Word: python
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...with a full 360 degrees of humanity and emotion.” The two comics met on the set of “Saturday Night Live” when Koechner was a cast member and Gruber was a guest writer. They shared a love for ensemble comedy like Monty Python and the Marx Brothers, and hit it off. Before Comedy Central signed them for their first season on television, the pair developed the show live at a small club in Los Angeles, where they still regularly perform. The show features material largely imported from the stage show but cropped...
...happens that, in the past two months, my TIME.com work has been awash in Englishness: not just in the Up films but in the humor of Monty Python's Flying Circus and the royal satire of the new film The Queen. I also participated in a South Bank Show about Nick Park's Wallace and Gromit who, although they are made of plasticine (and one, a dog, says nary a word), speak eloquently to the English traits of gamely soldiering on through life's trials, many of them self-inflicted...
...This time, it appears, Katzenberg was in charge. The movie's pulse races, compared to the tempo of Chicken Run. The film teems with pop-cultural allusions, referencing Finding Nemo (a small fish asking "Have you seen my dad?") and Monty Python & the Holy Grail (a mosquito that finds itself on Toad's tongue and shouts, "Run away!"). Roddy's groin takes quite a pummeling; that's less Wallace and Gromit than Larry, Curly and Moe. The script, like those of many a DreamWorks animated movie, seems assembled from a brainstorming super-session, in which bright guys spit out funny...
...rescue. Instead of unwinding, as Scorsese's movies tend to, this one keeps coiling, a python of a plot that puts the what-happens-next? element of standard, superior storytelling at the forefront of the audience's mind. Viewers are alerted to trust no one; immediately or ultimately, five of the characters will reveal that they are not what they seem. The anticipation of trickery keeps a movie crowd on its toes. And because the story is so strong, Scorsese can elaborate on it without looking self-indulgent. One visual strategy: he plants X's everywhere, on the walls...
Sitting in the living room at Balmoral, knitting and nattering in their plain wool sweaters, caring more for their pets than for their children, the royal family of this film seems a parody of the pettiness and insularity of the English middle class; they might be the Monty Python gang in drab drag. Yet despite their sternest efforts to keep up the moat bridge, Elizabeth (Helen Mirren) and her blinkered clan are about to learn how little they understood the appeal of the woman who, they think, betrayed them...