But I didn’t eat the mousse?! (Monty Python's 'Meaning of Life' (DVD))

Member Name: loulou6

Product:	Monty Python's 'Meaning of Life' (DVD)
Date:	19/10/01 (356 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: seeing the 'team' again, Mr Creosote

Disadvantages: Mr Creosote!

I remember bunking off of school with my best friend in 1983 to see this movie. After all it was a Monty Python and it had only just been released. There was a cinema in town where they ran the same film back to back throughout the day - No idea why they did it, and I can’t ask them as they closed to make way for a trendy wine bar.

Well, there we were, two 15 year olds sat in the middle of an otherwise empty theatre smoking tabs (you were allowed back then), eating popcorn (toffee, of course) and slurping on some fizzy pop (I could have sworn it was Lilt?) - but I digress.....

We were lucky to get there just as the credits rolled up for the start of the film - now I don’t know about you, but ‘The Crimson Permanent Assurance’ feature’ette frightened me a little, lots of old men dressed as pirates working in the insurance field - very strange. But then again, it is Monty Python!

The film is really a mixed bag of sketches, very loosely based around the ‘Meaning of Life’ (Birth, Sex, Middle age and Death etc) from Terry Jones (playing a catholic mother) giving birth to their 78th child and singing ‘Every sperm is sacred’ to the famous Mr Creosote sketch (for those of you who haven’t watched it yet, it’s about an atrociously obese man who is in a restaurant and after eating the entire menu 3 times over throws-up into a bucket, over a cleaner, over the other diners and after eating a ‘waaaaafer theen meent’ promptly explodes).

Of course if I say that it’s a brilliant film with a laugh a minute script - I’d be lying through my teeth, but Cleese, Jones, Palin, Idle and Chapman really do work well together, bouncing the weirdness off each other and ending up with a ‘decent’ film. Just unfortunately not the classics comedy that either ‘Life of Brian’ or ‘The Holy Grail’ exudes.

There are (of course) no
special effects in this movie, but the acting definitely makes up for any lack of interest by the team in that direction, there are a few Gilliam drawn animations (the tree of life always gets a giggle from me) and Eric Idle came up with some very good ditty's like ’The Penis song’ and the marvellous ’Galaxy Song’ at the end.

The camera work doesn’t detract from the very flighty essence of the film, but it doesn’t exactly compliment it either. Ah well, at 15 years old I wasn’t really interested in a close-up of Eric Idles ‘bitten off by a tiger’s leg!’

Tasteless in places, sick, perverse, abstract and very funny in lots of parts this is a film to watch again and after a few years......... again.

Did I get found out for bunking off of school? - You know I did, and my punishment was that I had to write up a 10-page review of the film ........ Grrrrrr.

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