The three chief weapons of the new Monty Python “16-Ton Megaset” are compactness, comprehensiveness, redundancy … and nostalgia. No, wait, make that the four chief weapons.
Oh, never mind. There’s only so many times you can see that sketch before the idiomatic Python dialect becomes second nature. Nobody ever expects the Spanish Inquisition, but we’ve come to expect regular and not-so-original issues of boxed sets from A&E, the producers charged with milking the Python catalog for every last drop.
The bulk of the 16-DVD set, discounting at about $140, is identical to the full set of TV episodes issued on 14 DVDs just five years ago. The new additions are two “Monty Python Live” discs already issued elsewhere, which include the “Live at the Hollywood Bowl” concert, a group interview at the 1998 Aspen Comedy Festival and other compilations.
This business of reissuing the Pythons can quickly deteriorate into a session at the Argument Clinic – “That’s not new!” “Yes, it is!” “No, it isn’t!”
It’s a rewrapping, is what it is.
Still, a comprehensive Python collection like this one is a good chance to revisit a comedy style as fresh and hilarious as ever, despite the ponderous DVD reruns. The Internet’s Wikipedia claims “the group’s influence upon comedy has been compared to that which the Beatles had on music,” and the best of the sketches here back the claim.
The six Python writers succeeded because they built a rocket ship from the familiar to the absurd. The most ordinary bureaucrat in a bowler becomes the Minister of Silly Walks, with one bizarre kick of John Cleese’s gangly leg. And we immediately settle in for more payoff – a Ministry of Silly Walks will, of course, have applicants for government grants, who must demonstrate their potential.
“It’s not particularly silly, is it,” scoffs Cleese to a crestfallen Michael Palin.
“With government backing, I could make it very silly,” Palin pleads.
And then, of course, they will have to ring the secretary for coffee. …
A mundane soccer match pitting Greece versus Germany will be played out by each nation’s greatest philosophers (plus Franz Beckenbauer to bolster the German side). No one kicks the ball, but Aristotle and Archimedes have a good argument about it; somehow the Greeks finally score, and Hegel denies the physical reality of the ball while Marx argues it was offside.
The best bits bring together the elemental Python touches of overturned expectations, literary allusion and cross-dressing. Graham Chapman sits at a table in a cottage, an angry, disappointed father; Terry Jones plays his long-suffering, impossibly ugly wife; Eric Idle walks in the door, the prodigal son returned – only he’s a coal miner, who has betrayed the roots of his celebrity-poet father.
“Coal mining is a wonderful thing, Father, but that’s something you’ll never understand!”
“There’s naught wrong with gala luncheons, lad!”
The legacy of their work is in Will Ferrell, taking over Cleese’s mantle as the furious office manager and the tin-pot dictator. Or in Steve Carell as Michael Palin, beautifully innocent until he’s suddenly not.
Every incomparable sketch, all 48 TV episodes from 1969 to 1974, are here in the box. The irritation arrives when the extra live discs become especially redundant – at the Hollywood Bowl concert, the Pythons play an old Olympic parody clip from the TV shows. Then, on the second “live” disc, Steve Martin introduces the same clip as part of a 20-year retrospective; and at the Aspen event, they use footage from the Hollywood Bowl.
As they say, “Well, it’s got some rat in it.”
But if you’ve never invested in a Python set, this is the one to have. Sixteen discs at less than $9 each will get you through a long winter, and introduce the Python state of mind to new generations of the family.
You see, no one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition, and there’s no reason to believe it will ever stop.
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at 303-820-1686 or mbooth@denverpost.com.
NEW ON DVD
The Interpreter *** Sean Penn plays federal agent Tobin Keller. Nicole Kidman is Silvia Broome, a U.N. translator from a fictional African country called Matobo, a nation plunged by its liberator-turned-tyrant into a bloodbath of ethnic cleansing. When Silvia overhears a plot to assassinate Matobo’s leader, she becomes suspect and target. Penn digs hard into Keller’s grief and suspicion. But it’s Kidman who has the best lines. When Keller asks Silvia how she feels about Matobo’s ruler, she replies, “I feel disappointment.” “That’s a lover’s word,” he says. Exactly. Silvia and Matobo’s other rebellious citizens are the jilted lovers of a leader who once promised liberty. PG-13; 135 minutes (Lisa Kennedy)
My Summer of Love *** 1/2 This is a hot-house flower of an indie film about what happens when Mona meets Tamsin one summer in Yorkshire, England. It stars Natalie Press (in a triumphant debut) as Mona, an alert, observant young working-class woman who lives with her brother above a pub called the Swan. Emily Blunt plays Tamsin, the bold and bored boarding school refugee on holiday. Paddy Considine (“In America”) gives a spring-action performance as Phil, Mona’s ex-convict brother turned true believer. Brit-based director Pawel Pawlikowski put two of our nation’s most contentious issues – same-sex desire and religiosity – in proximity and made a film that is tough- minded, poetic and fantastically droll, anything but strident. R; 87 minutes (Lisa Kennedy)
Lords of Dogtown *** 1/2 Catherine Hardwicke, the director of the disturbing “Thirteen,” clearly understands the knife’s edge of adolescence, caught between joyous freedom and dangerous experimentation. Here Hardwicke takes on a great subject: the Venice, Calif., skateboard culture of the mid-1970s that invented street skating and turned the sport into an international phenomenon. Stacy Peralta, who wrote the script, was one of the champion skaters, and also directed the documentary “Dogtown and Z-Boys,” so what you get is authenticity, re-created by talented actors. Heath Ledger is terrific as the boys’ troubled mentor, Skip Engblom. PG-13; 100 minutes (Michael Booth)
