It's Rude & Crude But 'Sausage Party' Is Actually Much Smarter Than You Think

13 August 2016 | 9:10 am | Anthony Carew

"Surprisingly, it harbours greater ambitions beyond delivering us a talking used condom."

sausage party

You’re damn right that title’s a dick joke. Sausage Party is the latest stoner-comedy from Hollywood’s most unexpected power-players, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. And it’s filled with dick jokes, and plenty of vag jokes, too. Endless sexual double-entendre comes sown into its two main characters: a hot dog and the bun he’s going to split apart and fill with his meat. 

Sausage Party is essentially a parody of animation’s Pixar-kickstarted obsession with The Secret Life Of (Insert) (heh heh, insert...), set in a supermarket where, when the store is closed, the products come to life. There’s Peanut Butter and Jelly as a couple; a whole aisle of fruits who are, y’know, fruits; a twinkie who’s a twink; a meatloaf who is Meat Loaf; and the film’s villain is, brilliantly, literally a douche. The comedy writes itself in the set-up; the flick, essentially, a stoner riff on Shopkins. 

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Were it just some gleefully foul-mouthed cartoon, Sausage Party would be a cinematic product worth consuming. But, surprisingly, it harbours greater ambitions beyond delivering us a talking used condom. The screenplay —by Rogen, Goldberg, Kyle Hunter, and Ariel Shaffir, with a ‘story’ credit for Jonah Hill— is, unexpectedly, a searing satire of religion; one of the greatest takedowns of blind faith in living memory. 

It opens on a brand new day in the supermarket, where, with the rise of the sun, the supermarket products sing a hymn to the ‘Gods’ who walk through the doors. Every ear of corn and tin of beans dreams of being dropped into a trolley and taken into the great beyond, where eternal paradise awaits. “We cannot overstate how accurate our beliefs are,” the gathered masses sing. And also: “everyone else is fucking stupid”. 

Soon enough, the film becomes a quasi road-movie, where a hot dog (Seth Rogen) undertakes an odyssey to discover the horrifying truth about what really happens to food when taken home by the Gods. Along the way, there’s a host of supermarket-stuffs made instructive ethnic stereotypes. There’s Woody Allen-esque bagel (Edward Norton) unable to get along with the lavash (David Krumholtz) —who believes 77 bottles of extra virgin olive oil await in the afterlife— despite their shared love of hummus. There’s an angry box of grits (Craig Robinson) who’s been fucked over by crackers, nazi sauerkraut that wants to kill all juice, etc. It’s 20th-century global conflict turned smirking punchline, but Sausage Party goes yet further. 

Ultimately, when Rogen discovers the truth about the song (it was made to pacify the populace) and the horrors awaiting in the ‘great beyond’, he speaks hot truth to the gathered supermarket. But, instead of finding enlightenment, putting aside theological differences in the face of a shared demise, the various products instead choose ignorance; clinging to their specious beliefs in the face of all rational logic. Rogen’s revelations are dismissed as “a theory, not a fact”, which, well, lulz. 

Sausage Party backs up its socio-political smarts with lots of dumb jokes, but the humour is, generally, endlessly inventive. There’s a Stephen Hawking-esque genius chewing-gum wad (Scott Underwood), the misadventures of a bath-salts-shooting human stoner (James Franco), and an uprising against humanity that puts Avatar’s pussyfootery to shame. And, finally, one almighty supermarket orgy; where hot dog finally enters bun, and you can go home happy. And maybe, even, a little wiser, too.

down under

After Eva Orner’s Chasing Asylum brought a great national shame —the treatment of asylum-seekers in offshore detention centres— to screen as tragedy, now Down Under brings another symbol of All-Australian racism to screen as comedy. It’s billed, with due cheekiness, as the Cronulla Race Riot comedy we had to have. And it starts with a montage of news-reports that, though a decade old, are still horrifying to watch. Director Abe Forsythe sets this footage —of, as one mobilising txt put it, “leb and wog bashing day”— to We Wish You A Merry Christmas, setting an ironic, satirical tenor that’ll hold throughout. 

In the wake of the riots, Forsythe sets a comic tale of two carloads of idiots —one of ‘Skips’, the other ‘Lebs’— on missions of misguided retribution, and on a collision course. Each car is full of high-comic caricatures, from the Ned Kelly obsessive whose bandaged head covers new cranial-tattoo work, to the camo-tracksuit-clad rapper who only speaks in rhymes. Forsythe also works a fine line in ten-years-ago comic kitsch: the film featuring endless Lord Of The Rings (and even a few Wolf Creek) references, a video store, a dashboard-mounted discman, and ironic airings of Kelis’s Milkshake, Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn, and a whole bunch of other era tunes. “Where’s the Korn? Where’s the Limp Bizkit?” demands Damon Herriman’s sunburnt bogan, when critiquing the mixtape of Alexander England’s clueless stoner, whose musical selections provide an ongoing comic riff. 

Much of Down Under is set in cars, its most lyrical moments coming when we ride in the middle of slow-motion burnouts. Cars are, as ever, symbols of masculinity; one bogan ringleader’s Southern Cross-emblazoned, muffler blowin’, HRD CNT-numberplated monster a classic case of insecurity-riddled overcompensation. Eventually, our two main automobiles have a symbolic head-on collision, then stage one of the most pathetic car-chases ever committed to celluloid. Eventually, violence comes, and the comedy stills: it’s ugly, brutal, grim; and, of course, all too futile. The dark ending draws close to dark reality, with the “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie” chant full of venom, dread, horror. Cronulla may be a decade in the rearview mirror, but in a year of Reclaim Australia rallies and Pauline Hanson election victories, Down Under still lands close to home.

tickled

Film Festivals are filled with sub-culture documentaries, in which the obsessive participants in a niche endeavour explain their devotion to a non-mainstream pursuit, and in-the-know audiences gleefully see their ‘world’ on-screen, whilst outsiders chuckle at the odd predilections of others. Tickled begins with a similar premise: New Zealand odd-spot reporter David Farrier discovers a world of ‘competitive endurance tickling’ videos and wants to find out more. Only, no one will talk, and threats of lawsuits come his way. 

So, Farrier and co-director Dylan Reeve set out in pursuit of truth, and discover the hidden network behind this world of tickling videos. The videos themselves are banal, the most softcore of fetish-works, but the stranger-than-fiction story behind them grows darker with each passing revelation: its participants dragged into a web of deception, blackmail, and cyber-bullying. 

Farrier’s inquisitive, everyman-ish quality gives the film a sense of wry absurdity, but as he traces this underworld back to one singular, elusive figure, it goes from quirky to disturbing. Tickled is, ultimately, not about a subculture, but an uneasy portrait of unchecked shame grown monstrous, and another lesson in how wealth and power serve to both protect and enable the most horrible of humans.

louder than bombs

The phrase ‘American family drama’ carries with it attendant terror; a host of Christmas movies, ensemble films, and quirk-addled Sundance roadtrips have long ago seen to that. But Louder Than Bombs is American only in its vague small-town setting. Its director, Joachim Trier —and his co-writer, Eskil Vogt— are Norwegian. The parents of its on-screen kin —Gabriel Byrne and Isabelle Huppert— are global film stars; and, on screen, here, they play characters of the world. He’s a former actor turned lecturer who’s settled in upstate New York to raise a family; she’s a photographer forever chasing that conflict-zone high, jetting off to war-torn territories in search of snaps. 

Huppert is also, in Louder Than Bombs, dead. She comes alive only in its scattered chronology; and lives on as memory, myth, ghost, and body-of-work. The film’s essential drama is a pair of hidden secrets: one in regards to her life, another her death. Each has the possibility of detonating a family on the edge. Jesse Eisenberg, the eldest son, has just had a child, but is terrified by the notion of being a father. Devin Druid, the younger kid, is struggling with adolescence; retreating into an antisocial shell following the loss of his mother. Rather than bring them together, Huppert’s death has driven the family apart: the men growing incommunicative, taciturn, secretive; unable to share their daily lives, let alone their feelings, or their grief. 

Trier’s film is a study of the peculiar bonds of family: that mixture of impossible closeness and improbable distance. Compared to his beloved first two films —Reprise and Oslo, August 31st— Trier is making something more conventional; more sombre. But, for all its prestige-picture familiarity, the directing remains finely attuned to the scale of human drama. Trier has a novelist’s penchant for navigating the complexity of our identities and memories, and the discrepancy between our exteriors and interiors.