Sausage Party

This is definitely food porn loaded with profanity and scenes that cross the line for some. On the other hand, it's an adult cartoon, so it's clear they're not going to be freeing Willy. On the one hand, I appreciate that the film makes a statement about such "weepy" issues as religion, otherness, ethnicity, and so on, but keeps it at the level of fun; of course, nothing deeper comes of it. In the end, basically all those stereotypes are used to entertain or dramatize the scene. Of course, some of the (pop) culture references were right on, ditto the visit from the candy-coated Stephen Hawking. The songs chosen were great and you could see the filmmakers were having fun with it. On the other hand, just bad language and now and then good and playful ideas are not enough to make you 100% interested in a film. Besides, the animation didn't impress me much either. I don't think watching it will hurt, if you don't mind that it's not exactly a story with a moral lesson and that the climax is a real climax. A better 3 stars. After all, even the day after watching it I was thinking about the film, mainly because I had no idea how to rate it. (2016-08-25)

This is just a total nightmare. A bunch of completely unintelligent jokes with an even bigger pile of bad words crammed into a sleazy and disgusting movie. Not to mention the pathetic scene at the end. Lessons learned for next time? When Seth Rogen writes the screenplay for something, it can never be all that good. (2016-09-14)

Sometimes they try too hard, but Sausage Party is so impossibly dirty, but at the same time an impossibly imaginative, original and entertaining film, which is completely different to everything I've seen. It's not at all as primitive a spectacle as it might seem at first glance, and after a few minutes. (2018-01-28)

I'm not under the illusion that this script was created any differently than with the main group meeting over a pile of food sometime around Independence Day, with the meeting interspersed with consuming various substances and a Toy Story marathon, and the job got done. In terms of parodies, it turned out quite funny as expected, but in terms of half-hearted socio-cultural comments and reminders, it was sweatily and clumsily done. Yet what destroys me the most is the constant need to swear, to randomly insert sexual innuendos into every scene, and to finish the last ten minutes with an extra coarse spectacle, maybe just for fun, to see if any of the viewers can handle it. Moreover, Seth Rogen keeps dwelling on the thousandth variation of how a character is under the influence of drugs, and that doesn't seem as funny to me as it is perplexing that his approach to these jokes has stopped evolving and instead has started to regress. (2018-08-19)

The anti-LEGO Movie. The protagonists have been brainwashed by a (corporate) ideology according to which the point of existence is to wait for one of the “Gods” to choose you and take you to the Promised Land, where a Jewish bagel and a Muslim lavash will find peace and quiet, otherwise leading to an endless dispute over who is entitled to occupy the “western shelves” of the supermarket. They are unaware that instead of 77 bottles of virgin olive oil and other pleasures, what awaits them is a painful death in a pot of boiling water or in a meat grinder. Every workday begins with a collective sing-along of an idiotic feel-good song in the mould of “Everything is Awesome”, which the characters want to continue singing even after coming to the realisation that maybe everything isn’t so wonderful. It’s just more comfortable for them to keep believing in the illusion that they have created for themselves, which offers them solace instead of existential angst. Unfortunate historical experience discourages dogmatically clinging to optimism, so let’s pretend that the past doesn’t exist and continue to live a lie. It seems that hedonism is the only satisfactory alternative to faith in salvation, which requires, among other things, the renunciation of physical pleasures. We are all going to die eventually anyway (with the exception of non-perishable foods), so why not at least lick a bun or smoke a beet before we do and make our joyless existence a little more pleasant. Of course, the anti-consumerist message of a film produced by a giant media corporation cannot be taken too seriously, and Sausage Party deserves credit for not wanting anything of the sort from the viewer. On the other hand, it is perhaps a pity that behind the veil of ultra-simple jokes, it’s a bit hard to see how clever and subversive a film Rogen’s crew came up with this time. After all, the biggest monster is not the talking can of deodorant, but the character of a random human consumer, living in the belief that there will always be something to eat. If nothing else, the mere fact that you feel compelled to root for a talking sausage, desiccated chewing gum and a busty bun in their struggle against people like you (i.e. people who are guilty of consumerism) can be considered a win for the filmmakers. 85% (2016-08-27)