Movie Review: Sausage Party

Directors: Greg Tiernan, Conrad Vernon

Writers: Kyle Hunter, Ariel Shaffir, Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Jonah Hill

Stars: Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Nick Kroll, David Krumholtz

Verdict: Guilty fun

On one level Sausage Party is a film made for the premise, in a way it’s a film that’s completely review proof, and it’s a film that is unashamedly in your face, vulgar and says ‘fuck you’ to anyone who wants to challenge it, and I could suppose that that in itself is commendable, but it does have good reviews from the potentially sniffy critical community.

The premise is kind of just purely absurd to describe. There is a group of religious foodstuffs that think that the people who come to buy them are gods to take them to heaven, the metaphore isn’t particularly big and clever but what it allows the film makers to do, (who incedentally before this have done much more, sort of middle of the road animation, maybe apart from Shrek, I mean one director has previosuly only made Thomas & Friends), is look at the themes from a very detatched, dry perspective. It’s ocasionally a bit too on the nose, but it also occasionally makes jokes around just how on the nose it is, it’s as if the joke they’re making is “this political religion based issue is so damn obvious, it’s litereally this simple”, I’m not going to say I’m 100% behind that type of humour, and it is a tad reductive, but it is certainly intersting, and maybe that’s the problem with the film, it’s only ever intersting. 

There have been adult animations in the past, but not in the cinema for a while I think, certainly not for my generation. For my generation, when it think of adult animations I think of TV shows, BoJack Horseman and Rick and Morty, both of which I actually have a lot of affection for. The great thing about animation is that you can do things you can’t do in live action cinema which is why a movement we’ve seen in recent years into adventurous animation for an adult audience that fully explore that possibility is so exciting for me, and Sausage Party does explore that, there was one sequence with a talking condom that just made me have a similar reactoin to the church spire death in Hot Fuzz, which is to go eugh, and laugh at the same time. There is a lot of humour like that but that is a staple of Seth Rogan movies, (This Is the End, Pineapple Express), although with works like Sausage Party and Preacher, which I incedentally think is a far superior work, his career is taking on a much more exciting bent.

One thing I do like is that it fixes a lot anthropomorphication problems that other movies have. There’s a moment in Return of the Jedi, which I actually like, where we see robots getting ripped apart and it’s played for laughs and to me that just completely spoils the point of having robots in the film, because you are meant to engage with them on the level of people so them getting ripped apart, Chinese torture style, should be horribly traumatic. This film revolves arond the idea that anthropmorphosised characters getting hurt is just as horrible as people being hurt. Issue number 2 that this film gets right; following the rules of anthropmorphication in general; in Bee Movie, we have bee world, and it’s its own homogenous little thing, then a bee dates a human, then bees sue humans, and by then you’re going ‘hang on this doesn’t work at all’, but this movie frequently makes jokes about how the world of the foodstufs translate into the human world, and when they do eventually interact they stick to their own rules, there is occasionally moments, actually quite frequent moments where you think, ‘no, that can’t work’ but they very sensibly don’t show the human perspective, so although it might be stupid you never really have to think about it, for better or worse. 

There are some admitedly very dumb, but very funny jokes, and it is almost unbearably postmodern, and in its last act it does completely fall apart, and the animation is a bit Foodfight!, but in a world where people are treading on egg shells with regards to religion and religious issues, a film that’s prepared to be this in your face about it is actually quite refreshing, and it has enough dumb humour to eventually make you laugh by attrition. 

And plus, it has Edward Norton, (Fight Club, American History X, The Illusionist), doing a very funny Woody Allen, (Annie Hall) impression, and Bill Hader, (Inside Out) playing a Native American figure, (the film actually makes jokes about how we would associate different foodstuffs with different racial stereotypes), although the character is taken from Native Americans, the voice performance is clearly lifted from Johnny Depp playing Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Who doesn’t want to see that?

Movie Review: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Director: David Yates

Writer: J.K. Rowling

Stars: Eddie Redmayne, Dan Fogler, Ezra Miller, Colin Farrell, Katherine Waterston

Some people have really loved Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. I don’t love it but what it is is a perfectly adequate Harry Potter anthology movie. It follows Newt Scamander, a Hogwarts expulsee, played by Eddie Redmayne, (The Theory of Everything, The Danish Girl), who moves to America to learn about all the magical creatures one can find there, or so he may say. 

There was one point at which the original Harry Potter films were going to be made by the one, the only Terry Gilliam, (Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Brazil), as it happens the first two ended up being made by Christopher Columbus, (Pixels, Home Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire), who I actually very much like, he might be admittedly a good but very mainstream director but he did write Gremlins and The Goonies. As much as I like those early films can you imagine if they had that Time Bandits feel of Gilliam’s family work? This film comes to us from David Yates, best known for the last few Harry Potter films. Probably the most technically accomplished effort, with the most film-making verve is probably the one from Alfonso Cuarón, (Gravity, Children of Men), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The reason I’ve had this little tangent is that David Yates has always seemed to me a bit of an industrial filmmaker for hire, especially with his recent Harry Potter break The Legend of Tarzan. However Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, (typing that’s going to get irritating), does have that Gilliamesque sense of wonder and sort of joi de vivre and joy and passion for film making also.

This film, (easy workaround I think), combines the childish sense of knockabout fun of those first three movies and the darkness of the last few, and the film is surprisingly dark, warning to parents; it is a strong 12A. I mean the last non-horror film in recent memory to reference The Omen was Looper and that was a definite 15, and this film is that dark tonally. I would not be surprised if we saw a similar set of complaints to The Dark Knight. Despite that darkness, when the film is wondrous and fantastical it really does wonderful and fantastical. Kids will be awed at the wonderful design of all the various creatures and it does contrast with the darker subplot rather nicely. Whatever else I may have to say that is the real draw of the film, the fantasy element and the film does it rather well. 

That being said, the thing that’s so great about a lot of Gilliam films is that he has a way with effects to make them really immersive. This film has a similar look to its effects as something like Doctor Strange, which I said should win the VFX Oscar this year, but they never had to animate living things, new animal creations. This film does and it looks a bit naff, and when we have actually the Harry Potter films, and actually the David Yates Harry Potter films, in which the animation of the animals is really incredible and really immersive, there is no excuse for it looking, and I’m sorry but it’s true, like the dinosaurs in Transformers: Age of Extinction. 

In terms of performances, Eddie Redmayne is surprisingly good casting, I mean he’s the obvious choice for this character but whilst I normally find him incredibly obnoxious and irritating, here, he seems oddly charming, and honest, and not at all arch and typical-British-classically-trained-actor which he normally comes off as. His character is great as well, I mean someone who identifies more with animals than people, how can one not empathise? Colin Farrell, (In Bruges), and Ezra Miller, (We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Perks of Being a Wallflower), both form the meat of the more adult plot line and they’re both the best actors in the film I think, they’re the ones with the most gravitas, their plot line seems resolved at the end and I really hope they both come back for sequels because they are simply great. The joys in terms of really fun, endearing characters as we’ve come to expect from Harry Potter can be found in what is surely a breakout performance from Dan Fogler, (Kung Fu Panda), playing Kowalski, who is the best thing about any scene he’s in because he’s great. Johnny Depp shows up at the end and he’s just terrible for all the 5 seconds he’s on screen. He does the thing he does in Tim Burton films like Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Ed Wood or Terry Gilliam films like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas of being very arch and theatrical, and it works in those films because they know exactly how to sculpt his performances because their films are very visually precise, and it’s just not the same in this film. Which to reference a Gilliam saying is slightly more camel than horse than it would like to be. 

Although it’s not perfect, definitely not perfect, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them serves up sufficient meat for both adults and children to qualify as a perfectly fine Harry Potter prequel, although I’d like it to have more physicality. It won’t stay with you in the way some Harry Potter films do but it is, in the end it’s own franchise and it’s not like the early Potter films stayed in your mind, although an 11 year old might feel differently.