I can envision owning this on DVD and just skipping ahead to my favorite skits and thinking that the best 30 minutes of it are among the funniest films I own. But as for sitting through the entire thing in order, when you don't know every good routine by heart? A bit more problematic.

Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail
Script/Story: 6
Acting/Casting: 7
Comedy: 6
Eye Candy: 2
Replayability: 7
Overall: 6

It was educational though, since for years I've heard jokes about and references to the unkillable Black Knight, the deadly bunny, the Knights who say "Ni!" the arguing three-headed ogre, the cow catapult, the Trojan rabbit, etc. And I sort of knew what movie they came from. Now I know exactly what movie they came from. I'm not entirely sure this is an improvement.

A lot of the jokes are very good, or at least very inventive, but the overall story is basically non-existent, and you end up just watching it to see what wacky low budget thing they'll come up with next, rather than out of any real interest in the rather frayed narrative thread.  Expect to laugh, but don't expect to be exactly on the edge of your seat with excitement, and it would help a lot if you know the conventions of mythic fantasy quest movies, since you'll laugh all the harder at seeing them so skewered.

Spoiler!

The thing I liked least about the movie was the ending. Namely, there isn't one. The film has a bunch of hit and miss (Most hit the target. Or at least wing it.) gags sending up the middle ages, King Arthur, and so on, but just as the finale is all set up the 4th wall is entirely broken and a bunch of modern day cops (bobbies, if you prefer the UKism) roll up and arrest all the principles, and run off all of the costumed extras. It's cute, and there were regular shots of the cops following along behind the scenes in the film, so it wasn't entirely out of left field, but it was still rather a disappointment for the film to just peter out like that. It felt like a cop out (so to speak) for film makers who didn't know how else to end the picture, to me at least.

True, we'd all love to see that happen in real life, like to those redneck nerds who reenact Civil War battles in such detail that they keep track of exactly where everyone died, who died first, which direction they fell in, etc. But I didn't think it worked that well for this film.

I should also note that I love Monty Python's sketches, or at least I love the best of them, and I've seen And Now For Something Completely Different at least a dozen times, and know most of those sketches more or less by heart. I'm much less fond of their other movies, and always end up wishing I liked them a lot more than I do.

September 1, 2004

The following is a short excerpt from a reader email, and my reply to it. The author of the email, which is indented and purple, goes by the handle of GS. My reply to him follows his comment.

I also looked through some of your reviews, both books and films, and theres only one thing I just have to disagree with: the ending to Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail just seems right. Maybe its just because I'm British, with the strange sense if humour that involves, but a proper ending in that film just wouldn't have the same effect. If you haven't already seen it you should take a look at Monty Python and the Life of Brian sometime.

I did see the Life of Brian and the meaning of Life, but years ago for both of them; too long to comment with any accuracy. I think all of the MP movies have some good parts, but none of them have really worked for me on the whole. In contrast, I love some of the better sketches, so perhaps for me they are like a lot of comedies built up from sketches: what works great for 5 or 10 minutes can't sustain a feature length film, and either requires endless stretching out (as is the case with most of the movies Saturday Night Live people make) or else the writers have to think up something new every 3-5 minutes, which gives such films a very uneven feel. More episodic than a cohesive whole.

As for Quest for the Holy Grail, I don't know how I would have ended it or how it would have worked, but I didn't like the way they did it. True, the subplot of the modern day cops following their trail and seeing the dead people they left behind was an amusing series of scenes, and it was only logical that they'd turn up at the end with enough cops to do something about these Ren Faire lunatics, but for me, at least, it felt like a bit of a cheat.