'Sausage Party' Will Make You Want to Set Your Food Free

Sausage Party will make you want to set your food free—from yourself—and you may never eat dinner again without wondering if you're actually committing genocide. It's like The Muppets and Julia Child on acid. This is an animated movie for adults that portrays consumable goods—everything from hot dogs to cherry tomatoes to toilet paper to Jose Cuervo—as sentient beings, each of them brandishing skinny little arms and legs and able to communicate with each other. Every morning, as the supermarket opens, they perform a musical number hastening the arrival of “the gods” (that’s us), each of them hoping she or he will be chosen. To be chosen is to be bought, and taken to “The Great Beyond.” Nobody knows what that means, but everyone assumes it’s a good thing, a wonderful, magical, eternally blissful thing. Of course, reality, which the grocery store’s inhabitants will learn, is far more horrifying. The film’s message is clear: religion is the opiate of the masses, the thing that those in power use to control us. And the writers—Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Kyle Hunter, and Ariel Shaffir—have crafted a canny, lucid thesis in defense of skepticism. Sausage Party is funny— sometimes uproariously funny—and surprisingly transcendent: at times, the gags (the film is ladled with jokes like a pot roast steeped in its own gravy) and the bleakness of the film’s message (there is no god, there is only the here and now) converge into a chaos of beautiful insanity. 

But the writers’ thesis-driven approach to comedy feels far too self-satisfied. It would be like if Blazing Saddles were trying to be Roots. In Blazing Saddles, which is one of the most important anti-racism films of the 1970s, the racists were idiots, and we were free to infer for ourselves just how wrong racism really is. Sausage Party, were it made in the 1970s, might be free to let us do some thinking on our own. But sadly it’s mired in message like a kindergarten class. And while I admire the film’s honesty, what I enjoy and delight in is its insanity, and Sausage Party often cannot do both at once. 

Here’s an example of insanity: Barry (voice of Michael Cera), a sausage, narrowly avoids being boiled to death in a woman’s kitchen; he escapes and ends up in the home of a 20-something stoner with crazy curly hair who, once he’s injected himself with bath salts, can see that all his food products are living creatures. (Normally, humans cannot perceive this because their version of reality is so limited.) Later in the film, when the consumables are battling the humans at the supermarket, Barry shows up with the severed head of this bath salt-addled junkie. Barry didn’t kill the guy (that would be far too mean-spirited); it was a freak accident. But when the noggin of this blazed lug plops down on the floor, and Barry yells triumphantly, “the gods can be killed!”, it’s a moment that is equally hilarious, moving, and bonkers. That’s the kind of thing that comedies need more of. 

But when Sausage Party fixates on its message against religion, it often feels as earnest as a kid-friendly Pixar movie. (Sidenote, the afore-mentioned drugged-out lunkhead drives a beat-up old car with a bumper sticker that reads, “Dixar.”) Seth Rogen, who plays the main character, a sausage named Frank, is the one who first discovers the truth about the Great Beyond, and he becomes the film’s literal voice of reason, championing free thought over blissful ignorance. When he angers the entire supermarket with his claims that the Great Beyond is a lie, he realizes he must be “nicer.” It feels smug and disingenuous, and really beneath everything else that’s happening in Sausage Party, because so much of Sausage Party is ingeniously crazy. It happily riffs on all the politics—be they racial, gender, what-have-you—of our time: two supporting characters are a Jewish bagel named Sammy Bagel, Jr. (voice of Edward Norton) and a Middle Eastern lavash named Kareem Abdul Lavash (voice of David Krumholtz); another character, the sultry lesbian Teresa del Taco (voiced by Salma Hayek) has a crush on Brenda, the other main character, a hot dog bun who’s in love with Frank. (She’s voiced by Kristen Wiig.) There’s a Native American character, Firewater (Bill Hader) who knows the truth but pretends not to: he’s imbued with all the stereotypes of the wise old Indian distilling knowledge (and weed). And, much like Blazing Saddles erupts in an orgy of chaotic violence at the end, Sausage Party erupts in an orgy too, the old-fashioned kind. 

As delightfully reprehensible as much of Sausage Party is, it loves silliness too, and accumulates a stock of wonderful little throwaway puns. Every adage about food you can imagine (“spill the beans”, “how do you like them apples?”) is thrown into the mix; when one character says, “Okay, so…”, a jar of sticky orange cheese suddenly appears and says, “Did somebody say ‘queso’?” And then there are moments that truly feel disturbing, like when a woman is preparing dinner, and we see the food being tortured and killed: a triumphant potato, the first item she picks up, suddenly screams in horror as she begins to skin him and then tosses him into a pot of boiling water; the woman then pops two baby carrots into her mouth, and we see her teeth chomping them into bits from the inside while outside, horrifying foods wail, “She’s eating children!” So if we have to have our comedies doused in messages today, at least some filmmakers are still jolting us with the kind of nutty, irreverent insanity that makes the genre an urgently needed antidote to our own reality.

Directed by Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernan. With voices of Nick Kroll (as one of the film’s chief villains, a douche), James Franco, Jonah Hill, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, Paul Rudd, and Anders Holm. 

There's lots to see in "Captain America: Civil War," but not much stands out.

In Captain America: Civil War, the Avengers are forced to sign a treaty with the United Nations that will prevent them from interfering with bad guys unless specifically conscripted by individual nations. This causes a rift between the Avengers, some of whom (including Black Widow, played by Scarlett Johansson) consider it a necessary evil, while others (among them Captain America, played by Chris Evans) see the treaty as a form of surrender that will tear the Avengers apart. The latter eventually happens, and we see multiple Avengers fighting each other in a mostly light-hearted sequence. It’s lighthearted because so little is at stake: we know that none of the Avengers is actually going to be killed. Usually in any narrative, low stakes are a reason not to care about what’s happening, but in this case, the low stakes are a relief.

I found myself enjoying this scene all the more because it wasn’t an excuse for rampant destruction of whole city blocks. Instead, the writers and directors punctuate this scene, which takes place at an airplane hangar, with a flurry of mini-conversations between all these characters (Captain America, Iron Man, Falcon, Hawkeye, Black Widow, etc) as they spar with each other. Ant-Man (played by Paul Rudd) cuts every moment down to size with a dumb joke. (He may be the least respected and most undervalued of all superheroes.) And the sequence showcases the amusing, cocksure arrogance of a young Spider-Man (Tom Holland).

Of course, the great heretofore unacknowledged joke of most superhero movies is that the heroes end up destroying the city in an attempt to save it. We see some all-powerful evil agent smashing cars and toppling buildings, and the heroes are forced to add to the destruction, though we assume it’s out of necessity. These movies gleefully stage enormous battle sequences that should kill thousands of human beings, but because the films are targeted at kids, we’re supposed to be okay with it. And, conveniently, nothing too horrible ever happens to a discernable human being. (Don Cheadle does get hurt pretty bad in this one, but he’s one of the heroes, not some innocent bystander.) It’s nice that Captain America: Civil War incorporates this joke/problem into its story.

The rest of the film vacillates between mindless, sped-up action sequences and little dramatic exchanges reminiscent of The Young and the Restless. The Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) is traumatized when she uses her powers and accidentally destroys a whole building. (This is the impetus for the disputed U.N. treaty.) Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) is still haunted by the deaths of his parents. Captain America has a little romance brewing with CIA agent Sharon Carter (Emily Van Camp, who has a real screen presence). There are others, but I’ve already forgotten them. These dramatic moments don’t ever really pop, perhaps because they’re cloaked in sameness. The film certainly has a rhythm, and directors Joe and Anthony Russo are smart enough to give the audience little breaks between all the fighting. But they seem to have only two approaches to a scene: make it fast or make it slow. Perhaps we wouldn’t need so many breaks from the action if it were meaningful and not mindless, if it were artful and clever and exciting and not merely overwhelming and predictable.

I tried hard to discern what was going on during those moments of fighting between multiple characters. The action is sped up so much that it’s impossible to sort out what amounts to a jumble of images. Is this supposed to be entertaining? Don’t people find it chaotic and therefore impossible to connect with or enjoy? I realize that these films appeal to viewers as mindless entertainment, but how is it entertaining when you can’t even tell what’s happening? Whenever filmmakers overly rely on shaky cameras and rapid editing, my assumption is that they’re covering up their ineptitude, hoping we’ll give them credit for putting something up there, whether it possesses visual logic or not, whether it’s well-choreographed or not.

Action—whether derived from a comic book or not—doesn’t have to be this way. See John Wick, and you’ll see how to make a mindless action movie with real visual elegance. Of course, John Wick is also R-rated, and it’s likely that the need to make a PG-13 rating prevents movies like Captain America from reaching the glorious heights of violence that John Wick enjoys. But sanitizing the violence in order to make it kid-appropriate is actually worse: it diminishes the shock factor. A movie like John Wick never ceases to shock me, to convey the reality that violence can wreak havoc in people and places and cause real physical pain. What we need are more real, sharp comic book movies and less of this vague, “cleaned-up” drek.

But at least there are lots of familiar faces that unexpectedly pop up. Jeremy Renner appears (as Hawkeye) in the last third of the movie. As irritating as it is to see a character (played by such a great actor as Jeremy Renner) introduced so late in the film, his presence filled me with gratitude. And Tom Holland makes a good impression as Peter Parker. (Even though Andrew Garfield was terrific in the role.) The scene where Tony Stark enlists Spider-Man’s help is the best one in the movie: it’s funny and revealing and has some shape to it. We see Peter Parker coming to grips with the nature and the implications of his power; we see Tony Stark at his most desperate, making a trip to Queens to ask for a high school kid’s help. (But aren’t we all tired of Robert Downey, Jr.’s shtick by now? He’s been playing the smart-ass smart guy for over a decade.)

Somehow, Scarlett Johansson gets lost in all this. She’s a terrific actress, and certainly skillful in her many fight scenes, but she—like so many others—gets relegated to the sidelines as the film introduces more and more characters. The end result: it’s forgettable but intermittently amusing. Anthony Mackie, who plays Falcon, is a pleasure to watch. Mackie has charm to spare, and he always seems to be having a good time whenever he’s on screen. With Don Cheadle, Paul Bettany, Chadwick Boseman (as the Black Panther), Sebastian Stan, Frank Grillo, William Hurt, Marissa Tomei, and Daniel Brühl.

They Came Together

A throwback to the insipidly silly gags of the Naked Gun movies and Airplane (written by the Abrahams/Zucker/Zucker trio), They Came Together is a cheeky, "meta" spoof of romantic comedies, although, it's not exactly a pure spoof. It's more like watching a group of smart-ass comic writers give a tongue-in-cheek presentation on the tropes of the romantic comedy genre. Watching They Came Together, I was plagued with a nagging question: If this movie contained the enjoyable but dumb kind of humor of a Naked Gun movie (which I appreciate sometimes) as well as the presence of a slew of funny actors I love (including the great Amy Poehler as the romantic lead), why did I just want this movie to end?

The answer is quite simple. In the process of picking apart and laughing at the clichés of romantic comedies, They Come Together feels not different or clever, merely familiar. It falls into the bad-spoof trap of failing to tell an original story of its own. Indeed, They Came Together isn't much better than those wretched Scary Movie installments, all of which merely ape scenes and lines from the latest horror franchises. They don't actually try and tell an amusing story into which the parodies and references can be mixed.

The movie opens with Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd sitting across from another couple at a dimly lit restaurant. They're about to tell them (and us) how they met, and we're informed that their story is just like a corny romantic comedy. When the flashback starts, we see all the right notes being hit: Poehler's a klutz, but exaggerated to the point of absurdity. And she owns a too-adorable-not-to-like candy store that is about to be pounced on by the giant candy conglomerate for which Rudd works. That's when they meet and an unlikely romance begins. The detail about Poehler's character owning a candy store is priceless, one of the truly inspired jokes of this movie.

They Came Together is laugh-out-loud funny for about twenty minutes, until it goes completely stale and you start to feel that through some ingenious maneuvering of space and time you've been teleported to the Hallmark Channel. I grew restless. I perused my email. I sighed. I checked the remaining running time over and over. And it's mercilessly short at 83 minutes, but those minutes couldn't have gone by fast enough. What's so depressing about this movie is the sheer waste of talent. It would have been far better for them to have put the full power of their energy, intelligence, and comic wit and spontaneity into making a legitimate romantic comedy that was equal parts original and intelligent and funny. Instead, it's a forgettable pastiche that feels lazily contrived with nothing but a smarmy distaste for a popular genre, one that is an especially easy target.

With Cobie Smulders, Max Greenfield, Christopher Meloni, Bill Hader, Ellie Kemper, Jason Mantzoukas, Melanie Lynskey, Ed Helms, Michael Ian Black, plus cameos by, among others, Norah Jones, Ken Marino, Jack McBrayer, Adam Scott, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Michael Shannon, and Judge Judy. Directed by David Wain. Written by Wain and Michael Showalter.

Admission

I'm happy to live in a world where Tina Fey is making movies and TV shows, because it's a much funnier, more interesting world than it would be without her. Admission, Fey's latest movie, is that way too: the movie would be less funny and less interesting if she weren't in it. More to the point, it's the kind of romantic comedy that seems tailored to fit Fey's personality--or at least the personality she projects into characters like Liz Lemon, her character from the just-ended sitcom 30 Rock. (I'll refrain from inserting a comment like "30 Rock is the best situational comedy in the last ten years, possibly the last 20.")

Fey plays slight variations of her Liz Lemon character in movies like Baby Mama (2008) and Admission. They're always women who are successful but unhappy. They've avoided the pitfalls of marriage and family only to find another pitfall in their careers. In this latest vehicle, Fey plays Portia Nathan, an admissions officer at Princeton University. (Something about the name 'Portia' seems like an inside joke.) Portia isn't single. She's been living with a Princeton English professor (who thinks that reading lines from Canterbury Tales in Middle English are a good way to spend an evening). She isn't unhappy (she has a rewarding job at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, and she's one of the ones who says "yes" or "no" to a student's application). And she isn't worried about having children. These non-problems only become problems after she meets John (Paul Rudd), a teacher at an experimental school in New Hampshire who's trying to get one of his students into Princeton.

In true romantic comedy fashion, Admission hinges upon a series of unlikely plot devices, such as the teenage boy, who Portia learns might just be the son she had in college and gave up for adoption when he was still a baby. This hypothetical pushes a lot of maternal buttons that Portia didn't know existed in her, and she finds herself doing all of the irrational things parents do to help their children: The very things she's encouraged parents of college applicants not to do.

I really enjoyed Admission. The writing (it was adapted from Jean Hanff Korelitz's novel by Karen Croner) somehow balances clever with commercial, which makes Admission a surprisingly refreshing comedy. It goes in unexpected directions, and requires more from Tina Fey as an actress than her previous movie roles have. She pulls off the dramatic scenes convincingly. But it's her delivery of the jokes that sells this movie. Every one of her throwaway lines seems so fragile, so destined for failure if even one thing is off, be it the timing or the cadence or the facial expression. Yet Fey locates and projects the humor in lines that wouldn't necessarily look funny on the screen. (Except that more likely than not, Croner was familiar with her acting enough to imagine the lines working. This assumes that the movie was written with Tina Fey in mind, of course.)

Lily Tomlin co-stars as Portia's mom. She's an eccentric loner who was a major voice of the feminist movement during the 1970s. She's put a lot of pressure on Portia to be fiercely independent of men, and as Portia treads the ground forged by her mother, she begins to suspect that perhaps it's not as fulfilling as she thought it would be. Tomlin is a delightful comedian, and it's especially fun to see her paired with Fey. Paul Rudd is surprisingly likable in this movie. He's finally been cast in a movie in which he doesn't have to be a jerk, even slightly. He's just charming and even foolishly passionate about the world. It's a refreshing change. With Michael Sheen, Wallace Shawn, Nat Wolff, Travaris Spears, and Gloria Reuben. Directed by Paul Weitz. ★★½

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

In The Perks of Being a Wallflower, 15-year-old Charlie is recovering from a traumatic event in his life (the recent death of his best friend) and trying to adjust to high school. He soon finds a group of friends who haven't followed the herd mentality of adolescence, or so he thinks, and begins to find himself in them. Actually, when you read the plot of this movie in those terms, it sounds awfully cheap.

Some of the ideas in Wallflower seem so calculated to wrench out your heart that you feel writer-director Stephen Chbosky, who adapted the screenplay from his own 1999 novel, is performing the work of a surgeon, not a filmmaker. His movie resurrects a lot of the old devices and archetypes, including the hip, self-aware English teacher (Paul Rudd, more amiable than he's ever been because he doesn't appear to be trying so hard, nor does he seem as jaded as usual), and the parents who "just don't get it." Yes, Wallflower has most of the cliched ingredients of a teen drama. But yet it also has an effervescent sort of charm to it. You can't really feel any disdain for the world this film creates, because it's authentic, imaginative. Moreover, the relationships between adolescents and grown-ups and between adolescents and adolescents, is shown to be far more complex than "the parents just don't get it" or "the jocks don't talk to the geeks." It's refreshing.

Logan Lerman carries Wallflower with his wonderful performance, one of the strongest by an up-and-coming actor in recent memory. His Charlie feels the pain of everyone he knows, even of those who have caused him pain, and he can't let it go, or imagine it away. He reminded me of young Timothy Hutton in Ordinary People. Lerman makes it look so easy because he is, often, the most together of his friends (probably because he's hiding all his own problems so he won't fall apart.) The supporting cast includes Emma Watson, as Sam, the girl Charlie has a crush on, and Ezra Miller, as Patrick, Sam's step-brother, a remarkably self-aware young man who's also miserable because he's gay and has to keep his relationship with one of the football players a secret.

Wallflower is a wistful movie, one that makes you slightly depressed to have passed your teenage years, and slightly exuberant because you remember how bad they were, even if they weren't as cinematically bad as in this movie. (There are a lot of lovely moments in between the sad parts, though). I kept going back in my mind to John Hughes' movies, as they were, for me, the quintessential high school movies, even though they failed to reflect my own high school experience, which of course happened later than the 1980s. The high school experience that's reflected in Wallflower isn't in the same territory as a John Hughes movie though. It's more realistic, less sitcomish. You almost wish the John Hughes vision of high school life could be true, because it's such a fairy tale. Full of complications but all of them solved by the denouement. Wallflower won't solve the problems. It illuminates the people and leaves the problems where they are: some will go away with time, some won't. But the spirit that thrives in this joyful movie isn't nearly as temporal as those four years of prison, hell, and torment, or alternately freedom, euphoria, and excitement. And I liked that about it.

With Dylan McDermott and Kate Walsh as Charlie's parents, Johnny Simmons, Melanie Lynskey (as Charlie's Aunt Helen), Mae Whitman, Erin Wilhelmi, Joan Cusack, and Tom Savini. 102 min. ★★★½

Role Models

Role Models (2008) is another one of those man-child-becomes-mature comedies, bolstered slightly by Paul Rudd's performance. He plays Danny, who pedals energy drinks to America's youth, with the help of his partner, Wheeler (Seann William Scott), who wears a giant minotaur suit. After Danny has a meltdown (following a rejection by his would-be fiance, he and Wheeler are ordered to participate in a mentoring program called Sturdy Wings. Their "littles" are a nerdy fantasy freak named Augie (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) and a foul-mouthed devil-child named Ronnie (Bobb'e J. Thompson). If watching a 9-year-old boy curse like a sailor is your idea of a good time, then Role Models is the movie for you.

It's an elongated sitcom, written by Rudd, director David Wain, Ken Marino, and Timothy Dowling, and between the four of them they couldn't come up with any original ideas or gags. The characters are all familiar archetypes: Danny is a sardonic curmudgeon, Wheeler is a horny man-whore, Elizabeth Banks, as Danny's girlfriend, is the beautiful, successful lawyer who's somehow put up with Danny's shiftless negativity for seven years, and Jane Lynch is the oddball director of the Big Brother-like organization. Lynch gives the film a few moments of relief, but her character is weird for no reason. There isn't anything credible about her, or anyone else. Forget motivation or story impetus. There are moments where Rudd and Scott mesh well together. They get into a comic rhythm that is funny and engaging, but the movie isn't well-thought-out enough to sustain their performances, and their performances don't do much for the movie overall. They may get you through it, but that's about it.