MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL A film review by David N. Butterworth Copyright 2001 David N. Butterworth
*** (out of ****)
With several Hollywood releases grounded in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks on New York and Washington (one film in particular, "Big Trouble," featured hijacking and carry-on nuclear weapons among its many plot devices), it is indeed timely--yet purely coincidental--for an inspired bit of lunacy known as "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" to be reissued to theaters. Well, just the one theater that is.
This 2001 re-release of the Python's first full-length feature film (if you discount 1971's "And Now for Something Completely Different" which was, after all, a loosely-edited series of television sketches) features a brand new negative, stereo soundtrack, and 25 seconds of missing footage!
More focused than their future work (and looking less dated now than ever before, surprisingly), "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" is a medieval romp filled to the pink curly edges with your typically irreverent and extremely silly Monty Python humor (if you've been in a time capsule these last few decades, Monty Python was the collective name of a bunch of terribly talented comedians--Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin--who got together in the summer of 1969 to produce a ground-breaking (and terribly silly) TV series called "Monty Python's Flying Circus" for the BBC). Set in England 932 A.D. (but actually filmed in Scotland), "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" follows King Arthur of Camelot (Chapman) on a mission to round up his knights of the round table. In the process he is given a quest by God (courtesy Terry Gilliam's typically outrageous cut-out animation) to seek out the Holy Grail, that magical chalice that floats aloft over various impressive-looking Scottish castles (one of which, we're told, is fake).
The silliness kicks in from the opening credits (with Swedish subtitles and spurious moose references a plenty) and never lets up. These knights don't actually ride noble steeds, for example. Instead, they prance around as if on horseback with a long-suffering serf trotting behind them knocking two coconut shells together. Glancing down a list of some of the characters our valiant fellows encounter upon their journey gives you a pretty good idea as to what to expect: Second Soldier with a Keen Interest in Birds; A Quite Extraordinarily Rude Frenchman; Sir Robin the Not-Quite-So-Brave-as-Sir Launcelot; Roger the Shrubber (A Shrubber); Leader of the Knights Who Say "Ni!"; The Page Crushed by a Rabbit; Patsy (Arthur's Trusty Steed); and so on.
As with most of their work, the Pythons don't skimp of the details. What makes "'Holy Grail" such a delight is that not only is the humor thick and fast but so is the medieval muck--the laughs are made even stronger by a heightened level of authenticity (with, perhaps, the exception of the furry keeper of the cave of Aaargh and all that blood spurting from severed limbs--a black knight who stands in Arthur's way is reduced to a name-calling torso, for example). The writer/performers play multiple roles, of course (to keep the costs down?), and it's great fun watching each one show up as somebody sillier than the first. Crammed with acres of quotable dialogue, the film ploughs along from one inspired bit to the next.
To this day, "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" still "makes Ben Hur look like an epic" (to quote one of the film's original tag lines) but in the 26 years that have elapsed since the film debuted, those lines seem to have blurred considerably.
-- David N. Butterworth dnb@dca.net
Got beef? Visit "La Movie Boeuf" online at http://members.dca.net/dnb
========== X-RAMR-ID: 29588 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 251240 X-RT-TitleID: 1014174 X-RT-SourceID: 878 X-RT-AuthorID: 1393 X-RT-RatingText: 3/4
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews