 10 stars--I'd recommend this movie with caution--there are a lot of sick jokes in this movie--but if you're cool with that, it's worth seeing.

Links
Movie Bob's review of this movie was one of the factors that made me interested to see this movie in the first place, and his commentary on the movie is a lot more intelligent than mine.



Link of the Day
noam chomsky and varoufankis