Monty Python: Almost The Truth - The Lawyer's Cut

MPFC fans will run for this LONG documentary; Casual viewers will probably get bored
Forty Years ago five "silly" (but educated - Oxford and Cambridge) British comic actors joined with one American animators to for what is collectively known as Monty Python's Flying Circus. After the BBC ran a pilot and it worked they got a contract and produced 39 half-hour-long shows. Yes, there were only 39. Of course, the team later made some feature films before disbanding.

This documentary, shown originally in October 2009 on the Independent Film Channel on cable, runs six hours! There also bonus material. This is a serious documentary on comedy. The five living members (Graham Chapman, deceased, is showing with early interview clips) each provide comments on their beginning, career as part of the team and life after Python. None of these members are interviewed together. Though they don't trash one another, you get the feeling, after a while, that they had fun when they were doing it but saw it as a job and its past history. They have gone on to other ventures. Their...

For the Faithful, the Obsessed and our last best hope
Warning: The five stars hold true if and only if you annoy other people with your grasp of Python and quote at length at every opportunity. To only those of you who hold well and truly that all important moments of life has a Python quote at the ready. If you have never been told to "Shut Up", you will have only the four star edition of this review. The rest will be bored to tears.

We are at home as soon as the familiar 17" diagonal TV is exploded. An unfamiliar face fills our screen, but he is just a lawyer, hence the overflight of the Soviet TU-85 dropping a bomb with parachute. Incongruity follows reassuringly, with the atomic detonation on Bikini Atoll. This is the Lawyers' Cut and it cuts both ways. Film is cut and they take their pound of flesh. But this is old business in Python history. All will be made clear.

These short six hours are for us lifers. There is a bonus disk above what was aired, which has a starter sample of the popular skits...

Python in the Pantheon
For the first time ever the members of the comedy troupe Monty Python's Flying Circus are able to provide serious, insightful, meaningful historical information about the formation of a modern entertainment classic. This alone is worth every moment of your attention, and every penny, since getting the members of Python to be serious about anything was a violation of one of Newton's little known laws: "No member of Monty Python, when asked a serious question, can give a serious answer." And this violation of a natural law was possible only because the makers of this documentary were wise enough to prevent any member of the Python group from being in the same room at the same time with any other member. Monty Python was more than just a comedy group inspired by the courageous and intrepid post-WWII comic geniuses like Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, who dared to make the British people laugh after their somber, dour, ordeal, and to do so with the audacity of satirizing their own...

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