Word: pythonized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Catholicism through the spectacle of rows of nuns. Busby-Berkeley-style, caroling that "Every sperm is sacred." But the addition of an explicit theme quiets the ridiculous proceedings somewhat, leading the film to a previously avoided mass-appeal glossiness. Distributed through Universal Pictures, Meaning of Life is the first Python film wholly backed by a major concern and released smack into the American commercial mainstream. The difference, which shows subtly in the film's professional polish, in its tilt towards topical satire and identifiable allusion, is not altogether encouraging...
...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...
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...
...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...
Such minor infusions of relevance, though, aren't enough to stop the momentum of the comedy, which hurtles on with all Monty Python's ludicrous charm. When Cleese and Graham Chapman start mugging at the camera, the material they're acting becomes supremely irrelevant. When Terry Jones dresses up as an old crone this time as a sort of Mother Hubbard, dancing and singing with her 90 ragged children--he she looks exactly like 39 other Jones crones from Holy Grail or earlier. And fortunately, the gag is just as ridiculous the fortieth time around. There must be some deeper...