Word: grails
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...Once it was risky even to attend a Python event. I was at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival for the Holy Grail world premiere. As all Pythonistas recall, MP&HG begins in earnest with opening credits that keep breaking down, as the people responsible for goof-ups keep getting sacked. The last credit reads: "Directed by 40 specially trained Ecuadorian mountain llamas... and Terry Jones & Terry Gilliam." The story finally starts when they're done with the llama...
...Once the Pythons were comedically dangerous. Thirty years later, in part because they schooled the Western world in their brand of sublimely silly comedy, the rebels have inevitably become a nostalgia act. So, what changed between the Holy Grail film and the Spamalot show? Idle codified and cute-ified the old loopy, spiky surrealism. The show is so mainstream it's arri?re-garde. It's been polished and burnished, pressed and dry-cleaned, into a Broadway musical that is super-ingratiating - don't risk, can't miss...
...post-Flying Circus personality: as Basil Fawlty in his Fawlty Towers sitcom; as the martinet sergeant in the film of Peter Nichols' Privates on Parade; and, right now, in Spamalot, as the Voice of God. When Arthur cravenly compliments Him on the notion of a quest for the Grail, Cleese the Almighty bellows in that distinct and cutting tenor: "Of course it's a good idea. I'm God, you stupid...
...little, and you could see the Pythons as British versions of the American college jocks who reached their apex of glory and achievement as young men, then went into real estate, coasting on their lingering allure. It's true, anyway, if we see the TV show and Holy Grail as an extension of the glamorous days Jones and Palin spent at Oxford, and Cleese, Chapman and Idle at Cambridge...
...Spamalot it's often hard to tell whether the stypefyingly simple lyrics and false rhymes ("So be strong / Keep right on / To the end / Of your song / Do not fail / Find your Grail / Find your Grail / Find your Grail") a joke on the banality of such songs? Or is it the real thing, a straightforwardly banal inspirational? Which is not to say that a song can't also be what it makes fun of - that a faux-inspirational song can't be inspirational and incorrigibly, addictively, sing-alongable. Remember that "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" became...