Customer Reviews

Meaning of Life

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4 star:		(1)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is Monty Python's finest album to date. It's every bit as funny as the film. It also boasts some new linking material from Michael Palin, like frying eggs and The Adventures of Martin Luther. Every thing on the album is hilarious. Although the sound effects that are used to smoothe the transition from visual to audio is a bit overdone. Every Python fan should own this album. It's a shame MCA Records won't re-release this in America.

I think everyone including the Pythons themselves, know that much of this movie, isn't nowhere as good as much of their other work. By the eighties, they really weren't as funny. After writing years of superb funny material, they came out with this.

This is the soundtrack. Every man in America would like a certain part end the end, but that's not on this, as it's "visual". They might as well have realesed a soundtrack album, as they realesed evrything else on book soundtrack, and computer games. However the book version of "Life of Brian", was quiet esential, as the scrapboook version has ALOT of new material, writen but not used for that film.

There isn't anything too new. The "new material" is the briefest parts by Micheal Palin, doing brief links, as on Final Rip-off, neither are very funny. Well I bought this for a fin at half.com, and it's too much here. This isn't essential, if you can pick it up for under 3 dollars, you might as well buy it.

Since there are not so many songs in the film, there's a lot of dialog,
and it works only partly without the visual...

Well, "Every Sperm is Sacred" and "Galaxy Song" are still among my favorite Python songs...

Now that we are well past all the hype of the initial movie release, even the Pythons themselves are prepared to admit that 'The Meaning of Life' was not their greatest work. There is plenty of gore and a little sex, to at least embarrass, if not offend many. This is not the sort of CD you can comfortably listen to with your parents or children. In fact, there isn't a single funny sketch on this CD that doesn't have some squirm value.

But there was plenty of gore and sex in previous Python volumes, so the question remains: why does it not work so well here? I think part of the reason is that there is an underlying mean-mindedness here. It happens to many of us as we grow older and our talent dims. One tends to resent the fact that the youthful enthusiasm has gone, and one's best work is perhaps in the past. There is real hate in many of John Cleese's deliveries here -- e.g. in 'Live Organ Transplants' and the Hospital Birth sketch (which is rescued by the machine that goes 'Ping!'). The Pythons might argue that there was real political comment in those sketches, but the public find it hard to accept such comment from those who clearly have a lot of money.

The other part of the reason lies in the money. This was the first film where the Pythons didn't have to be careful with money. They didn't have to chase Playboy's Victor Lowndes, who funded 'And Now ...' or George Harrison, who funded 'Brian'. No, for 'The Meaning of Life', the Pythons had full Hollywood backing, and most of the money seems to have gone into the production values rather than the sketch-writing. Mike Palin has spoken of his satisfaction with the choreography of the 'Every Sperm is Sacred' song, but the problem is that Python audiences come for the jokes, not the dancing, and all the humour in that sketch comes at the start.

The trouble with being in the position of having made it is that you have less to prove. When the Pythons really had to struggle to get the finance together, they knew they had to create something outstanding to justify their backer's support. When the finance is secure, when you know that the film won't change your life much, and when your main problems are Hollywood producers grumbling about schedules and budgets,
your output is going to look much more like production-line output.

Mike Palin once said that, of all the sketches he'd written, his favourite was 'The Communist Quiz'. It's also one of the Python's most family-friendly sketches. If there's any humour left in the Python team, this is the sort of material they should be creating.