Word: python
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...conjunction with Monty Python's recent inquiry into the meaning of life. Hospital Britannia seems to be part of British comedy's putative attempt to explain the ways of the world. Significantly, while neither movie manages to shed much light on the world situation, both do offer some particularly gory destructions of human vital organs. Yet surely life itself transcends liver-snatching and brain drinks...
...Terry Gilliam and John Cleese and the rest met while pursuing degrees at Oxford. But then he happens to mention his Welsh roots--"I've always felt Welsh, you know, the exciteability"--and his voice goes up and up and suddenly he is jabbering away in several simultaneous Monty Python accents...
...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...
...subject is out of bounds," he maintains, "you're up against the wall." Not everyone finds those standards agreeable--one backer of Jabberwocky abruptly pulled out, leaving some legal threads dangling, after he saw the script--but the strategy has paid off with audiences. Monty Python and the Holy Grail made 200,000 pounds, or about half a million dollars; Life of Brian did nearly as well...
...group's string of mildly embarrassing experiments--including The Secret Policeman's Other Ball, Time Bandits and Jabberwocky --Jones deftly avoids discussion. He steadfastly resists analyzing what has made any of the Python or Python-offshoot products bad or good. Nor, despite considerable hinting from several quarters, does he agree that Python humor has evolved in any particular way since its creators started dabbling in the commercial feature-film world. For him the most important comic influence remains the English tradition springing from the likes of Tristram Shandy, and after that the "goon shows" of early radio and the comic...