Word: pythonism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...knack for electroplating the basest metal with silvery gentility and presenting it like the finest tea service. This wonderful alloy of nastiness and reserve is the stuff of such typical British products as Alec Guinness classic Kind Hearts and Coronets, Agatha Christie's drawing room whodunits. Monty Python, and Evelyn Waugh, Brimstone and Treadestems from this tradition of black comedy, but departs from it by crossing over the boundary between laughter and darkness once too often. The result, while disturbing and thought-provoking, is ultimately unsatisfactory...
...folding in on itself. Beckett's characters on paper are so surrealistic, so utterly removed from normal constraints or modes of reference, that it's an initial shock to see one walking around. The fifty-is Gullett, white hair frizzed, eyes bugged out, toddles and grumbles like a Monty Python animated character, and it's a long while before he talks...