Word: lifeness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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MONTY PYTHON'S LIFE OF BRIAN...
That's the way things go in Monty Python's Life of Brian. The film is a send-up biblical epic recounting the biography of a chap born in the manger down the alley from the one people sing about each Christmas. Brian (Graham Chapman) is just a regular guy. He has a domineering mother, basically cowardly nature and no messianic complex whatever. But circumstances force him into contact with, among others, a lisping Pilate, an underground revolutionary group that spends more time in ideological debate than in overthrowing the Romans, and all sorts of people who think...
This is an excellent example of the movie's contempt for both taste and religion. Life of Brian is even now being protested by spokesmen for various pious groups. They are quite right to do so, for this is no gentle spoof, no good-natured satire of cherished beliefs. The Pythons' assault on religion is as intense as their at tack on romantic chivalry in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). They are funny lads, but detest all formal systems of belief, all institutions: the political left and right, popular culture, motherhood, womanhood, homosexuality, conformity and nonconformity...
What if Little Nell doesn't die? What if nothing much happens to her? Nell had better be unusually charming, that's what. The feeling here is that Peppermint Soda, a film about an uneventful year in the life of two young Parisian sisters, wavers back and forth across an awkward boundary: sometimes it is just barely charming enough, and sometimes it almost charms, but not quite...
...orange sweater." Obviously the commonplace events of the film have an intense and personal meaning for her. Some of this intensity is conveyed to the viewer, some is lost. The film offers a sense of the strong, often mysterious flow that when it is finished, we call a life. Yet in the end the viewer feels that Kurys has held back important information, that she has used technique to disguise the fact that there are depths to her characters that she herself, perhaps, does not understand...