Word: lifeness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Monty Python and the Holy Grail; Graham Chapman's snooty King Arthur deserved to have shit flung upon him. In Jabberwocky, a 1976 bomb starring two Python members, the mock-epic dropped out entirely and left the cast wallowing in a cesspool of gore and unbearable toilet humor. Life of Brian returns to the successful formula of Holy Grail, spoofing a genre of film and its directorial cliches with both skillful imitation and derision...
Holy Grail worked largely because they blithely ignored traditional dicta of screenwriting and approached the movie as a two-hour set of manageable episodes. Life Of Brian does a more creditable job as a "full length feature presentation," as the studios call it, but its sanity actually works against it. The risks Monty Python used to take with its narrative line--bouncing characters from film to animation, for example--would fail as often as they succeeded, but they were a trademark, often responsible for the funniest moments...
...Life of Brian remains disappointingly sober...
...outrageous." Except for a brief sequence in which an animated spaceship picks up Graham Chapman in the middle of a 100-yard plunge, whisks him into a brief take-off on Star Wars, and then dumps him back where he would have landed anyway, the plot line of Life of Brian is alarmingly coherent...
...Monty Python crew had been less inhibited, Life of Brian would have been a much funnier movie. A few incendiary jokes remain to keep the screen aflame, and to keep fans happy. But the troupe's newfound concern for order leads them to repeat a few jokes as running gags that would have been better left to explode only once...