Monty Python's The Meaning of Life
Life's questions are 'answered' in a series of outrageous vignettes, beginning with a staid London insurance company which transforms before our eyes into a pirate ship. Then there's the National Health doctors who try to claim a healthy liver from a still-living donor. The world's most voracious glutton brings the art of vomiting to new heights before his spectacular demise.
Gimly@Ruuz
Doesn't hold up as well as some of Monty Python's other work, but there's enough classic moments in here to make it worthwhile watching.
_Final rating:★★★ - I liked it. Would personally recommend you give it a go._
Filipe Manuel Neto@FilipeManuelNeto
**I expected much more: this film is a shadow of what it should have been.**
I think it's redundant to say what everyone already knows: the Monty Python represents the pinnacle of British humor, and if each of those comedians is excellent alone, seeing them together is always an added bonus. This film, however, is a late work by the group, when each of them was starting to have a solo career and the group's notoriety was consolidated. There are incredible partnerships in the artistic world, and if we think about it, we will think of huge music bands, television series or troupes of actors that worked incredibly well and were successful for a certain time. The issue is that many of them did not know how to harmonize a joint existence with the growing commitments of individual agendas. And I think that's what happened with Python, and that helped complicate this project.
The film makes us laugh, it has some good moments, but it is a shadow if we try to compare it to “The Holy Grail”, for example. That's the crux of the matter: it's not bad, but it should have been much better, considering the talent of those involved! For me, a good part of the problem comes from the fact that it is a succession of humorous sketches with almost no obvious correlation between them. We can admit that in a TV comedy show, it is done routinely, and it works very well. In a film, greater cohesion, unity and homogeneity are expected. It's not an unbreakable rule, but it was an expectation I had.
Another problem with this film is the quality of the humor. We already know that the humor has more puerile moments and others that are frankly acidic, but the film resorts too much to easy laughter and simplistic and unrefined humor: a man who is condemned to death and chooses to fall off a cliff after being chased by naked women; an enormously obese man who, in a fancy restaurant, vomits everything around him and eats a regimental dose of food; a sex education class for totally naive boys (something impossible to believe, even considering the time when the film was made) and with the right to practical and very visual exemplification of the act in the classroom... what's the funny in all this?
As I said, the movie has some good moments. I loved the delivery room sketch, I think it's an absolutely delicious sarcasm and that it still works as a critique of the general state of public health services. I also liked Crimson Insurance, which is nothing more than a gigantic parody of Errol Flynn's piracy films, especially “Sea Hawk”, but which has a sympathetic touch and a critique of globalization and unbridled capitalism. Much less pleasant, but equally hilarious, was the huge musical sketch of Irish Catholics, stuffed to the bone with political incorrectness and with very accurate stings to the rejection discourse that the Catholic Church was maintaining with regard to contraceptive methods.