Having pushed the shaky alliance between plot and Monty Python style humor to the stretching point with "Life of Brian", the brilliant U.K. comedy team returned to their sketch roots for their third and final film, usually regarded as the least of the film series. The sketches are loosely organized around a chronology of human life (beginning of course with "The Miracle of Birth") and the idea of philosophical inquiry into the meaning of human life. Along the way the audience is treated to the best and worst of their collective talent, and the strongest feeling for fans to take away unfortunately is the feeling that the group's sensibilities were fracturing.
The show begins with a short film directed by Terry Gilliam, "The Crimson Permanent Assurance." Its very witty and the unique style of visualization puts the rest of the film, mostly directed by Terry Jones, in a bad light. There are some other funny sketches, some much funnier really, but none of them are visualized in a particularly interesting way.
This is a film of as they say the good, the bad and the ugly. The good -- the machine that goes "ping", "The Third World", Eric Idle's "Universe Song" and Noel Coward impression, "Christmas in Heaven." The bad -- an overlong war parody that misses all marks, a rambling conversation about tigers that seems like amateur variety hall, naked field hockey executions (in a movie that later mocks cynical exploitation). And the downright ugly -- Mr. Creosote is all you have to say for people who've seen the film.
It seems a lot longer than it is, and all of it a bit arbitrary. The Monty Python troupe is more interested in skewering the absurdities of social behavior than in investigating anything of any "meaning." But the dark edge to the comedy is consistent and the film bravely challenges the audience's sense of taste and proportion. In the end, it's more entertainment than we could expect from a movie but less than we could hope for from Monty Python. Looking at it now especially in retrospect it's clear that it was the right time for the "boys" to go their own way and take on the world as men: otherwise we wouldn't have Gilliam's "Brazil" and other classics, we wouldn't have Cleese's "Fawlty Towers" and "Fish Called Wanda", and so forth. Although at the time in the 1980s it seemed a tragedy to me that Python was no more, it seems clear at this point that they left on a relatively high note and went off to pursue individual goals that brought them to new and interesting places.
The show begins with a short film directed by Terry Gilliam, "The Crimson Permanent Assurance." Its very witty and the unique style of visualization puts the rest of the film, mostly directed by Terry Jones, in a bad light. There are some other funny sketches, some much funnier really, but none of them are visualized in a particularly interesting way.
This is a film of as they say the good, the bad and the ugly. The good -- the machine that goes "ping", "The Third World", Eric Idle's "Universe Song" and Noel Coward impression, "Christmas in Heaven." The bad -- an overlong war parody that misses all marks, a rambling conversation about tigers that seems like amateur variety hall, naked field hockey executions (in a movie that later mocks cynical exploitation). And the downright ugly -- Mr. Creosote is all you have to say for people who've seen the film.
It seems a lot longer than it is, and all of it a bit arbitrary. The Monty Python troupe is more interested in skewering the absurdities of social behavior than in investigating anything of any "meaning." But the dark edge to the comedy is consistent and the film bravely challenges the audience's sense of taste and proportion. In the end, it's more entertainment than we could expect from a movie but less than we could hope for from Monty Python. Looking at it now especially in retrospect it's clear that it was the right time for the "boys" to go their own way and take on the world as men: otherwise we wouldn't have Gilliam's "Brazil" and other classics, we wouldn't have Cleese's "Fawlty Towers" and "Fish Called Wanda", and so forth. Although at the time in the 1980s it seemed a tragedy to me that Python was no more, it seems clear at this point that they left on a relatively high note and went off to pursue individual goals that brought them to new and interesting places.