The visual design of the picture was similarly crude and ugly, although the fact that one of the human characters looked as if he’d stepped out of a Peter Bagge comic panel gave me intimations that something a little sharper overall could have been accomplished, if only … well, again I dunno. And the allegorical structuring of the grocery community-a nebbishy talking bagel and a goateed and belligerent piece of flatbread stand in for the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, for instance, and Nazi sauerkraut makes noises about eliminating “the Juice”-mostly struck me as an opportunistic ploy to get away with a lot of cruddy ethnic humor. Even when I did smoke weed, it was never my favorite thing. And I guess it’s kind of funny that "the imperishable”-three grocery items that let Rogen’s frank Frank in on the fact that the Gods and the Great Beyond are just myths, and outside the supermarket there’s only death and consumption-get their buzz by smoking out of a kazoo. The movie’s prime mover, Rogen, is a doge of stoner humor, and he shows incredible discipline in this film by saving the first weed joke for twenty minutes in. “Maybe I’d like this if I still smoked weed,” I thought at one point. I feel bad about this, because the voice cast contains not just super-talented actors but some friendly acquaintances who happen to be super-talented actors. Once in an interview the very humorous Kevin Smith said to me, “Comedy is so f**king subjective.” I have to be honest here and say the comedy of “Sausage Party” never really connected for me. To wit, the movie’s villain, or rather, sole-non-human villain, is an extremely irate feminine hygiene product voiced by Nick Kroll. But given that the hot dogs and the buns then engage in an exchange of dirty talk that makes Cartman in “South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut” sound like Joel Osteen, “Sausage Party,” directed by Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon from a script by Rogen, Goldberg, Ariel Shaffir and Kyle Hunter, with a story credit going to voice actor and executive producer Jonah Hill is spectacularly relentless in its profanity and sex talk and extends the metaphor of anthropomorphic groceries into territory you and I might not have even imagined. Not really, it turns out-that song’s the only original in the movie.
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