Film

“The m&m’s are coming!”

Food fight

There have been a few too many “more of the same” type movies at theaters this summer—flat, big-budget blockbusters and sequels without an ounce of creativity or originality puking out of the Hollywood industrial complex, delivering an astounding amount of expensive, vapid horseshit.

Sausage Party, the animated hellcat from writer-producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, is the first big studio film in a long time with screaming levels of originality. It’s a profanityladen, blasphemous middle finger to the moviemaking establishment that thinks it’s OK to turn out sequels and comic book movies that suck as long as people shell out for them. It couldn’t be more fun, and it’s like nothing you’ve seen before.

In a sunny supermarket, a bunch of vegetables, hot dogs and buns wake up and sing a happy song, convinced that today will be the day they are chosen by humans to enter the great beyond—the world on the other side of those automatic sliding doors.

Frank (Seth Rogen), an optimistic hot dog with teeth like Seth Rogen’s, longs for the moment he can leave his packaging and “fill” his sweetheart, a bun named Brenda (Kristen Wiig). That moment seems to be coming when they are selected and placed in a cart, but things quickly go awry. Frank and Brenda are left behind on the supermarket floor, while their friends go to the Great Beyond, only to find out that things are far from great.

On top of being super profane, Sausage Party is one of the more violent films you will witness at a cinema this summer, with various foods and condiments suffering unthinkable, heinous fates. (What happens to heads of lettuce and baby carrots is particularly nightmarish.) Rogen and Goldberg have found themselves a little loophole, since the main characters aren’t human or animal, which allows for non-stop carnage within the confines of an R-rating.

That loophole also allows for a food orgy that would be too much for your average porno, yet, there it is, a bunch of characters openly fornicating in just about every way possible on a big screen playing next door to Finding Dory. If you’re a parent out there who doesn’t watch commercials and takes kids to the movies based on the poster, you are in for the shock of your life. However, the first word in this movie is actually “shit,” so you should know early on that the wrong entertainment has been chosen for the day. Unless, of course, you and your kids are truly twisted, in which case, have at it. Other exquisite touches include a main villain who is a total douche. And by total douche, I really mean he’s a literal douche voiced by Nick Kroll. He’s also a leaky douche, so his thing is to suck the replenishing juices out of his prey, sometimes in a way that is most provocative. James Franco is on hand as the voice of a druggie experimenting with bath salts, while Edward Norton Sausage Party voices Sammy Bagel, Jr., a bagel who plays a pivotal, perverted 12345 part in that food orgy. Rogen and Goldberg mainstays like Jonah Director: Greg Tiernan, Hill, Craig Robinson, Bill Hader, Conrad Vernon Michael Cera, David Kurmholtz Starring: Seth Rogen, and Danny McBride all have Kristen Wiig, Jonah Hill roles, and they all contribute to make this the most outrageously insane Hollywood comedy since, well, their own brilliant This is the End (2013). What makes Sausage Party a cut above your average stoner movie full of food items screwing and being murdered is that it’s actually a smart swipe at organized religion and politics. I don’t want to give much away other than to say this movie makes you think a lot more than you would expect from a movie that features a taco going down on a hot dog bun. I heard Rogen on the Howard Stern Show saying he thinks Sausage Party could be a franchise ripe for sequels. Just how the hell he thinks he can top the madness of this movie is beyond comprehension, but I will certainly be in line to find out when he tries. Ω

3Don’t Think Twice An improv group called the Commune faces an uncertain future when their theater is closing and members of their team are faced with life-changing events. Writerdirector-actor Mike Birbiglia plays Miles, an improvisational actor in his mid-30s who feels passed over, while Jack (Keegan-Michael Key) finds himself in line for a role on TheWeekend (the film’s less copyright infringed stand-in for SaturdayNightLive). Gillian Jacobs—who’s having a nice year with this and her role in the excellent Netflix series Love—plays Jack’s girlfriend, Samantha, who also has a chance to advance her career. They, and other members of the troupe, must decide between real money-paying gigs and doing what they actually love, getting up on stage and making up stuff for free. I personally can’t stand watching comedy improv, so that perhaps knocks the film down a peg for me, because there’s a lot of bad improv in this movie. Balancing things out for the better are the performances from all involved, especially Key and Jacobs, who should do more projects together. Birbiglia does a nice job of portraying the artistic need to do one’s art in the face of all adversity.

1Jason Bourne It’s been nine years since the last Bourne movie that mattered. (2012’s TheBourneLegacy, with Jeremy Renner, was a joke.) After saying he wouldn’t play the part again, Matt Damon is back as Jason Bourne, with his director buddy Paul Greengrass in tow. The result: a tedious, desperate and sad extension of the Bourne storyline. JasonBourneis currently holding hands with Ghostbusters as a film prominently displaying how not to continue a beloved franchise. At the end of TheBourneUltimatum, Damon’s Bourne woke up after a bridge dive and swam off into an unknown and unpredictable future. It seemed a fitting and perfect end to the character or, perhaps, that particular story arc. Bourne found out his real name, learned why he was an assassin with amnesia, and got himself a little revenge. Case closed, right? Wrong. Money matters, and Universal wanted to keep the Bourne locomotive on track. Greengrass and his writers have come up with a way to further confuse Bourne about his identity. As it turns out, there’s more to his amnesia. He doesn’t know everything after all! He’s also got some daddy issues. Attempts to modernize Bourne with mumbo jumbo involving a tech mogul (Riz Ahmed) and his new social media platform make parts of this movie feel like a jettisoned episode of SiliconValley.

3Lights Out Three years ago, director David F. Sandberg made a great short about a woman home alone at night, noticing a dark figure when she switched the light off. The payoff was both hilarious and scary as shit. So, of course, producer James Wan got a hold of Sandberg and now there’s a full length feature film based on that light-switch premise. Writer Eric Heisserer takes the idea, fleshes it out, and comes up with a pretty good story to go with Sandberg’s strong horror directing abilities. Rebecca (Teresa Palmer) is an angry woman with mommy and commitment issues. Her mom, Sophie (Maria Bello), recently lost her husband and has fallen into a depression where she is talking to herself. Her son, and Sophie’s brother, Martin (Gabriel Bateman) is seeing a strange dark figure when the lights go out. It all leads up to a finale where flashlights are very valuable and potential victims behave like idiots. Sandberg repeats the same jolt scare over and over but makes it all work nicely.

3The Little Prince After sitting on the shelf for quite some time, Mark Osborne’s unorthodox, animated adaptation of Antoine de SaintExupery’s classic story finally gets a release, albeit a release streaming on Netflix. It’s a good enough movie, but it’s by no means a straight retelling of TheLittlePrince. There’s a modern story about a young girl (Mackenzie Foy) who befriends an old aviator (Jeff Bridges), and the aviator is the one from TheLittlePrince. He recounts part of that story to the little girl, which we see in stop-motion animation. The modern story is mostly CGI. So there’s an interesting mix of animation techniques to go with some twists to the story, and while it feels a little uneven and perhaps slow at times, it’s an enjoyable film. Other voice performers include Rachel McAdams, Paul Rudd, Marion Cotillard, James Franco, Benicio del Toro and Albert Brooks, and its fun hearing all of their great voices in one place.

3The Secret Life of Pets A bunch of comedians lend their voices to some cartoon characters, and the results are moderately entertaining. Louis C.K. voices Max, a Jack Russell terrier who loves his master, Katie (Ellie Kemper of Unbreakable KimmySchmidt), with that undying loyalty that makes dogs so damn cool. Katie brings home a new brother for Max, a big brown shaggy dog named Duke (Eric Stonestreet), and it creates some turmoil in the household. Max and Duke eventually wind up in the hands of Animal Control, and eventually fend for themselves in the sewers of Manhattan. There they become enemies of the Flushed Pets, a group consisting of alligators, lizards, snakes and furry critters led by Snowball the Rabbit (Kevin Hart on a sound booth tear). The advertised premise for the film suggests the movie might be about what our pets do in the house when we leave home. That part of the film is out of the way early in the movie’s opening minutes. The rest of the movie is the band of pets in Max’s neighborhood trying to find him and Duke when they get lost. Some of the sequences are borderline deranged. This doesn’t feel like the stuff of kids’ movies.

1Suicide Squad| Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was a skunk blast to the face for most of us trying to have a good time with a superhero movie earlier this year. Suicide Squad looked like a chance to get DC movies back on the good foot. With David Ayer (Fury, End of Watch) at the helm, and a cast including Will Smith, Jared Leto and Margot Robbie, it looked like summer was due to get a fun blast of movie mischief. Suicide Squad does nothing to improve the summer blockbuster season. It actually sends a big, stinking torpedo of shit into its side, and sends the thing barreling toward the bottom of the bowl. That’s being kind. After a first half build-up/tease that does a decent job of introducing bad guy characters like Deadshot (Smith), Harley Quinn (Robbie) and the Joker (Leto), the movie becomes what can only be described as a spastic colon, resulting in that big turd referred to above. While Smith and Robbie deliver relatively fun performances, the movie is a scattershot mess with no sense of direction. The tone is all over the place, as if the studio meddled and turned the movie into a hackneyed heap of nothing.

3Star Trek Beyond While the latest StarTrekfilm lacks a little bit in soul and story cohesiveness, it scores high on the zip factor and introduces a creepy new villain. The third film in the franchise’s reboot might be the weakest chapter featuring the newish cast, but it’s still a lot of fun. J.J. Abrams stepped down from the conn to direct his revamped StarWars, relegating himself to a producer’s role. In stepped Justin Lin, best known for making cars jump between skyscrapers in the Fast&Furiousfranchise. It’s also not a surprise that some of the action scenes motor along with the efficiency of a Dodge Challenger Hellcat. The film picks up with James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) and his crew in the midst of their five-year mission. Kirk, as he did in StarTrekII:TheWrathofKhan, is starting to get a little bored. He’s up for an admiral’s position, and might soon find himself grounded to a desk job. The movie has barely started when the U.S.S. Enterpriseis attacked by thousands of marauding spaceships, and the crew finds themselves shipwrecked on a sparsely inhabited planet. Unfortunately, one of those few is Krall (Idris Elba), a nasty looking alien with evil intentions involving an ancient weapon.