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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...

Author: By Amy E. Schwartz, | Title: Fishing for an Answer | 4/7/1983 | See Source »

...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...

Author: By Amy E. Schwartz, | Title: Fishing for an Answer | 4/7/1983 | See Source »

...pacing the beach to the omnipresent British boys' schoolroom. And it enables crazed animator Terry Gilliam to create some of the wackiest sequences he has ever penned, galaxies swoop in and out of file cabinets and the sun rapidly mitotes into a fetus while, for background music, a typical Python "French" accent promises to "explain it all for you tonight." So broad are the cinemographic possibilities that the movie's structure, crisp at first, ends up as a loose collection of scattershot satires...

Author: By Amy E. Schwartz, | Title: Fishing for an Answer | 4/7/1983 | See Source »

Still the overall effect-- reminiscent of the Python T V series is far livelier than similarly constructed spoofs like Mel Brooks' History of the World. Part I or Woody Allen's Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask And of course, at the end Monty Python reveals the long awaited answer to the meaning of life...

Author: By Amy E. Schwartz, | Title: Fishing for an Answer | 4/7/1983 | See Source »

...PURPOSE PLOTLINE provides a virtual directory of comic strategies and styles. The segments which work best draw on the longtime Python staple of pure, straightforward silliness. This impulse motivates Gilliam, as a crusty general, to set up a lace tablecloth in an embattled World War I trench. Viewers are cheerfully bid welcome "to the Middle of the Film, where we will play a game of... Find the Fish" Fish, particularly goldfish, remain a dominant theme throughout, prompting various subtitled admonishments from the "management" and offering ironic social commentary from a strategically positioned aquarium...

Author: By Amy E. Schwartz, | Title: Fishing for an Answer | 4/7/1983 | See Source »

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