Okay, “welcome back,” this was Davey’s pick so I’m up first here:

Ready Player One is a dark fantasy movie depicting a mid-21st century future where 20th century baby-boomer-authored mainstream American pop media fails to wane in relevance. Where this body of media once had a flame mainly tended by Gen X nerds, whose isolationist, elitist identity congealed at the meeting points of nostalgia, consumption, bitterness, and trivia in the 1990s, in RP1’s year ~2050, this media is now worshipped by all young people and ruthlessly referenced in words, gestures, winks, and callbacks. Furthermore, this nerd consumer elitist identity is now a kind of skillset.

In a 2005 Angels of Light song the Swans guy sings “let the wind wear away / the words cut in the stone” and boy do I identify with that. I love the idea that there’s gonna be a future generation that truly is just not going to give a fuck about Star Wars, and that sometime after that, that there’s gonna be a generation who has no idea who Harrison Ford is. That time keeps passing, that stuff has its time, and that stuff is doomed to shrink to infinitesimal size en route to eventually disappearing completely is, in my opinion, unequivocally good. This movie depicts a nightmare where this process somehow stops, frozen in time at Ferris Bueller references. Not that Star Wars or Ferris Bueller are “bad” (both are fine), but the notion that either represent “peaks” and not “starting points” is deeply cursed.

At the edges of this movie are threads about the global economic/daily life repercussions of everyone living in an always-online pleasure matrix, but the movie doesn’t get too far into it. When Scott Pilgrim or whoever takes over the matrix in the end, he turns it off for two days a week, because “everyone needs to spend a little more time offline,” and then it shows him kissing his girlfriend, like, welp, that’s all that follows from that decision. I’d watch a movie set in 2020 that explores just this: what if a single individual controlled every internet service provider on earth, and decided that it’d be better for the world if there was no internet for anyone on Tuesdays and Thursdays?

It’s funny to think abt Spielberg making a movie in 2018 that in a large way is a fantasy “about” how his era of classics are gonna just keep being relevant endlessly into the future, and within that, to include a part where they go inside The Shining (1980). That Spielberg’s weird ode to himself includes a lengthy side-ode to Kubrick felt strangely elegiac, giving the sense that Spielberg in his “I’m never going to disappear” movie is also acknowledging “and yet I was never the greatest.” It seems possible to read RP1 as being “about” the relationship between these two directors, where Simon Pegg is Spielberg and Mark Rylance is Kubrick, but tbh I don’t really care about this beyond kind of wanting to rewatch AI (2001). I also kept thinking abt how sick it would be if they went inside Barry Lyndon (1975) instead of The Shining, and stood like MST3K characters in front of that movie’s epilogue screen.

I coincidentally watched Paul (2011) last week, a wooden movie that’s also about Gen X-flavor nerds as heroes, is also with Simon Pegg, and also explicitly addresses the continuing relevance/legacy of Spielberg, and the utility of pop culture references as a meta-language for producing further pop culture media. At best, some people use samples like this to create a black hole energy that collapses into a whole new thing; that’s postmodernism/hyperreality for ya. But at worst, as in these movies, the references are just like a dvd collection at some uncle’s house – stacks of recognizable things taking up space.

Ready Player One is about a multiplayer virtual reality game called the Oasis that’s so good and the world outside so shitty that everyone plays it constantly. After dying, the creator sets up a contest where the winner will get control of the Oasis and a bunch of bucks. The contest is played by doing deep dives into the creator’s favorite pop culture and looking for clues. A kid (Wade Watts, the kind of character whose name you need to look up the next day) solves the first clue after five years by “going left”, a game design idea that was groundbreaking when Metroid did it in 1986 but didn’t really strike me as something that would take the world’s collective gamers five years to figure out. This kicks off a race to win the contest, with Wade and his plucky crew on one side and a giant corporation run by an evil CEO on the other. The corporation plans to blanket the game world with ads if they win the contest. Wade wants to keep it exactly as it is, a monopoly on all entertainment that has been shown to be so addictive as to bankrupt people and drive them to suicide. The moral stakes of this situation struck me as more of a Spotify or Apple Music kind of problem than an end of the world kind of problem, but I thought it was best to just go with it.

The film’s world has a ton of pop culture references but no evidence of any new pop culture created after 2018, possibly because the advent of the game has completely arrested the adoption of any new characters or stories, since the game’s world is fixed on the pre-2018 tastes of a dead old white man. Maybe Ready Player 2 will be about the people creating the art that was being ignored while everyone else was hunting for pop culture clues? Could be good!

This seemed like a weird movie for Spielberg to make, though I have a theory as to why he did. He created the blockbuster, then spent decades making money, but he hasn’t had a genuine hit in a while. He’s a great filmmaker still doing great work (check out Bridge of Spies (2015) (also with Mark Rylance – TB) it rocks), but what people on the business side are convinced people want to see is recognizable IP. So Spielberg decides his next movie will be about a world where the only thing that matters is knowing your IP, and if you know it, you become rich and powerful.

There’s one part of the movie I thought was actually captivating – when the characters go into an interactive version of The Shining (1980). Great movie, box office bomb, and one that most of the extremely pop-savvy characters in the movie declare themselves to be unfamiliar with. The amount of craft and care put into replicating scenes from the movie is mind boggling, far surpassing any other part of the movie; the whiplash from these to the climactic VR war that follows is insane. Meticulous reproductions of shots in the Overlook followed closely by a dark messy looking CGI battle intercut with shots of people wearing VR goggles flailing in the streets, followed by an Iron Giant/Terminator 2 death scene mash up, followed by Mechagodzilla fighting a Gundam… all things that feel like the opposite of The Shining. So I thought, maybe RP1 is a self-contained critique of what passes for blockbusters in the modern age, all references and noise, made for the suits by someone who knows better but wanted to prove the point. That, or it’s just a normal bad vapid movie? It’s a mystery I fear may never be solved.

This movie is about a girl, Mija, who loves a giant genetically-modified food-pig (named Okja). The super-pig gets taken to NYC (from Korea), and Mija goes there to bring it back. She keeps chasing the pig and getting hurt in extreme ways, but she never gives up. Eventually she buys the pig back and they go home; that’s the movie.

The movie’s evil-agribusiness-mega-corp antagonist, who made/own the pig, is a thin Monsanto parody, fronted by Tilda, again here in the role of competing twins. The twins (in one scene with matching colored cigarettes that they each take one drag of, then throw away) care to use the girl for company image purposes, and to kill the pig for meat, respectively. Paul Dano plays a mod ALF cell leader, with the conversational affect of a startup CEO ripping a TED talk; he wants the girl to know that it’s his noble mission to save the pig (en route to “exposing” the evils of agribusiness GMO meat murder). Jake Gyllenhaal plays the current ad man for Monsanto; he wants the girl to know he wants to keep his job.

None of these other characters, their henchmen, or their plots matter or even intersect much. The feeling to me was that Tilda, Gyllenhaal, and Dano were grafted onto this movie from three other entirely different movies; incredibly, this also seemed intentional, and I found it effective. This side stuff gives the movie an irl feeling I rarely feel in movies: That big forces are moving around visibly and contiguously to what you’re working on, and they all have their own plots, main characters, and aesthetics, and they ultimately have nothing to do with and don’t care about you. I’m comfortable giving Bong (writer/director) the props and credit here: This quality of “the personal” (“give me back my pig”) occurring within the broader frame of the “monumental” (“evil agribusiness food nightmare”) feels characteristic of his writing, and I think it’s part of what makes his good movies good.

The ethical issues (and what the movie calls “paranoia”) around GMO foods and global food justice/sustainability are less in the movie’s focus than the somewhat more direct problems around killing and eating an animal, but they’re here. Is Monsanto providing a Nobel Prize-level service by creating a sustainable meat source? Or are they perpetrating an atrocity, by executing what the movie shows to be intelligent beings for food? This Q is unresolved – it’s a movie about a girl who wants her pig back, and that’s it.

I don’t really like hero-narratives where a determined child shows up to smash an “evil corporate”-form primarily via their individual tactical wiliness and athleticism (cf. The Hunger Games, Star Wars kinda except Rogue One (2016), etc.), and though Mija is wily and athletic, I love that that’s not what this movie is. Those kinds of stories aren’t useful for understanding (or even visualizing) modern individual powerlessness, or individual complicity within the “evil corporate”-forms of our time – they’re always abt people responsibly destroying those forms from outside of them. That option doesn’t really exist irl, where change is rarely cataclysmically realized, and individual contributions are typically anonymous.

I loved seeing individual irl-like powerlessness and smallness presented in a non-ironic and non-frustrated way here. Mija gets her pig back, literally just by interacting directly with the terms of its capture (i.e., by buying it for a fair price): Great. The girl can’t do anything (and maybe doesn’t even care) about the corporate meat farm’s hellscape slaughter yard, but anyway she gets what she wants, so she’s free to move on: Hmm, that’s sorta like me.

I eat meat, and while I understand the vectors on which that’s fucked, I don’t believe the responsibility for what I eat can reasonably be said to lie with me, or that to the extent to which it may, that my share of that responsibility “matters”; whatever chicken is already dead and it’s Tuesday and I have to eat. (But conversely, I feel that individual shares of responsibility do matter within supply chains when there are valid alternatives, and spending itself is the important act, rather than directly consuming; not using Amazon is the obvious instance.) Anyway, similarly here, it’s not Mija’s job to end the execution of intelligent super-pigs generally (and as the movie makes clear, it’s not Paul Dano’s job either): It’s Monsanto’s. I like that the movie is unblinking about the fact that Monsanto doesn’t care about this ethical problem at all, and is basically impervious to the ALF’s attacks.

(“So what does that mean?” you might ask, “Are you saying that if I vote, and call my senators, it’s still nowhere near enough, and that I would need to radically give over my life to some cause, or like run for office or something, in order to individually make a real impact, OR I’d have to somehow come to terms with my own individual powerlessness, and fundamental interchangeability with other people, as a person who basically lives a comfortable life, buttressed by complicity with the multifarious self-serving violences of capitalism?”

I’ll leave that one open! But I will say that googling, I saw at least one inevitable article like “my partner is vegan after watching okja,” which I def didn’t read, but to which I’d suggest that the partner not only missed the point, but (willy wonka meme vox) tell me again about how your inconsistent reactionary uncoordinated-private-individual-opting-out matters? Further riff here about Amazon buying Whole Foods in another movie review maybe, but uhhh, where was I here? …) (I feel that I’m making the point in this aside very poorly, but I’m gonna leave this original text and the paragraph above intact. What I think I was trying to say is that that 1. consumer lifestyle decisions shouldn’t be confused with activism, 2. that individual low-power acts (e.g. calling senators) are fundamentally impersonal and interchangeable, with a value that’s truly present only in the aggregate, not in the individual contribution, and 3. that self-righteousness is corny. – TB 12/2018)

From my view Tilda is wrong to say that people don’t care abt GMOs if the food is cheap & convenient enough; the food being cheap & convenient might just matter more in her consumer case. It seems important to try to establish for oneself where this rationale breaks down, and to try to push back in cases where it seems like common understanding or behavior could actually be shifted. (Sorry but) Imagine a “what a cast” Netflix movie that like, critiques the ethics of a vampiric convenience service like Seamless, or the community-resources-waste of something like Kickstarter.

…

– Here’s a video I like of an automated lamb deboning room in a slaughterhouse (it’s “graphic” but imo no more so than preparing a chicken); see especially the robot arm at like 1:30. Not sure why the slaughterhouse in the movie looked like something outta like, Saw.

– Okja contains a reminder of the scene in Permanent Midnight (1998) where Zoolander smokes crack (to Prodigy) and jumps against the plate glass window

– Other pig movies that spring to mind are Babe/Babe Pig In City, Charlotte’s Weeb, Gordy, Willow (see feature image; “You’re……. pigs!“), Beast of Southern Wild

– I watched this movie because The Host (2006) rules, and because Jeff told me to check it out. Thanks Jeff!

– Bela sent me a snippet from the Evgenia Markon Yaroslavskaya memoir she’s translating from the Russian… this contextless snippet feels relevant: “even in self-sacrifice, a person is still doing it for themselves, and feels satisfied with the knowledge of their own heroism”

In an addendum to Tom’s review of The Martian I mentioned that although I appreciated there being a movie that held such trust in a rational response to problem-solving, I pined for a time when the more acceptable cinematic solutions were those of chaotic-neutral variety. Well, I have good news for cinema goers with a yen for that particular streak of dark insanity. I predict that we’ll be seeing a lot more films about the failure of rational decision-making and its fruits in the future, as well as more films dispensing with rationality altogether.

Which makes Arrival in some ways already a dated movie. Much like The Martian it prizes a rational and methodical process, and places extreme trust in it winning out. This is an extremely optimistic film which, though it doesn’t take a completely unrealistic view of what problems people make for themselves, still manages to place rationality on a high pedestal. This can make it rather tough to stomach in current times. Luckily it has many other strong defining qualities, chief of which is heaviness. Cosmically heavy, intellectually heavy, thematically heavy and heavy emotionally. A potent brew for fans of being crushed by the cosmos and life on earth.

It’s best to go into Arrival pretty cold on specifics, so plot stuff I’m not really gonna get that far into. To skim, it’s primarily about language. This extends to its use of some well-learned tropes of film. Bits of dialogue and characters can seem lifted from other tested sources, which is usually a major bummer but in Arrival it proves to be an effective shorthand, off-loading tons of busy work so it can get to the big questions. It’s extremely visually inventive, replete with sweeping vistas, a hand-rolled visually-based alien language, and an incredible scene that uses seemingly only white and shades of gray.  Acting wise, Amy Adams is in the film and she rocks.

Arrival as well passes the Keanu test and is chock full of references to his films, including a sly reference to Speed. A film which in one of the great looks behind the curtain of film’s shared language, made clear that a relationship built upon a shared stressful situation may not truly be what it is. It as well shares a great deal with Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, a film whose undying optimism is based in the belief that an unmoored relationship to time’s (perceived) linear march is the secret to saving humanity’s soul. Denis Villeneuve has obviously studied Keanu’s films, and here it serves him well.

For these reasons and more, Arrival is definitely worth watching. I don’t really see how you can come out of it without at least a few new ideas. Like most films that seek to achieve such a high concept it doesn’t hit all its marks but I personally think it’s silly to ding something so ambitious that’s mostly successful. Such deliberateness can be seen as a sense of inflated purpose to some, and there’s something to be said for becoming the thing by scuttling towards its side. To become the thing through a mostly straight line though is important as well, and can be a valuable blueprint of understanding more complex and less intentional success.

I do feel it’s important to enjoy this particular strand of victory while we can, for this age of rational cinema may be ending. Films that can explore notions of post-humanity so purely and with such conviction will be heading the way of the buffalo, if only for a little bit. For that Arrival should be celebrated. A powerfully optimistic, mature and above all else, a reasoned approach to our reality. Long live rational cinema, all hail the new era and what insanity we can muster.

I went to the theater and watched it ($15.50; UA Court Street theater 12 “all the way at the top”) on the strength of Davey’s rec. Here’re some thoughts from my Corner.

(I’m never gonna say it again; please assume “Spoilers” from me from here on out on this blog.)

• It’s like a core opinion of ours that it’s worth watching dumb movies because their failures generate a kind of fun set of inquiry and experience that the movies do not directly intend or anticipate. Arrival is a textbook Good Bad Movie: though it fails to hit its own marks – it’s not a Great Film, or an Instant Sci-Fi Classic, it’s not Smart, and it’s not good at all as a Serious Movie – it’s fun to watch because it maybe accidentally hits some other points instead.
• Like uhhh if time is a construct of language, but the meaning of the alien language is only understood in translation, how does that translation act not require the inheritance of the human-language-based time-construct onto the interpretation of the pictograms. Even if Amy Adams could use the alien system to communicate human ideas, aren’t those still, ya know, human ideas.
• And like if the idea is that you can have “future memories” because time is slippery, but you’re still experiencing it in order, I guess I don’t get how this means you can also have “perfect future recall” ? Wouldn’t this be consciousness-shattering at minimum, or like, so fully altering of your reality paradigm, that being able to perform an act like the deus ex machina with the chinese general at the big party would be fundamentally impossible through all the unfiltered noise of “constantly lived” moments? Isn’t this “way more fucked up” from a functional-reality perspective than like, being in the throes of the furthest reaches of psychedelic experience?
• Or put another way, if language is software for perceiving and ordering reality, wouldn’t there be strict, blocking hardware requirements barring Amy Adams from running the pretty intense software update she I guess downloaded from the critters?
• Okay okay okay and so all that aside, does everyone have time-insensitivity in the near-ish future, or just Amy Adams, and how exactly will time-insensitivity help solve the world’s problems? And like where’s the minimum viable engagement with the metaphysical implications of future knowledge? Are the rules that “Amy Adams is unavoidably gonna tell Jeremy Renner the bad news,” or does she now know in the past not to, because it’ll make her bummed and lonely, and so she won’t? Or what.

Also =

• They truly unleashed the tropes on this one, often without bothering to change the default settings. I think Davey’s read, that this deployment of tropes was meant to intentionally reinforce the core-conceptual language stuff on a film-language meta level is extremely interesting, but, to my viewing, generous.
• The dialogue is noteworthily sewer-grade. Consider e.g. Jeremy Renner to Amy Adams: “My whole life I’ve been looking at the stars…” can you guess where this is going?!?!…. “…but the most amazing thing I found was you.”
• They make Forest Whittaker (Species, Ghost Dog, The Crying Game) say his bad dialogue with an unrecognizable accent = I’m into it
• Why did Forest Whittaker take a helicopter to Amy Adams’s house at like 5am for the followup interview, and how does a college professor live alone in a baller house on the lake.
• Good luck if you try to watch this on a laptop. Only the big screen

  

  will do the image of the giant black default avatar/Mork-egg spaceships justice.

• There’s no emotional commitment to the characters (or really any character development), and all the drama and tension is super artificial and thin; there’s the sense that someone at the top felt that this movie needed an antagonist, so several(!) antagonists were added, and they’re all thin too.
• Meanwhile the critters are 100 foot obelisks with tentacle fingers for legs/hands/mouths. They live in a room full of white smoke, that has a glass wall shaped like a movie screen (or cop mirror). But the glass wall doesn’t stop an explosion from hurting one of them, and Amy Adams goes into the white smoke room via a back entrance through a rat turd she boards, and is fine, so I didn’t really get what this staging device was all about (other than “a cost-cutting measure”).
• Amy Adams has a “crazy dream,” seemingly just to get a non-smoke room shot of a critter into the movie = I’m into it
• Compare the ship entrance corridor/critter glass screen area to the mind-cavity corridor and behind-the-eyes thing in Being John Malkovich (1999).
• I thought the movie did a lot of really obvious work, and was frustrated e.g. when Jeremy Renner said “zero-sum game” and the movie cut back to the memory tableau this phrase was a callback to. But Davey told me he thought this was fine – that a movie’s doing more narrative work frees an audience to do the work of dealing with challenging concepts. I definitely feel grated and don’t like it when any text does my reading for me, but I guess mileage varies on that one.
• All computers seemed to have an inactive terminal window open? Also I guess some government rolled their own Google Hangouts video chat replacement software, and all the different language teams around the world got permission to download and install it = hell ya I’m into this too
• Do the critters know about the Lucent Technologies logo. What about the Germs logo.

I love horror.  Real horror.  A private fantasy can be really excellent, one private fear blown up huge for all to see infecting the viewers with a new terrifying unknown.  I love a public terror.  One everyone shares.  I love it when they’ve tapped into the big one, and you know it’s always been there. Once hid well beneath the surface but now it’s here.  With us.

I love disaster.  With disaster things must first be right, and then they are wrong.  Isn’t it so good, to know right from wrong?  Of all disaster though, one kind is my favorite.  A special kind.  Where a creators intentions good hearted all, are present and on their sleeves.  A malicious glare never shown at any steps of the way.  Yet, somehow… everything still goes terribly, terribly wrong.

With films such as this I love to imagine the creeping dread that slowly manifested on the cutting room, where what was once a light hearted farce began to uncoil into a creature of abject dread.  The creators begin to see what has been wrought, but still refuse to acknowledge.  For if they did, what options would they have?  Would they be able to withstand what they have made with an honest eye?

Anything would be easier, so they smile and they nod and they tell themselves that what they have created is good.  That what they have created walks, a just path.  That although what they have created is maybe not particularly wise, that at least surely it’s good?  If that turns out not to be the case at least, once they are done then they can smile and everyone around them will smile and haven’t they all done something like this before?  Soon this be nothing but a memory.

Films like this are rare, and only for the very brave.  They will challenge ones very sense of aesthetic demolishing what is known to be enjoyable.  If one can find pleasure in such a sordid brew, does one truly deserve pleasure at all?  Perhaps there is no pleasure in this world and we are all mired in nothing but a sickening, fetid bog of other peoples confused ideas. Struggling to breathe as it pulls us under, our lungs slowly filling.  As we float downwards into nothingness free of the world we find ourselves free to ask of ourselves the big questions.  We can finally ask, did we enjoy the many minutes Kevin Spacey spends getting us to hate him?  We can ask, did we find mirth in the endless sound of distressed alien yowling?  Did we smile watching Kevin Spacey inhabit a creature both sickly familiar but unlike any we have ever seen?  And did we cry, when he said to his long suffering wife

“But I always loved you”

Or is the terror too much to handle?  The emotions too twisted and raw?  Do we strike out and refuse to give our acceptance and pity to this thing so misshapen and wrong?  We struggle to remain free to still hold onto some portion of ourselves, and eventually the vision abates.  We find ourselves sound of mind and believe ourselves to be free.  We are not.

We have been somewhere and now we know about a place.  A place where many minds have tangled together.  Where in their collective vision what they have seen is a being of pure pleasure.  The thought crosses the mind, is it us who pervert and destroy it by being witness?  Is it us, who are wrong?  What kind of cruel beings have we become?  How could we not feel for a daughters love of her father?  Is it possible we have become so cynical that nothing in the film, so full of mirth has brought us joy?  When its ends with a suicide attempt, should we not be sad?  These are the questions Nine Lives asks of those brave enough to watch.  Like the best of cinema it will shake your very belief of who you are to its core.  A sensation not very pleasant but then, worthy cinema rarely is.  

In The Martian, Matt Damon gets stuck on Mars and says, “I’m gonna have to science the shit out of this.”

His mission’s captain is a white woman. Also on the ship are a Mexican-American man, a German man (played by a Nordic man), and a white man and white woman (who are in love). A white man runs NASA, but is afraid to take risks. A Chinese-American man runs the tech (and is hooked up with the Chinese guys running the tech in China), while an African-American man runs the mission. Another young genius African-American man figures out the math. Kristen Wiig is present and at one point sorta tells a joke.

This movie was upbeat but serious (dealing with loneliness and difficulty without really going off the deep end into being a “brutal” or “difficult” movie), deeply procedural and easy to follow but still dramatic (because plenty of things go wrong), clear in its very simple stakes (Matt Damon might die), properly epic about interplanetary travel (it takes a super long time to get anywhere, and if you spend that time, you’re not on earth with your aging family; space logistics are mindboggling; Mars is empty but being a human not-on-Earth is mega dangerous), was filled with great images (dir. Ridley Scott), and never got too stressful (cf. Gravity (2013)).

A couple things though: Cameras in Matt Damon’s space station are recording his mission. He speaks to them throughout the movie, though the fate of the recordings is never known, so it’s pretty much just a trick to allow for direct-address. Well, okay, that’s narrative convenience, but compare with the mostly silent, way-more-lonely Robert Redford boat-survival movie, All is Lost (2013). Imagine Redford looking you in the eye in the beginning of the movie and saying, “I’m gonna have to boatsman the shit out of this.” Damon’s situation, despite being bleak, is still basically cozy.

And second, for a big budget movie so apparently sensitive to diversity in casting, it’s funny that The Martian still winds up with an imperious white dude who, as the movie’s lead, gets to tell the camera that it was he who “colonized” Mars by being the first to grow food in its native soil, was the first human to be alone on a planet, and who is, technically, also a space pirate. He also repeatedly complains that the only music available on the Mars outpost’s iPod is disco.

…

when I showed these thoughts abt the martian to davey he replied:

Nice, ya I think you get to what my main problem with what this movie was as well, the kind of twin factors of “who do we want to be saved” (a thing I think about a lot in the context of these movies was, in casting Apollo 13, Ron Howard said that they cast Tom Hanks not based on his believability as an astronaut, but because he was the person that culture most wanted to get back to earth) and the implicit idea that, again, we want Damon saved (I guess I’m tired of having feelings on the matter being taken for granted)… plus his transformation into colonist is also troubling, like that’s what we want saved? Seems regressive.

And there’s something about the measured reasonable engineer-like approach to seemingly unsurmountable problems that strikes me as kind of un-American. Like in the Martian he figures out what his needs are, the amount of time he has to meet them, and then sets out on a schedule (which put this way makes the Martian seem like a movie about working at an office)

In juxtaposition, in Die Hard, John McClane is faced with unsurmountable odds, and spends the next two hours climbing around in places he shouldn’t, dropping explosives willy-nilly down elevator chutes, and running across broken glass. Although theres a part of me that’s happy that Martian is trying to point us in this way, the fact that all-out insanity is not deemed “a way out” anymore [in fiction] is troubling to me on another level.

Sausage Party is the story of a young hot dog that I think we can all relate to.  After all, who among us does not wish to pierce the veil of misinformation through which we view our lives?  Who among us would not wish to pass our newfound state of enlightenment to our fellow man freeing them from the shackles of profundity?  And who among us would not wish to topple the false gods who hold us in thrall, subject to their capricious and cruel whims?   Sausage Party tackles all these questions and more.  And as some of the more astute readers among us may have noticed, Sausage Party is indeed what we’ve all been waiting for, a The Matrix, for 2016.

Our hot dog’s tale begins, much like Neo’s, trapped in a wrapper next to many of his fellow dogs, isolated from the outside world not only by his physical trappings, but by an omnipresent dogma received as sacrosanct.  The world this food lives in is one where divisions based on aisle and place of origin have grown to become an intractable part of society, and where rules passed down devoid of original purpose must be followed.  It’s important to note that these consumables lack the written word, without which they are beholden to the whims of a society in thrall to an ever shifting oral tradition.  Through this the film raises some important points about the necessity of keeping a recorded history, without which the advancement of civilization is forever in doubt.    

Our hero the hot dog, has his reverie taken from him through cruel circumstance, but while his adventure begins with the pursuit of normalizing his situation, it soon takes a detour as he runs into some colorful characters, a Twinkie, a bottle of Firewater, and a box of Grits with whom he “takes the blue pill.”

While the hot dog is becoming “woke” we are simultaneously being shown the stories of Taco, Bun, Lavosh, and Bagel on a parallel journey to try and return to what they believe is their place in the world.  Although they are able to eventually find it, they find that through unexpected misfortune, there is much to learn even if one does not desire it.  The experience separates them from their companions and leaves them although richer in knowledge poorer for no longer knowing exactly who they are, and what to believe is true.

Sausage Party spends much of its running time exploring how hot dogs and other items of food struggle to find meaning, and how constraining it can be if they prescribe too much to systems built by others.  The film keeps to this notion so strenuously that it does not recommend even its own whole-scale rejection of systems, but recommends that one find their own way.  

I enjoyed Sausage Party and have as well been enjoying pontificating over its myriad insights, but I do have a couple of reservations keeping this from being a full blown endorsement.  One is that Sausage Party is not a good title for this film.  Better would have been  “Naughty Food Adventure” or maybe, “God’s Not Dead, For These Foods.”  I as well think Keanu Reeves should have been in the movie, seeing as how much it owes to one of his pioneering works.  Hopefully that will be rectified in the sequel. Other than these grievous errors, I wholeheartedly recommend it. Sausage Party is a well constructed and thoughtful film, one which does an excellent job of “thinking outside the bun.”