Movie Nation

One rarely channel surfs past “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” when it pops up on broadcast or cable TV. Renewing your acquiantance with the funniest movie of 1975 and probably the silliest movie ever made is a guilty pleasure few fans turn down.

I hadn’t seen it in a theater since what I think was its last “anniversary” or “new DVD/BluRay” re-release back around 2004. With an “Evening with John Cleese” and “The Holy Grail” rolling round, I relished the chance to see it on the big screen again.

Some sight gags and wacky-phonetic/Saxon English opening credits jokes you expect to play better in a theater, and with an audience. But what struck me the most this time around is how cheap it doesn’t look.

Sure, the film stock isn’t the best, the effects primitive enough to point out as a punch line.

“It’s only a model!”

But Hazel Pethig’s costumes seem period perfect, even if the “chain mail” was loops of wool. And Roy Forge Smith’s production design, with input from Python cartoonist turned co-director Terry Gilliam, looks positively archeological.

I don’t know if it’s the nearly perpetually gray skies over the primitive Scottish locations, the fake fog or the very real mud that permeates many a scene, especially early ones. But the entire affair looks like a documentary-real absurdist farce by Samuel Beckett acted-out by the greatest British clowns of their day.

If you know the film you’ve heard the stories — repeated by Cleese at that screening — of the way it was filmed for a pittance, that the “coconuts” were an exceptionally clever way of avoiding the expense of renting horses, teaching the cast to ride them and the like.

But by the time Tim the Enchanter (one of several characters played by Cleese) is pointing his fire-breathing staff and setting off explosions late in the third act, I was muttering “Wow, this is something to see.”

Cliffs and caves and castles and mud-mired villages and sylvan forests ruined by assorted rival “knights” who challenge King Arthur and his motley crew at every turn are so inviting — save for the mud — that they impact Scottish tourism and one particular castle location to this very day.

The story — Arthur, played by Graham Chapman at his straight-man sternest, and his faithful servant/coconut-clacking pack mule Patsy (Gilliam, REALLY into the part) make their way across this corner of Britain, trying to convince the locals that A) he really is king, B) they really are Britons and C) that his authority was ordained by God and “The Lady in the Lake” who handed him the sword Excalibur.

“Listen, strange women lyin’ in ponds distributin’ swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.”

Knights such as Sir Bedevere (Co-director Terry Jones), Sir Lancelot (Cleese again), Sir Galahad the Pure (Michael Palin, of course) and the “not so brave” Sir Robin (Eric Idle) join the traveling retinue, which avoids Camelot and its Round Table as “a silly place,” as Arthur accepts a quest from the Almighty, that he and they seek the Holy Grail.

The many set-pieces here, sketches built around Arthur or this or that knight’s encounters with figures prosaic and mythic, still induce giggles — from the randy sisters of Castle Anthrax, led by twins Zoot and Dingo (Python’s go-to laugh lady Carol Cleveland) who long to corrupt “pure” Sir Galahad, the quest for “shrubbery,” the hilariously dim-witted witch trial featuring Cleese’s then-wife and future “Fawlty Towers” collaborator Connie Booth to a “damsel” rescue Lancelot slaughters his way to, only to realize a sissy Prince Herbert (Jones again) is the one who requires rescuing.

Cleese’s glorious bit of French-accented taunting from castle battlements may offer the most quotable lines in this most quotably hilarious cult comedy.

“You don’t frighten us, English peeg-dogs. Go and boil yourrrrr bottoms, you sons of a seeelly person. I blow my nose at you, so-called ‘Arthur King,’ you and all your silly English Kuh-niggets!”

Cleese’s many comic creations — the stubborn Black Knight who will not yield, calling each limb lost in a duel with Arthur “a flesh wound,” Tim the wild-eyed wizard — make him the stand-out in the picture, amusing in every guise.

But from the first time I saw it until now, it’s been obvious to me that Chapman carries it. His self-serious Arthur, under-reacting, reacting and over-reacting to the “silly” going on all around him, was pitch perfect here, and in the later “Life of Brian.”

Chapman’s Arthur is a version of his conservative man/military man stentorian figures who’d march into a sketch or a shot with an officious, “Right. Damned silly. That’ll be enough of that” variations, the serious man taken aback by the lunacy going on around him on the TV series.

The gay member of the troupe was its best straight man. He is the contrast to the absurdism, arguing about how coconuts could have journeyed to Britain, trying to get the attention of a “French” castle, in England over 100 years before the Norman Conquest.

“Go and tell your master that we have been charged by God with a sacred quest. If he will give us food and shelter for the night, he can join us in our quest for the Holy Grail!”

The production design is the buy-in. Cleese, Palin, and to a lesser degree Jones and Idle, bring the surrealism. But Chapman, with the perfect voice for a stern, schoolmaster lecture on the Dark Ages, pre-history Britain and the Arthurian legend, is the credibility.

Add them together and “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” remains one of the great see-it-with-an-audience cult comedies, riotously funny at times, grimly goofy at others, and muddy and bloody almost all the way through.

And sparrows to catapults, coconuts to killer rabbits, “Bring out yer dead” to “Run away!” the “Grail” almost never looks like the comic-thrills-made-on-the-cheap classic that it is.

Rating: PG, a little innuendo, comically bloody violence, profanity

Cast: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam, with Carol Cleveland, Connie Booth, John Young, Rita Davies, Bee Duffell and Neil Innes.

Credits: Directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, scripted by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam.

Running time: 1:31

Eighty-four years old, sharp as a tack and still damned funny, John Cleese charmed, tickled and regaled a packed house at Greater Orlando’s Enzian Theater last night as a special event for this year’s Florida Film Festival.

He talked about “creativity,” the subject of his latest book, as it relates to comedy and screenwriting, reminded everyone of the low budget and discomfort one and all — especially he — suffered making “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” in soggy early ’70s Scotland.

He griped about “uncreative” executives — calling out ex-Disney boss Nina Jacobson by name for trying to dumb down a script Cleese co-wrote based on a Roald Dahl book. Cleese broke down the particular talents of his assorted Python-mates — with Michael Palin “gifted at creating unforgottable characters,” his late writing partner Graham Chapman “our best litmus test” as to whether something was funny or not and Eric Idle’s clever way with lyrics.

And he expressed amusement with the American right’s obsession with “drag,” something “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” was pivotal (along with Uncle Milty and Flip “Geraldine” Wilson) in bringing into the nation’s living rooms via TV. He laid the blame for it at the foot of America lacking “our long history of pantos (Pantomime Shows),” where generation after English generation has been delighted by plays put on with women playing men and boys and men playing women.

Maybe conservatives wouldn’t feel so threatened if they’d grown up with something like that, Cleese suggested.

He talked about his fond friendship with Steve Martin, with America’s comic philosopher an unerring sounding board for “A Fish Called Wanda,” his amused frustration at Michael Palin’s decades of “boring” travel documentary series, his appreciation for “the two Terrys,” Jones and Gilliam, who co-directed “Holy Grail” and who made it look so muddily authentic, despite the presence of coconuts.

The evening’s best joke might have been a question from the audience, about where “It’s true” that Cleese didn’t accept a knighthood because “the Queen didn’t know how to (or refused to) pronounce k-nigget?”

And another member of the audience asked about the big moment that changed his relationship with his pathologically depressed mother — making a threatening joke (as an adult, on the phone) about knowing somebody who could come over and “help” grant her wish to just end it all. Cracked her up every time he brought it up from then onwards.

Aside from some vertigo and hearing loss, one of the funniest men alive was none the worst for wear and tear, quick to run with an idea or jokingly ridicule a rambling question, try his hand at a fake pratful or grouse about “cancel culture” and its impact on creativity and creative freedom.

Lovely man. I’ve been a fan since the records of their live performances came out @1979-80, catching the second wave of Python mania that blew up around the time “Life of Brian” became a global phenomenon.

That gives one the pleasure of bingeing on their many series, including the pre Python ones featuring the sextet before they teamed up, and catching up on their movies and later work.

If you get a chance to catch JC on the other dates of his years-long North America and elsewhere tour, don’t miss that opportunity.

Thanks to Cameron Meier for the two-shot, here. With all one has to keep up with re: introductions, questions, audience moderation and the like, I didn’t get around to getting a selfie or two-shot with Our Lord J.C. The venue didn’t photograph the event, at Mr. Cleese’s request.

Anybody else among the scores of folks who I saw snapping away get a decent shot or two-shot? Feel free to send my way. I’ll give you credit.

Decades of co-starring human actors with CGI animated ones in kiddie comedies haven’t exactly produced a new golden age for children’s entertainment. A hit here and there, but nothing you can imagine kids embracing, generation after generation, has been the result.

Efforts starring Scooby-Doo and Marmaduke and Sonic the Hedgehog are joined by “Woody Woodpecker Goes to Camp,” a lackluster revival of the 1940s vintage intellectual property cartoon character.

The title tells you everything that’s important about this picture. The rascal Woody is in it. He needs to go to “camp” to learn “teamwork” instead of being the self-serving, pileated and pecking menace he’s always been.

Struggling “STEAM” (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math) Camp Woo-hoo is where Woody seeks a “teamwork” badge to get back into the national forest he was expelled from. It’s run by Mary-Louise Parker, and the funniest thing about the film must have been the conversation between the “Weeds” star and the agent who talked her into this.

There’s a rival Camp Hoo-Rah, all dressed in camo and run by and for bullies (Josh Lawson plays the camp chief). An ex-con buzzard helps the bad guys (not all that bad) compete with Camp Woo-hoo in The Wilderness Games, which are officiated by a park ranger, played by a CGI walrus.

It’s childish and slapshticky, with Woody commenting on everything and anything, including a flashback to the old prospector who bought the land that it was founded on.

“Too bad this flashback wasn’t in color,” Woody quips. “It could’ve popped.”

The jokes are feeble, even the puns. Toss Woody in the camp kitchen freezer to “chill out.” He’ll “be the coolest kid in camp! NAILED it!”

“You KNOW those weren’t funny!”

No, Woody’s trademark laugh isn’t as amusing as it once once. And no, Woody’s promise back in the first act is never fulfilled.

“Never mind. Come back to me. I’ll think of something funnier.”

It’s all harmless enough, with its diverse cast of nerd “types” and “mean girls” and the like.

The messaging is Kid Comedy Screenwriting 101 worthy.

“You can’t hide from the bullies of this world your whole life.”

But there’s barely enough going on here to distract children into sticking with Woody all the way to the finish. The anarchy is mild-mannered, the sight gags limp and the human interactions produce no laughs and little in the way of charm, either.

Still, I would’ve loved to hear that agent’s call to Emmy-winner Mary-Louise P. Provided it didn’t smack of desperation on either end of the line.

Rating: TV-PG, cartoon mayhem

Cast: The voices of Eric Bauza, Tom Kenny and Kevin Michael Richardson, with Chloe De Los Santos, Savannah La Rain, Esther Son, Josh Lawson and Mary Louis Parker.

Credits: Directed by Jonathan A. Rosenbaum, scripted by Cory Edwards, Jim Martin and Stephen Mazur. A Universal release on Netflix

Running time: 1:40

John Cleese’s latest stop on his North American “Catch me while you still can” tour is at the Florida Film Festival, at the Enzian Theater in Maitland (North Orlando).

It begins tonight at 8ish with a showing of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” followed by a Q&A with Our Lord J.C.

Packed house, festival director Matthew Curtis says — he’s the one not dressed for prom night — but there are still. A few tix left. I’m moderating the Q&A after the movie This should be a fun evening of memories and taunting and flesh wounded knights.

How did the evening go? My “report” is right here. Thanks to Michael Furlong for the snapshot.

Getting an “Inception Lite” vibe from this May 8 thriller from Apple TV+.

Guy comes out of a come with a new life in a new “world” created — he thinks — around him. Who or what is his “real” life, real wife, etc?

Good cast. Earmark this one as worth taking a peek.

Yeah, I’d say so. But to be fair, I mean, come ON.

Note that the paid extras are the only ones keeping it together. And that this is merely the most busted-up sketch of the night.

This is a regular feature of Gosling appearances on “Saturday Night Live.” He cracks up and the seasoned cast joins in. This time he lost it in almost every sketch. Yes, it’s funny to people watching it, but one wonders about the memos and/or staff meeting about this to come.

Some of its power to shock and repel still clings to “Hardcore,” the debut feature by “Taxi Driver” writer turned writer-director Paul Schrader.

But as it travels from the conservative Rust Belt just before Reagan and the “Rust” set in, into the strip clubs, sex shops, lap dance “arcades” and porn film industry of the Southern California of 1979, it can feel almost quaint as it exposes a mostly-naive Middle America to variations of “The World’s Oldest Profession.”

It’s a quest thriller, loosely based on the classic John Wayne/John Ford Western “The Searchers,” about a Grand Rapids, Michigan father hunting for a teen daughter when went missing on a trip to church camp in California, and somehow wound up in the sordid, dangerous porn film/sex-worker underworld of Van Nuys and environs, a landscape later surveyed in Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic “Boogie Nights.”

George C. Scott gives us shades of guilt-ridden concern, shock and his trademark enraged histrionics as Jake VanDorn, owner of his family’s venerated furniture manufacturing concern. We’re immersed in their world, first, a snowy Christmas with the whole clan gathered, singing carols, dutifully attending their Dutch Reformed (Calvinist) Church and enjoying the bountiful fruits of lives their belief system tells them they were predestined to receive.

Writer-director Schrader’s religion has long informed his cinema, something he made even more obvious with his 2017 “comeback” movie, “First Reformed.”

When Jake says grace before the whole family that evening, he finishes with “keep up safe from harm and danger, if it be thy will.” Remember that.

In “Hardcore,” that faith is discussed and those values are tested when Jake gets a call that his daughter disappeared on a field trip from California church camp to the Knotts Berry Farm theme park. His support system is such that his brother-in-law (Dick Sargent of “Bewitched”) thinks nothing of saying he’ll book the flights and go with him out West to find Kristen (Ilah Davis) or at least get some answers.

Sitting with a not-particularly comforting cop (Larry Block), seeing a wall of teen girls and boys “missing persons” posters and fliers around him makes Jake despair. But on the cop’s recommendation, he hires “the best” private investigator for this sort of case in that corner of Southern California.

Peter Boyle has one of his best roles and runs with it as Andy Mast, a sleazy guy in a sleazy business doing a sleazy job of hunting through a world of sleaze. Mast’s bluntly sexual questions about the missing teen and his salty language offend VanDorn.

“You wanna hire a choir boy, go back to Grand Rapids.” But he assures Jake he’ll find her in “a week or two, a month at the most.” He doesn’t.

But as seasons change Mast shows up in Grand Rapids, takes Jake to a seedy 8mm peep show porn theater where he shows what he did find. Kristen is working in “Hardcore” porn.

That and rising impatience with how long this is taking launches Jake’s odyssey, a conservative man in conservative suits wandering the mean and sordid streets, showing pictures of his daughter in that dirty movie to sex workers and porn shop operators (Tracey Walter plays one, naturally), roughing up Mast in his righteous wrath over his child’s fate and the private eye’s “methods,” which include bedding porn actresses on VanDorn’s dime “for information.”

Eventually, our hero will have to descend to everyone else’s level, pose as an “investor” with a porn producer (Leonard Gaines, in a definitive portrayal of a “type”) in order to trace his child’s journey, determine her fate and perhaps accept his role in it.

“Love, Divided” is a pleasant-enough love-without-first-sight rom-com about two quarelling neighbors who find a connection through a shared wall, one that’s entirely too thin to get the sound muffling job done.

He, played by Fernando Guallar, is borderline agoraphobic, a tinkerer/game-builder who hasn’t left his apartment in three years. Something set David off, and he’s been obsessing over getting his next game just right, any excuse to not go out.

The new neighbor (Spanish pop star Aitana) “won’t make it through the day,” David predicts to his pal, Nacho (Adam Jezieriski). David has his ways — sound effects gear, noisy machinery, etc. — to chase off anyone who might disturb his peace by moving into the place next door.

He doesn’t need that other neighbor Valentina asks about “the noise” (in Spanish, or dubbed into English) telling her it’s a “ghost.” Couldn’t hurt, though.

She’s a pianist rehearsing for a big audition. Mr. “I require absolute silence” and “Challenge, accepted” and his metallic racket may be getting into an escalation he’s not mentally prepared for.

But a truce is quickly reached, conversations grow more pleasant and her Beethoven audition piece muddles along. Her overbearing ex Oscar (Miguel Ángel Muñoz) may still be in the picture, but she takes a stab at figuring out who the sensitive stranger next door is. That requires conferring with her cousin/bestie Carmen (Natalia Rodríguez) while David copes with the “get out of the house” efforts of Nacho.

Can love be in the offing, or is an old non-soundproofed wall enough to stand in their way? Not having to face or get too close to someone could be “perfect, just the way it is.” Or is it?

It’s a little dispiriting to watch Alex Garland’s idea of what America’s next “Civil War” will look like, and the documentary “Bad Faith” on the same weekend.

The first is about effect, and the second, subtitled “Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy,” a point-by-point examination of the steps and the people who schemed, fund-raised, wrote-manifestos and enflamed and misled a fanatical minority to put us there.

Like other films covering similar ground (last winter’s doc “God & Country”), filmmakers Stephen Ujlaki and Christopher Jacob Jones — they collaborated on the “Hollywood Masters” interview series — set out to define “Christian Nationalism,” the political movement that “privileges Christianity” “over all other faiths” and seeks power to impose that view on others.

And they trace the modern version of this KKK-born movement’s birth back to the days when activist/zealot Paul Weyrich found, in abortion, the proper smokescreen issue to enlist ardent Protestant segregationists like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and whichever Bob Jones was presiding over the founder of Bob Jones U.’s white supremacist preacher’s college into Republican politics in the 1970s.

“Bad Faith” features academics, pastors, authors and Russell Moore, the courageously outspoken editor of “Christianity Today,” in detailing the history, agenda and assorted manifestos of billionaire-funded right-wing “think tanks,” data banks and “rage baiting” organizations, from the Council for National Policy and Koch Foundation to the Faith and Freedom Coalition, Turning Point USA, ALEC and The Heritage Foundation.

Their latest manifesto could be their Final Solution for ending American democracy and majority rule — Project 2025.

A “Calvinist” view of Christianity is at the heart of it, some suggest, the idea that the wealthy pastors of the Falwell, Robertson, Kenneth Copeland and Joel Osteen variety were “chosen” to be made rich by the Almighty, and thus worthy of being donated to and followed right to the ballot box.

Enlist and coopt them, and you’ve got a virulent one-issue voting bloc.

But who do a lot of those preachers follow? “Bad Faith” takes us back to the way Weyrich and others figured out that connecting this manipulated minority to Big Money and the issues Big Money people support — cutting or eliminating corporate tax rates, attacking estate taxes and lowering taxation on the rich.

The fact that the Hunts, the Kochs and many others were oil and coal barons isn’t even played up. But who denies climate change and who benefits from their electoral denial of scientific fact?

The film’s most troubling footage is of the violence of the January 6 insurrection, with grim images of the assault on police, the nation’s capital and democracy itself interspersed with images of the combatants, urged into “war” by thousands of conservative pastors and others, carrying Jesus wearing a MAGA hat posters, wearing crucifixes and waving Trump flags.

I caught the first IMAX showing of “Civil War” closest to me Thursday afternoon, a Regal Cinemas matinee that had a lot more people than your average non-summer opening day/matinee would pull in at IMAX ticket prices.

That was a tell. A big Thursday and huge Friday take for this cautionary A24 thriller has Deadline.com projecting a healthy (it didn’t cost all that much) $25.7 million opening, making it the top movie in America this weekend.

Reviews have been good to glowing, but breaking down along political lines. The conservative critics and publications try to convince everybody “Nothing to see here,” the vast majority of us sounding the alarm to the vast majority of Americans that this cautionary combat thriller is something to see and take heed of.

Deadline reports Cinemascore tracking that’s possibly politically-divided as well. The movie is “apolitical,” but not for those who catch its clues.

“Godzilla X King: The New Empire” is still making stupid money, another $14-15 million this weekend and is closing in on the $160 million mark, which it could pass Sunday, but will clear by Tuesday or so for sure.

“Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” will add another $4-5 million, and fall just short of the $100 million mark in North America since opening. It should clear that by the middle of NEXT weekend.

The pin-your-ears-back action pic “Monkey Man” is seriously underperforming in the US, a bit of surprise considering the growing audience for Indian cinema (it’s mostly in English) in the U.S. and the gonzo “John Wick” nature of the violence. It took a steep dive from its middling opening weekend and will earn maybe $4.5 million.

But will it edge “Kung Fu Panda 4” on its SIXTH weekend of release? The animated hit is slated to earn just under $4.5, and may clear that. It could move past the $180 million North American box office take mark by Sunday night.

As always, I’ll update these figures as more data comes in over the course of the weekend.