Word: python
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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SOME OF US, the sensible ones, never doubted that Monty Python had an inside line on the meaning of life. Then again some of us run out of tingers when we try to count the number of times we saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Some of us laugh at just about every muscle twitch in John Cleese face. We even snicker at the very approximate "John Cleese imitation" attempted by his cohorts Michael Palen and Terry Jones (Palin sat on Jones's shoulders) before a screening last week of the troupe's latest cinematic venture...
...latest venture--and, according to hints, probably their last for some time both legitimizes and assuages such fears True. Life Itself seems rather a broad topic to attempt visualizing. And the proximity of the eternal verities (birth, religion, contraception, and the life of a waiter) have transformed the original Python tone of genial silliness to satire. But despite these signs of maturity, the group has evidently regained its comic fire--and the comedians roll around in their capacious subject matter with every bit of the old gusto and panache...
...MONTY PYTHON'S THE MEANING OF LIFE
...Sacrilege. Scatology. And a bowlful of talking fish. There is a little something for everyone in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. Aside from the fish, who are extremely clubbable, most of the film is designed to offend somebody at the very moment it is making someone else fall helplessly about with laughter. And there is one unforgettable passage that should engender an exquisitely painful mixture of both responses in everyone...
Since The Meaning of Life is structured like the beloved old Python TV show, as a series of sketches interspersed with Terry Gilliam's inspired animation sequences, it provides a convenient place to measure how far the group has come from the Ministry of Silly Walks and the other cheery conceits of those more or less innocent days. As it turns out, the distance is huge. By now the writer-performers of the Python troupe have become a true flying circus, engaged in savage aerial combat with the institutionalized madness and hypocrisy of the age, performing their comic loops...