Holy Flying Circus Blu-ray Review
This Isn't Satire, It's Just Impersonation! (No, It Isn't)
Reviewed by Michael Reuben, September 4, 2012
Imagine that an Elvis impersonator made a movie about the life of Elvis Presley, except that it
wasn't a standard bio-pic, but a fictionalized re-telling that borrowed its style from classic Elvis
films like
Viva Las Vegas. The result might be the rockabilly equivalent of
Holy Flying Circus,
the best Monty Python film that Monty Python's Flying Circus never made. Top comic
screenwriter Tony Roche (
In the Loop) has
taken a real historical incident—the religious outcry
over the Pythons' 1979 film
Life of Brian
—and retold it as an extended series of Monty Python
sketches starring parody versions of the group's six members. The story culminates in a semi-accurate recreation of the TV debate on November 9,
1979, where Michael Palin and John Cleese
appeared on the program
Friday Night, Saturday Morning to defend the film against the Bishop
of Southwark and Malcolm Muggeridge, a noted Christian intellectual. The consensus afterward
was that Muggeridge and the Bishop lost the debate by behaving like bullies. It also came out
that they'd only just seen the film the day of the debate and had missed the first fifteen minutes,
leading them to believe that the character of Brian is supposed to be Jesus. (He very clearly isn't.)
You don't have to be a Monty Python expert to enjoy
Holy Flying Circus, but the production
assumes that you're at least familiar with the six members of the group and, more importantly,
enjoy their style of comedy, which is so distinctive that it spawned the adjective "Pythonesque".
The Pythons' impact on comedy would be hard to understate. It extends far beyond the forty-five
half-hour TV episodes that ran on the BBC from 1969 through 1974 and continued through group
projects like
Life of Brian, as well as solo efforts like Terry Gilliam's
Time Bandits (in which
various ex-Pythons appeared), John Cleese's
Fawlty Towers and
A Fish Called Wanda and, most
recently, Eric Idle's
Spamalot, based on the earlier film,
Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And
that's not to mention the thousands of comics and comedy shows that have been heavily
influenced by Python humor and style, starting with the original
Saturday Night Live and moving
forward through
The Simpsons and
South Park.
Screenwriter Roche is a Python expert of the first rank. Not only does he know
Life of Brian
inside and out, but he also drew on an apparently endless knowledge of the classic shows to
structure scenes and borrow references. By the time Roche and the talented cast were done, the
daily life of the Pythons had been transformed into one extended Python sketch. Terry Gilliam is
reported to have said that he and his fellow members could hardly complain, since they'd been
doing the same thing to other people for years.
Like many of the early Python episodes,
Holy Flying Circus opens with a bearded man
approaching the camera from a distance. In this case, however, the man turns out to be Jesus,
who informs the viewer (in subtitles) that everything you're about to see is made up. After some
additional nonsense, there's a credit sequence done with Pythonesque (or, if one prefers, Gilliam-esque) animation, followed by a lengthy text scroll
that recalls, more than anything, the
shambling credits of
Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
It's 1979, and the group has just returned from shooting
Life of Brian in Tunisia. They gather in
the office of their agent, Barry Atkins (Simon Greenall), to discuss release and marketing.
Already in these early scenes, it becomes clear that the group's interactions will be dominated by
John Cleese and Michael Palin (Darren Boyd and Charles Edwards, neither of whom looks much
like the originals, but whose vocal re-creations are uncanny). This may not be historically
accurate, but it's dramatically necessary, because Cleese and Palin are the ones who end up on
TV defending
Life of Brian, and they have lengthy scenes of disagreement and preparation
leading up to the appearance. Many of their interactions riff on the classic "Argument" sketch,
because they're played as polar opposites, capitalizing on personas from their work both in and
out of Monty Python. Palin, who became a genial travelogue host, is widely acknowledged to be
the nicest man in the world, and is beloved by everyone, including his mother (also played by
Edwards). Cleese is abrasive, argumentative and confrontational, to the point where he feels
obliged to interrupt the show at one point for a "paid political announcement on behalf of John
Cleese" in which he assures everyone that he's
not just like Basil Fawlty but is really a gentle
soul who likes kitty-cats and small children.
The other four group members are drawn in broad strokes. Terry Jones (Rufus Jones) speaks with
a lisp that grows worse when he gets excited; he's also partial to performing in drag, which leads
him to spend as much screen time playing Michael Palin's wife as himself—and since Palin is
the nicest man in the world, the Palins have a loving and genial home life complete with an
active sexual relationship. Graham Chapman (Thomas Fisher) smokes a pipe continuously and
routinely speaks up on behalf of the gay community. Eric Idle (Steve Punt, whose resemblance to
Idle is remarkable) wants to make money, money, money; when he's introduced to Tim Rice
(Tom Price), who co-wrote
Jesus Christ, Superstar, he says how much he too would like to get
rich from a hit musical (which the real Idle has done with
Spamalot). And Terry Gilliam (Phil
Nichol) daydreams in his own world, speaks in a (deliberately) bad American accent, and creates
animations and effects that never quite work out.
The Pythons open
Life of Brian in America first, figuring that Americans will be more open-minded, because the nation is a melting pot.
They are stunned when the film is greeted by
protests, picketing and hatred, primarily by people who haven't seen it. So they turn to their
native Britain, where the national film board, the BBFC , gives the film a gentle "AA" rating, but
local councils are pushed to ban it by a grass roots movement spurred by the Popular People's
Church of St. Sophia, formerly the People's Church of St. Sophia, formerly the St. Sophian
Church of People. They haven't seen the film either, but they know something of its contents
from script pages found in the BBC's trash. Led by Andrew Thorogood (Mark Heap), and with
deeply concerned members that include a chronic stutterer and a Tourette's sufferer who screams
obscenities, the group is determined to stamp out the blasphemous film and chastise its creators.
At the BBC, the newly appointed head of TV chat, Alan Dick (Jason Thorpe), daily berates his
staff for their boring guests. Get me the Pythons! bellows Dick, almost hourly. He's especially
rough on his chief assistant, who is named Harry Balls (Paul Chahidi), thus placing Dick above
Balls in the chain of command (the Pythons never shunned obvious jokes, and neither does
Holy
Flying Circus). At first the Pythons decline the invitation, but eventually Palin leads them in a
change of heart, as he concludes that it's time for them speak up publicly. The result is the
"debate" with Muggeridge and the Bishop.
Palin finds the experience so unpleasant that he almost loses his temper. Almost, but not quite.
Sitting in the control room, Dick is outraged that the intense outburst of violence he seems to be
witnessing on the monitors is nothing more than "Michael Palin's
fantasy sequence!" In reality,
Palin has kepts his composure, and when the debate concludes, he storms out of the building.
Upon returning home, he learns from his adoring wife and mother that he and Cleese came off
better. In a fantasy coda, Palin encounters God (Stephen Fry), who assures him he's done nothing
at all to diminish religious intolerance and begins rattling off a series of future cultural events
(e.g.,
The Satanic Verses) that demonstrate how intolerance continues to thrive.
Holy Flying Circus Blu-ray, Video Quality
According to IMDb,
Holy Flying Circus was shot on the Red One system, and the image on
Acorn Media's 1080i, AVC-encoded Blu-ray bears out that description. The image is framed, for
the most part, at 2.00:1, which is one of the available settings on the Red One. I have been unable
to confirm whether the film was shown this way during its original British broadcast, or whether it
was matted to an HD-standard 1.78:1. Regardless, the framing on the Blu-ray feels neither
cramped nor compromised.
I said that the image was framed "for the most part" at 2.00:1, because some sequences have had
the aspect ratio deliberately altered for effect. For example, specific scenes (e.g., the mock
opening in heaven) have been matted to 2.35:1, while a few others (e.g., a mock commercial for
Monty Python Christmas Crackers) have been created for 1.33:1 display to reproduce the style of
the old Monty Python TV shows.
Whatever the AR, the image is clean, smooth and detailed, as we have come to expect from
digitally captured footage. Some scenes have been purposely "distressed" in post-production, but
these are obvious. Colors range from slightly faded and dusty in the 1979 scenes to a more
fluorescent look in a few scenes intended to represent the present, to unnaturally flushed NTSC-style chroma values for the mock commercial, to the
overlit, overcontrast-y look of the telecast
debate. There's also an old black-and-white segment with fake scratches and print damage, a
mock spaceship sequence (a
hommage to a similar sequence in
Life of Brian) and, of course,
various animations. Each of these has been given its distinctive appearance in post-production,
and not one of them looks real.
Since there appears to have been no analog stage in the path from capture to disc, concerns about
filtering, artificial sharpening, etc. do not apply, and indeed I saw no indications of such
problems. The 89-minute program fits comfortably on a BD-25, with minimal extras, all of them
in standard definition.