Word: python
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Basically a "Revenge Of The Rarified Nerds," Function is a tale of social scatology. The hero, Gilbert Chilvers (Michael Palin of Monty Python fame), is a man shat upon. His story is a struggle for status, which in the throes of postwar means meat All the town aristocrats are dining on veal and steak while poor Gilbert meekly spoons Spam from...
...reveal anything new and different about the English aristocracy. The film is different because it immerses the viewer in the bowels of society so suitably that he does not feel unclean himself. Bennett's low-key attitude keeps the film from rising above the level of an average Monty Python episode, but when compared with lawdry American attempts like wild Life and Arenging Angel, A Private Function almost deserves its royal welcome...
...faced with certain temptations. Very few actors, for example, can pull off a good Russian accent, and the cast members of The Good Doctor are not among this elite. If Goldman had dropped the Russian accents, the "Drowned Man" scene, in which David Angel employs a hilarious Monty Python accent, would have seemed more consistent. Other excesses of voice and gesture occur too much at random to be enjoyable and too much to be believably off-beat. In going for the cheap laugh, Goldman unfortunately loses his otherwise perfectly Chekhovian control and his sense of comic plausibility...
...serve a public need defined other than by the number of people who want to watch a given program, then by all means it should do so. That's how we end up with driver education programs, and documentaries on harp seals, and even "Monty Python's Flying Circus," none a ratings success, but each a legitimate use of the public airwaves. Public TV instructs, enlightens, and entertains in ways commercial networks just can't afford...
...regular subway rider even after that assault. Surely he, like all other regular subway riders, has seen just about every imaginable thing, and some that have led to the phrase "only in New York" becoming a cliche, like the man who rode the IND with a Burmese python wrapped around his neek. One of those things is kids with sharpened screwdrivers in their jackets asking you for money to play video games. But in Bernhard Goetz, something finally snapped, and he told four Black teenagers that he had five dollars for each of them, and pulled...