Word: chapman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Directed by Michael Chapman...
...clichés. These teen-agers are good-looking kids with big dreams and a bright line of patter. The coach carries on like a sensitive drill sergeant, psyching his team into a football frenzy by using curses, inspirational locker-room speeches and the odd face-mask violation. Michael Chapman, who graduated to the director's chair with this film after making his name as the cinematographer of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Personal Best, brings a virginal intensity to each hoary plot device. He hardly gives his audience time to realize that the football team is only...
...first scientist on its cover: Frederick G. Banting, the Canadian physician who, with Charles H. Best, extracted the hormone insulin from the pancreas and finally provided a successful treatment of diabetes mellitus, until then almost always a killer. Two months later the spotlight focused on the naturalist Roy Chapman Andrews, whose hunt for dinosaur and other ancient fossil remains in the Gobi Desert had fascinated the nation. In its second year, long before the id and the superego had become the chatter of the cocktail hour, TIME devoted a cover story to the controversial theories of Sigmund Freud, the father...
Such minor infusions of relevance, though, aren't enough to stop the momentum of the comedy, which hurtles on with all Monty Python's ludicrous charm. When Cleese and Graham Chapman start mugging at the camera, the material they're acting becomes supremely irrelevant. When Terry Jones dresses up as an old crone this time as a sort of Mother Hubbard, dancing and singing with her 90 ragged children--he she looks exactly like 39 other Jones crones from Holy Grail or earlier. And fortunately, the gag is just as ridiculous the fortieth time around. There must be some deeper...
...release The Meaning of Life, the six members of Monty Python Enterprises--Jones, Terry Gilliam, John Cleese, Graham Chapman. Michael Palin and Eric Idle--split up and followed publicity routes, lunching with groups of admiring reviewers and cavorting before advance-screening audiences through most of March. Jones, the director, covered Boston and New York, but he admits that the effort is somewhat allen to the six-man troupe's usual way of operating. Former pictures have been supported by small independent backers, usually musicians, frequently George Harrison; work habits are commensurately informal, with the six writers splitting into teams...