Film Review: Sausage Party

A profound examination of religious faith — buried deep, deep within a hilariously crude, offensive, foul-mouthed animated film.

Oh, sh*t, these foods are f**cking foul-mouthed!
Oh, sh*t, these foods are f**cking foul-mouthed!

Imagine if Toy Story was written by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and then sprinkled with a dash of Caligula. Even that probably doesn’t quite capture just how far Sausage Party goes in terms of it’s R-related language and content (supposedly it came close to an NC-17 rating, until they toned it down — yes, toned it down!). As advertised, the cast and creators of This is the End are back, this time to infuse their stoner, ultra-sexualized, black comedy into an animated feature. Sausage Party goes a step beyond just shock-value to deliver its laughs, serving a healthy does of side-splitting puns, curse-words, pop culture references, and hilarious characters. But Sausage Party is also an incredibly clever film. It disguises it’s more contemplative themes of divinity, the existence of an afterlife, and the triviality of religious tensions within the entertaining muck of a hilariously perverse one-note culinary joke — that anthropomorphic foods discover that they’re all doomed to be devoured by humans.

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Spinning Platters Interview: Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek on “Puss in Boots” (and “The Skin I Live In”)

Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek at the San Francisco premiere of PUSS IN BOOTS. Photo by Eric Lawson.

Antonio Banderas is out on a very polarized and complicated press tour at the moment. While it is not uncommon for an actor to have several projects opening at the same time, there have perhaps never been two more diametrically opposed films opening together than Puss in Boots, a feature-length spinoff of Banderas’ scene-stealing feline fan favorite from the Shrek films, and The Skin I Live In, a shockingly perverse psychological drama that reunites Banderas, now 51, with the great Spanish auteur Pedro Almodovar, who first introduced Banderas in such ’80s world cinema classics as Law of Desire and Women on the Verge of Nervous Breakdown. And so, when Banderas and his frequent collaborator/Puss in Boots co-star Salma Hayek came to San Francisco for a red carpet premiere of their film, we were supposed to be talking about the family-friendly Puss in Boots. But, inevitably, the conversation kept working its way back to his other, considerably more lurid project – whether he liked it or not.

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