Monty Python's And Now For Something Completely Different was first released in the US in 1973, but didn't really take off as a midnight-movie fixture until after the Monty Python's Flying Circus TV series began making the PBS rounds. Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam are the Pythonites in attendance, together with semiregulars Carol Cleveland and Connie Booth. The sketches presented include such classics as "The Lumberjack Song", "Hell's
Grannies", "The Upperclass Twit of the Year Race", and, of course, "The Dead Parrot". Additionally, Terry Gilliam's animated-cartoon interpolations act as buffers between sketches. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
A kind of insane logic seems to connect the sketches, if you look hard enough, but mostly the movie seems to exist in the present and be willing to try anything for a laugh.
Essential viewing for fans of Monty Python and British comedy, this film consists of some wonderful sketches, even though Terry Gilliam doesn't appear in them.
However, by refilming the sketches for a cinematic format, with new editing, camerawork, close-ups ... yet without the give-and-take energy of a live studio audience, what on TV was seat-of-the-pants fresh is here flat and overproduced.
Monty Python's best known sketches reshot and compiled on film, with slight variations and occasional profanity. Great sketches, but a rather pointless exercise.
If you know this material, you know it well; if you don't, you're in for a bizarre surprise as these six gifted men -- in their youthful glory -- blend the surreal and the scatological, the high with the low, manufacturing oddly brilliant comedy.
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