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...first five minutes, Monty Python's Life of Brian actually meets the unreasonable expectations of fans. The film opens with suitably celestial music as the star of Bethlehem scoots in from the galactic end-zone. Three camels with robed riders poke their way across a sea of sand-dunes, towards a shabby huddle of huts and mangers. It could all be right out of Zeffirelli's "Jesus of Nazareth" down to the last sunbeam...
...wise men wander into a manger, but it's the wrong one--no haloed Virgin Mary greets them in the straw; Terry Jones's familiar crone voice--a Python staple from "Penguin on the Telly" on down--bursts any reverential bubble, and we're back in the begrimed world of most Monty Python comedies...
This alternation of the mock-epic and the earthy proved an ideal technique in Monty Python and the Holy Grail; Graham Chapman's snooty King Arthur deserved to have shit flung upon him. In Jabberwocky, a 1976 bomb starring two Python members, the mock-epic dropped out entirely and left the cast wallowing in a cesspool of gore and unbearable toilet humor. Life of Brian returns to the successful formula of Holy Grail, spoofing a genre of film and its directorial cliches with both skillful imitation and derision...
...think the six members of Monty Python would find the format of a full-length movie inimical to their comic ideal. After all, they chafed under the minimal requirements of a half-hour television spot, shuffling the credits, titles, and skits in a restless assault on any prescribed structure for their product...
...because they blithely ignored traditional dicta of screenwriting and approached the movie as a two-hour set of manageable episodes. Life Of Brian does a more creditable job as a "full length feature presentation," as the studios call it, but its sanity actually works against it. The risks Monty Python used to take with its narrative line--bouncing characters from film to animation, for example--would fail as often as they succeeded, but they were a trademark, often responsible for the funniest moments...