Have any of our UK contingent watched this yet? I haven’t watched it myself, but I’m rather surprised no one’s commented on it. For those who don’t know, “Holy Flying Circus” is a biographical film about the Pythons and their trevails during and after the filming of The Life of Brian. From what I understand, the movie uses some Pythonesque touches to tell its story, for example by using the Terry Jones character dressed in drag to play Michael Palin’s actual wife. Reviews I’ve read have been split between those who thought it juvenile and those who thought it was clever. So, not unlike Python itself, really.
It’s available on BBC’s iPlayer for those who live in the UK (or those of us with, um, the ability to see UK stuff). Here’s a preview from the BBC, featuring (the actors playing) Michael Palin and John Cleese as they prepare for a TV interview/debate with two religious figures. More on which is below.
(I should mention that the whole film is available to those of us in the States on YouTube. Since it’s probably not kosher, I won’t link to it; besides, it’ll probably be taken down soon.)
After the movie, the BBC showed the classic “Friday Night / Saturday Morning” interview mentioned above, where Palin and Cleese discussed the religious controversy with Malcolm Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark – and two more pompous and closed-minded individuals surely could not have been found. (The show was hosted by Tim Rice of all people, though I suppose the Jesus Christ Superstar connection would’ve given him an interesting perspective… if he hadn’t been the impartial moderator, and not a very good one.)
Though snippets of the interview have been shown before – here’s one clip – I think this was the first time that the BBC reran the entire trainwreck. And it was cringeworthy. Muggeridge and the Bishop were condescending, narrowminded and flat-out rude, continually talking over the other guests and calling the Pythons’ film “tenth-rate” and “undergraduate humor” that only found comedy through mocking Christ directly and using bad language. Meanwhile, the Pythons couldn’t have been more respectful and articulate, but they were clearly furious – even mildmannered Palin was clearly fuming.
Anyway since I know the Dope is a hotbed of Python fans, I’d love to hear others’ reactions to either the film or the interview rerun.
It was a decent, watchable film; some of the actors playing the Pythons really nailed it. And the guy playing Cleese - the physical similarity was uncanny.
Although it’s a documentary, it’s a documentary as if the Pythons had made a spoof documentary about themselves. It’s quite silly and surreal in places, though the comedy never rises to the quality of its subject matter: the Pythons were funnier than the Python-style documentary about themselves.
I thought it was a hoot! Do agree it was a bit too long, though. The actors captured the Python’s mannerisms really well. I mention my love of Michael Palin is in about 10% of my posts here so, naturally, I loved that he was the main character. The protrayal of him as the nicest man in the world (with occasional bursts of manipulative evil brillance and violent fantasies) was excellent. It fell flat a couple of times but overall I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I felt like I was watching a Beatles tribute band that kept wanting to drop in its own original material into the show. The parts that weren’t specifically about the debate just seemed extra superfluous. And I sure didn’t get the gag about Palin’s wife; Helen Gibbins is a perfectly okay looking woman. The gag detracted from the Palin character’s rather central role in the story.
Didn’t seem like it was so much a commentary on Palin’s wife but more a commentary on Palin and Jones’ relationship. I think it may have also been a way to show Palin dealing with the controversy outside of the group without having to portray his wife at all, so as not to offend her or Michael. With a clearly fake wife, the writers only have to deal with Palin’s side of things and not make up anything about the wife.
I thought all of the voices of the actors who played the Pythons were amazing. Even though the Gilliam guy didn’t quite look like him, he sounded like him. The guys who played Palin, Cleese and Idle were fantastic. I wonder how much makeup they had to do for the Idle guy? Because he was uncanny…how can he go through life looking and sounding just like Eric Idle? He must have been acting really hard!
The whole thing was parodied by Not The Nine O’clock News at the time by inverting the argument and having the Church of England making a film vilifying the Life of Python.
*“This man Jesus Christ - it’s an obvious reference to the Comic Messiah, John Cleese. He even has the same initials”
“Python is taking enough knocks these days without the Church of England joining in” *
Eh, just going by the clip, the Bishop and his co-debator weren’t that bad. The “undergraduate humor” thing was just a (pretty funny) joke to make fun of the movie. Cleese seemed to appreciate it, and made his own jokes at the Bishops expense.
As to the content, the Bishop’s (incredibly) longwinded intro trying to make Life of Bryon some how equivalent to Communist attempts to stomp out Christianity was pretty stupid. On the other hand, the Python’s argument that the movie wasn’t mocking Christians was pretty disingenuous.
So I award neither side any points, and may God have mercy on their soul.
Brian’s followers are all misguided nitwits, desperate to find some religious organization even if it means trying to turn some random schmoe like Brian into a religious teacher against his will, and Brian’s obviously a Christ analogue. I can’t really believe the interpretation of Christians==nitwits wasn’t intended. I don’t have any problem with a film making fun of Christianity, but Cleese comes off poorly trying to insist that it doesn’t do so.
Indeed, I think the religious men could’ve made the Pythons look pretty bad if they’d actually attacked that point consistently instead of going off about how important Christianity is to the Western World (I doubt the Pythons think otherwise) and launching long rambling non-sequiturs about Communism.
I haven’t seen the whole interview, but in the linked clip I don’t ever hear the Pythons claim that the film doesn’t mock Christians . . . they claim that the film doesn’t mock Christ.
Cleese, talking about the Sermon on the Mount scene, says that it’s not making fun of Jesus or the Sermon, it’s making fun of “The guy who remembered it wrong and the people who don’t understand it and have missed the point.” Palin joins in pointing out that the Sermon is portrayed respectfully and that the jokes don’t happen until we pan away to the back of the crowd.
If at some point in the interview they claim that the movie doesn’t mock Christians, then I would agree with you that that is disingenuous- but that’s not what I’m seeing here. Saying the film doesn’t mock Christ is an entirely different point from saying that it doesn’t mock Christians. I only see them in this interview saying that the film doesn’t mock Christ.
I don’t think they were mocking Christians qua Christians; they were mocking all people who blindly follow faith – and those who then proceed to use their beliefs as a way to treat others as inferiors (e.g. the incipient schism between the followers of the Holy Gourd and the Shoe) or show cruelty, ignorance and intolerance in the name of their religion (thus basically betraying their own leader’s tenets).
Anyway, I just watched Holy Flying Circus and was pleasantly surprised at how inventive and refreshing it was. Not that it actually reached Pythonian innovation, but I certainly found the irreverence towards its subject and the stylistic flourishes very appropriate.
Charles Edwards really freaked me out with how very Michael Paliny he was. Not just his looks and voice, but his facial expressions and mannerisms were just utterly spot-on. And like JoseArcadio I am an unabashed Palin admirer, so I was very pleased by both the performance and the writing. He was the primary sympathetic character and I think this was a good choice.
I was less impressed with the Chapman actor, who had, I suppose, a passing resemblence, but that was all. Admittedly the four other Pythons besides Palin and Cleese were almost stereotyped cameos (and even Darren Boyd’s Cleese was an admitted Basil Fawlty impression – an eerily accurate one, to be sure – rather than an attempt to be a realistic version of Cleese). Punt’s Eric was hilarious, and he seems to have been born for the role, though I think he was doing Idle’s “Mr. Cheeky” voice rather than regular Idle. Also his portrayal as Mr. Money-Grubber seems to be painfully accurate. I didn’t mind the Terry Jones/Mrs. Palin impression; all in all the whole production seems to have been similar to a Python production, with the actors playing multiple parts throughout.
I also couldn’t get over the impression that the Alan Dick character should have been played by either Chris Morris or Matt Berry, since the role reminded me very much of the bosses in The IT Crowd.
Anyway it wasn’t very illuminating for me, since I know the history (and had already watched the Friday Night / Saturday Morning show), but still highly enjoyable. If anyone’s interested in the subject and hasn’t read Robert Hewison’s book Monty Python: The Case Against, please do yourself a favor and grab it from the library or a bookshop. It goes into great detail about the Pythons’ struggles with censorship and various legal issues regarding their TV shows and films. The section on their battles against ABC here in the U.S. is worth the price all by itself.
Yea, thats kind of what I mean. We don’t really know anything about Christ separate from what was passed down by the early Church. I don’t think you can ridicule the early Christian following without ridiculing the idea of Christ. Cleese is splitting hairs, and I think an engaged interlocutor could’ve made that pretty plain pretty quickly. But his adversaries seemed either more interested in ranting about the dangers of Communism (doubly ironic, since if anything, Brian is also a send up of leftist revolutionaries) or slinging insults.
(also, Malcolm Muggeridge is definitely the most Harry Potter-esque name belonging to someone not actually in a Harry Potter book).
Yeah I thought that too. Will all of the “impersonations” going on in this movie I kept having to remind myself that the Alan Dick guy was NOT a bad impersonation of Matt Berry!
There’s one problem with your interpretation: in the film, Jesus is explicitly portrayed as a divine being. His birth is heralded by a star, and foretold by three wise kings of the east (whose calculations turned out to be off by a street - still pretty good, for the first century). And early in the film, Brian meets an ex-leper, who had been healed by Jesus. Jesus is the real deal in this film.
The divinity of Jesus is, in fact, extremely important to one of the film’s central themes: that people are so blinded by their petty lusts and angers and day-to-day bullshit that they utterly fail to notice a living God in their midst. None of the people in the film are Christians, nor are they meant to be stand ins for Christians. They’re the dumb schmucks who are fighting over a gourd and a sandal while the redemption of the human race is happening the next hill over. Not only is this not an anti-Christian message, it’s core Christian doctrine. That’s what Christ came to save us from.
