Almost Monty Python (Almost) Live

This is a review of Monty Python (Almost) Live

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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17 August

This is a review of Monty Python (Almost) Live

As Spamalot may have been (the writer does not know), another Eric-Idle-engineered piece, centred on big musical numbers (which, in the case of Monty Python (Almost) Live, were very impressive - with a talented cast of singer / dancers), this show was, for all that it offered, uneven.

No doubt some of the unevenness could have been levelled out by the editing of the Live show to be (Almost) Live, which seemed a marked advantage (as it does for, say, NT Live broadcasts, though others see these things differently).

From the start, we had the dubious benefit of a kangaroo (with an obviously human face) on stage, which eventually found its place later on (please see below). In the meantime, its locomotive human bobbed around, in an irritatingly jolly fashion, which seemed to sound the inappropriate note that the show was going to be cuddly, which, in places, it flatly contradicted, e.g. with the penis, vagina, arse* group of songs (can one seriously write that in a review ? yes, as this is Python…)
It was the same Idle with Michelangelo's Last Supper, where John Cleese was too strong, as when he is allowed to be (such as with that whack with the mammoth fish on the edge of the quay, The Fish-Slapping Dance, and one of Cleese or Idle robbed Idle of the strength of the lines about the 28 disciples, and the 3 Christs – along with Idle’s outclassed cheery quattordicicento painter guise, they plummeted, unable to compete with Cleese, as The Pope, blithely saying fucking.

In this early part of the show, some of the humour – in what seemed to be new material – just did not work, and, by definition, was not the best of Python (e.g. the tame misunderstanding of Oz Arena for the O2 Arena, dutifully delivered by Michael Palin), as one might expect the show to aim to be. ‘Every sperm is sacred’ (from The Meaning of Life (1983)) was a huge production number, with a great dance routine, although not quite to rival the energy and scope of the film, and it also had new lyrics (in places). Another big set-piece, ‘I like Chinese’, was similarly impressive, but – if it was Python – taxed this writer’s familiarity. It started seeming marginally racially offensive, only to turn out not to be*.
Wherever the philosophers’ song came from (with the Bruces as philosophy professors**), Palin seemed, as observed, the only one who had obviously learnt his lines (such as they were) : Eddie Izzard was probably brought on stage at this part, but he just seemed star struck, and contributed nothing other than his awe. Linked with footage of the German and Greek Philosophers’ Football-Match, and sensationally going back to the match as Socrates scores in the final seconds, it worked well as a combination, because of the sheer shared incongruity : when parts of original Python shows were given oxygen to thrive by a suitable setting, both were enhanced.

A re-enactment of the Crunchy Frog Sketch at the premises of the Whizzo Chocolate company had the visually and aurally coarse element of Terry Gilliam, as Superintendent Parrot, farting and retching, as his senior officer (Cleese as Inspector Praline) recalled what he had eaten from the assortment. By the time that sweetmeats such as the crunchy frog were reached, Terry Jones was reading impassively from the card, and, cracking up with Cleese, swallowed and lost losing the impact of Ah - now, that's our speciality (Spring Surprise) - covered with darkest creamy chocolate. When you pop it in your mouth steel bolts spring out and plunge straight through both cheeks.

Up until the interval, the show had been pretty good, and the choice of archive Python had been well made : The Fish-Slapping Dance is always a killer (however many times one has seen it), because of Cleese’s all-too-adept bludgeoning, and included amongst Gilliam’s wizardry were the teasingly postponed / interposed full frontal nudity, the pram that swallows people, and the Rodin ocarina.

However, one strange note sounded was by a caption flashed up that said ‘Munich 1972’ – the year of the Olympic massacre, most notably ?

* * * * *

Palin in Blackmail was smarmy, but the sketch did not have the bite and impetus of that in the t.v. series, and just felt a bit weak. Another piece of shrapnel on stage was what looked like Mike Meyers : no doubt that he was pleased to be there, but he had nothing to do, and added nothing.

Great moments of the second half (as far as they can be recalled) were :

* The Exploding Blue Danube, which (although it probably was not as clever as it looked) was very entertaining

* The Spanish Inquisition, kept together, again, by Palin – with his not inestimable, dogmatically precise zealot prelate (to give the Pythons their full complement, lines on introduction, such as One on't cross beams gone owt askew on't treddle, had been given to members of the cast)

* Moving into Idle opening a fridge, and doing his pink-suited number, ‘The Universe song’ (alias ‘The Galaxy song’)

* One Professor (Brian Cox) being rammed by another (in Stephen Hawking) and accused of being pedantic (for correcting the detail of the preceding song)

* The Dead Parrot Sketch linked up with The Cheese Shop Sketch and finishing with Do you fancy coming back to my place ? (from a little t.v. moment when Cleese, as a Police Inspector, meets another Python in the street) : Palin and Cleese on top form, trying to make each other corpse with ad libs, but Palin getting the upper hand by recalling where they are and telling Cleese 'Your next line is...' - very funny, and in the spirit of Pythons' four re-enactments for Amnesty International (The Secret Policeman's Ball) between 1976 and 1981, although, perhaps notably, Idle was never involved in them***

* Inevitably, ending with a lively, shimmering version of ‘Always look on the bright side of life’


A good way of spending a couple of hours, and an encouragement to dig out that huge boxed set of the t.v. series – and Just the Words, the nicely curated scripts in two volumes (which has provided information of the episodes above)…


Hesitations:

* Just how much it was Idle’s patent show and with his songs, when it could have celebrated Python more widely, than promoting purchase of the films on the flier, by incorporating clips from them (or were their copyright limitations ?)

* Would everyone have known who Carol Cleveland was ? She may have substituted for the original Connie Booth to Palin’s lumberjack, but she was never introduced. Although she did an admirable few other turns, she had always been the token glamour in the t.v. series (when the pepperpots, etc. could not be suitable sirens), so it was a shame that the team did not put the record straight by officially acknowledging who she was.


Reference material :

Blackmail - Episode Eighteen (recorded 10/9/1970, transmitted 27/10/70)

The Bruces - Episode Twenty-Two (recorded 25/9/1970, transmitted 24/11/1970)

The Cheese Shop Sketch - Episode Thirty-Three (recorded 7/1/1972, transmitted 30/11/72)

The Crunchy Frog Sketch - Episode Six (recorded 5/11/1969, transmitted 23/11/1969)

The Dead Parrot Sketch - Episode Nine (recorded 7/12/1969, transmitted 14/12/1969)

Exploding Blue Danube - Episode Twenty-Six (recorded 16/10/70, transmitted 22/12/1970)

The Fish-Slapping Dance - Episode Twenty-Eight (recorded 28/1/1972, transmitted 26/10/72)

I’m a Lumberjack - (Episode Nine (recorded 7/12/1969, transmitted 14/12/1969)

The Philosophers’ Football-Match - From Monty Pythons Fliegender Zirkus (made for German t.v.)

The Spanish Inquisition - Episode Fifteen (recorded 2/7/1970, transmitted 22/9/1070)



End-notes

* Is that taken from The Meaning of Life (1983) and – as only Idle could – ‘updated’ ? (It was an irritation that the text of this, and of the philosophers’ song, were not kept in front of the camera for long enough – perhaps a last-minute bid to protect the innocent ?) If it was, as other pieces / songs were not straight renditions (unlike those that were – insofar as those performing them could manage it – meant to be straight renditions), but had been modernized (one was not always sure why) :

After all, I’m a Lumberjack is just as offensive to the trans audience as it has ever been, but no changes had been introduced to the sacred text (except the tease, in the preceding Lion-Tamer sketch, that Mr Anchovy really wants to be a Systems Analyst). Palin was jeered as ‘disgusting’ by one in the choir (uncelestial), whereas another song (‘I like Chinese’) was cute in pretending to be, but not actually being, racist. In fact, the interjection that followed the sketch on t.v., from Cleese voicing over a letter from Brigadier Sir Charles Arthur Strong (Mrs), had said Many of my best friends are lumberjacks and only a few of them are transvestites


** Which was the only connection with The Bruces, an insignificant piece, made no more or less significant.
*** It is understood that only Jones and Cleese took some role (of whatever kind) in all four shows, with Palin registering three, Chapman two, and Gilliam one. Apart from a brief cameo in the 1989 show by Palin and Cleese, there has been no engagement with any later Amnesty shows.



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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

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This is a review of Return to Homs (2013) (as screened with a Q&A)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

25 July

This is a review of Return to Homs (2013), as screened before a Q&A at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge (@Campicturehouse), on Tuesday 8 July 2014, when producer Orwa Nyrabia substituted for Talal Derki, the film’s writer / director

It might well have helped if one’s well-being and state of mind allowed one ‘to follow’ news’ stories (as we seem to say) : understandably, producer Orwa Nyrabia and others shown in the film felt – and even sang – that the world had, specifically, betrayed people in Syria, since the subject of the film (unlike the discussion in the Q&A) was just Syria and where Homs lay in what has happened since the popular uprising in 2011.

However, that is an assertion that needs to be looked at in context – and, with tempers running high at times in the Q&A, that did not happen there. That said, one questioner / speaker berated the film for not giving voice to the protagonists’ opposing fellow Syrians (although the film had plainly never been intended to be the type of documentary that asks those implicated on the government side for a statement or comment, and then, as the case may be, includes it, or reports that giving one had been declined).

Another questioner / interjecter, irritated by what the representative present from Amnesty International had been saying about the lack of reporting on Syria in the West and in the UK, wanted to tell her that John Simpson is on the t.v. every night, broadcasting from Iraq and Syria. That may be true – although it would be taxing, not to say confusing, for Simpson to be reporting from both countries with any regularity – but there will always be differences of opinion whether there is enough, too much, or too little reporting.

Yet Nyrabia’s direct challenge to those present was that there had not been protest-marches in the UK about Syria, and about the pounding of Homs, a city where people had been trapped, trying to live and to defend themselves*. The film and he claimed that the situation was unprecedented, and therefore demanded worldwide attention (at a better level, at any rate, than that of The United Nations, where failing to secure agreement within The Security Council (as it is called) can stymie any proper military or humanitarian response (although we do eventually see the latter in the film)).

Whether or not it was unprecedented since the post-war establishment of the UN is open to question, but probably the question is a red herring : what was happening was, of course, very bad by anyone’s standards, but the UN (and NATO, to whom the defenders also looked for help) has, as we all know, often enough shown itself to act erratically. Or for reasons that have subverted the notion that, as lodestones, UN member nations act solely and absolutely in support of legality and justice – let alone when a member of The Security Council interprets a Mandate to justify taking action outside the umbrella of the UN per se.

In terms of popular protest, though, it is well known that the Stop The War march in London on 15 February 2003, seeking to prevent / protest the second invasion of Iraq, did not achieve its nominal aim. Since then, London’s Parliament Square has even been cleared of legal demonstrations : in its day, if one wanted to see and understand more of issues concerning human rights, atrocity or war crime, Westminster had been the place for it. For, there, hardy souls camped out in shelters, advertising for how long they had done so (in what is conventionally called a sea of placards or faces**).

People may or may not have held similar rallies or marches about Syria, or made smaller, static protests (none of this necessarily in London), but perhaps they were not highly publicized / televised : at any rate, what the people of Syria felt (and those whom we see in Homs) was that they were being overlooked and ignored. Their frustration and anger are a current in the film – alongside defiance, taunting, pleading, and despair (to which emotions we return later).

In the Q&A, there was also strong feeling from Nyrabia that directing large, armed forces against the initially peaceful demonstrators had mistakenly (or falsely) come to be described as a civil war, whereas he asserted, with the film, that it was a government suppressing its struggling people using violence : as the film depicts it, the resistance seemed to have resorted to arms when the brutality and intensity of the repression became apparent, and not to everyone’s satisfaction (not least when the narrator sensed, with sorrow, that an element of gunlust had taken over).

It was here that the defenders of Homs saw themselves, if not in so many words, naked and alone, because of both the ferocity of the attack against which they tried to defend themselves (and, more importantly for them, the lives of those whom they loved), and of what they saw as the lack of intervention – or will to intervene – from the outside world. One is tempted to quote some words from the Gospels (though they hardly speak uniquely to this situation) :

Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee ? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee ?

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

Matthew 25 : 34-40

(King James’ Version)

Be that as it may. Afterwards (not having been invited to pose the question in the Q&A), @THEAGENTAPSLEY asked Nyrabia if it had always been obvious that what would cement the disparate moods, which one could briefly characterize as Enthusiasm / Joy / Loss / Grief / Resignation, were Humour, Music and Poetry (the poetry is in the narrative tone and style). Largely ignoring the thrust of the question, and saying that this was just the process of editing, Nyrabia said that the film is linear***.

Yet, if so, the story did not seem as if it had sufficient contextualization and explanation. At one point, for example, a map showing Homs as a besieged enclave did not seem to specify its orientation, so it was only later that one found the city to be actually on the opposite side of the country from what one had gathered : for the convention of North being towards the top (unless shown otherwise) had not been followed, and one had no notion of what – if anything – stopped those there from making for and crossing the border as refugees (actually that between Syria and Lebanon ?)

For, if the claim is that the world has not given heed to what had happened in Syria, can a film such as Return to Homs tell it, by following a group of people, and taking for granted that everyone knows the topography / geography, or that it will simply become clear, by watching and listening to what is said [sc. reading in translation], that Khaledya and Bayada are parts or districts of Homs (as they seemed to be, and as research on the Internet, such as at http://syriamap.wordpress.com/, proves to be the case) ?

It would have assisted, if, at the beginning of the film, the relation between these places had been less unclear, which was around the time when the narration talks about what appears to have become a closed corridor between them – and when we were shown an obstruction / low-level blockade between the carriageways in each direction on a road running at right-angles to the lens. We then see some men attempting to remove blocks, to make a gap in it, until the authorities notice what they are doing, and appear on the scene.

So, a crossing-point, but one had fairly little notion between where and where, or what the significance could be, of blocking the main route between them, in real or absolute terms : one never did find out from the film what these places mean, culturally or in other terms, to each other, and for them thus to be separated. Even when, at night, a car is driven at speed, and without lights, over a crossing-point (to avoid snipers), we might assume that it is at a point on this route, but it could have been somewhere else, as this information was not apparent.


It is less material that, as the film develops, we have to come to gather that Abdul Basset Saroot, a former football goalkeeper and a charismatic protester, is the person whom the narrative is referring to right at the beginning : a documentary, after all, needs to make one work at some level, at gaining understanding, rather than simply unfolding before its intended audience – if it is to take the best of what feature films do and engage one, by the process of active viewing itself.

Basset and who he turned out to be is one matter (which starts to unfold as Abu Adnan films him), whereas getting some notion of how Homs is set out, and what the destruction that we see implies for communication within the city, is another, and the lack of detail felt detrimental to telling the story of Homs. (Film editor Martin Reymers, and the Schnittbüro (in Munich ?) were both credited, so they presumably should bear some responsibility, on the German side of the production, for how the finished film ‘reads’ in this sense.)


In that telling, we come very close to Basset, hearing him exclaim with relief Thank God I did not shoot – it was a woman !, because he had been pointing his automatic weapon through a gun-slot, or, at a time when he loses heart, I no longer have it in me to do this. His faith is integral to what he believes that he is doing by fighting back, and, when he also says that God’s greatest gift to humans is oblivion, it is with a heartfelt sense of humanity’s place before divine authority and wisdom.

Before the return of which the title talks, which is hardly seen to be without danger to all involved (not least to Nyrabia as cinematographer, who had seemed quite matter of fact in saying, by way of introduction to the screening, that others and he had risked their lives to make it), there is a tranquil moment. In a sort of rural idyll, Basset is seen relaxing with, seemingly, members of his family, some female members of whom (his sister and his mother ?) wish that they could go with him.

One who could not go was Ossama al Homsi, of whose capture (and likely torture) we learnt in the film. No one asked in the Q&A why his face had been pixellated, but, it was not, even so, probable that it had been done in order to protect him from incrimination****: so perhaps it was out of respect, religious or otherwise, for his family or friends not to show his face, protecting his memory or his spirit, rather than literally shielding him…

As to whether Basset, and what we see him undergo, makes Return to Homs cohere except on a spiritual or symbolic plane, rather than as hard fact, must be down to the individual. However, when a recent map such as at http://syriamap.wordpress.com/ indicates that there are still factions / tensions within Homs, one comes back to the question raised of the one-sidedness of what we see, though one might hope – depending on where one places reliance – that the presence of a representative of Amnesty gave some assurance.

As to the film qua film, there was momentary interest in the nature of the filming / representation at the outset, but room was never given to the only other question that wanted to explore the cinematic construction of the film (outlined above). Likewise, screen a film such as The Look of Love (2013), and the questions tend shy away from the fact that one has just watched a film, in a cinema no less, to questions about Paul Raymond’s real life. As if film is not a specific type of potentially persuasive artefact.

But forget that a film is an artefact – and what have you fallen in love with, through ignoring the medium, except what its makers want to tell you… ?


End-notes

* All of which we see in the film, with corridors punched through the buildings so that defenders could travel from one side of the city to another, despite snipers and bombardment - oddly passing through spaces in this way, which were once someone’s quiet living-room or kitchen, full of aromas…

** Although the marine reference does not obviously make sense, maybe deriving from the fanciful notion that many faces, in intimate proximity, make one large thing from many small ones, with nary a fissure…

*** Nyrabia had also ended up as a significant cinematographer for the film, because of lack of people willing to hazard trying to penetrate back into Homs. When he was asked about the ending being foregrounded at the beginning, he sought to minimize the relevance of this aspect in his overall claim that the unfolding against time is linear.

**** Since, pixellated or not (and sometimes he was not, when one actually saw the side of his face), he was named in the film, and one knew that it was he, each time, because of how the image had been processed.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)