Word: arthurian
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...first, dating from the early Middle Ages, Ariès calls "the tame death," a calm acceptance of the end of life. He notes that in the Song of Roland and the Arthurian legends, heroes had premonitions of their deaths. In the final hour they prepared themselves with a simple, dignified ritual that reflected a world made whole by faith, community and a sense of common destiny. To die was to enter a long sleep until the day of resurrection...
...Romans is overwhehningly-perhaps recklessly-ambitious, an attempt to correlate the twilight of early British history with some of the nation's bedrock myths and most urgent contemporary problems. Celtic lore and Roman might thus flow through the first stirrings of Arthurian legend and course straight into the Irish issue. A quarter of the play takes place in 1980, when a British spy waits in a field to eliminate a high-ranking member of the I.R.A. "It's Celts we're fighting in Ireland," he ruminates. "We won't get anywhere till we know what that...
...assumption that after My Fair Lady, Lerner and Loewe were not men but gods. After John F. Kennedy's assassination, the show became a myth. The President's favorite musical was a symbol of the "one brief shining moment" when Washington was supposedly transformed into an Arthurian round table...
...course, Hugh is the champion that they are waiting for, but this certainty is a tribute to Le Guin's narrative savvy. Because she moves briskly without ever seeming to hurry, she makes Hugh's transformation from supermarket clerk to Arthurian knight-errant whisk by as inevitably as a theorem, as acceptably as a rabbit coming out of a hat. The author brandishes her magic instead of concealing it; when Hugh accepts his mission on behalf of the people of Mountain Town, he is given a standard-issue sword and sent out to slay a woefully worn...
LIFE OF BRIAN does not do the job on the gospels that Holy Grail did on the Arthurian legends. The scope is more timid, the technique less audacious. We had a right to expect better, funnier, or at least wilder. The more slavishly Monty Python tries to follow conventions--the more they tailor their films to play in Peoria--the less anyone will laugh at them. The film remains only a funny shadow of what might have been--like Jesus Christ beating a dead parrot...