Life of Brian (1979, Terry Jones) (Patreon)

87/100

Umpteenth viewing, last seen 2004. This has always been my favorite Python film, largely because they manage to score remarkably trenchant sociopolitical insights without sacrificing belly laughs or rampant silliness. Everyone loves and recognizes the factional infighting that finds the People's Front of Judea less contemptuous of the Romans than they are of the Judean People's Front, but I tend to forget that the PFJ also produces such priceless throwaway moments as Francis' peevish response to the Sermon on the Mount: "Well, blessed is just about everyone with a vested interest in the status quo, as far as I can tell." The entire Brian-as-unwilling-Messiah stretch, from the Hyde-Parkish crowd only becoming interested when he leaves a sentence tantalizingly unfinished to variant denominations instantly forming around his lost shoe and discarded free gourd, is sheer genius, merrily obliterating the already thin line between a religion and a cult. Life of Brian is also particularly heavy on Python's escalating-logical-absurdity branch (which is mostly Cleese-Chapman, with some Idle), serving up such classics as "well you did say  'Jehovah'," "ROMANES EUNT DOMUS! [sic]," "what have the Romans ever done for us?", and "haggle properly!" I'd stand those up against Holy Grail's best sketches, and here the whole movie is basically Palin's peasant's anarcho-syndicalist commune speech, in terms of being savvy as well as funny. Gilliam contributes a sequence so brief and zany and ultimately inconsequential (Brian ends up exactly where he'd started) that it's easy to wonder whether you somehow imagined it. (I wrote that up for Scenic Routes.) Even the lengthy Biggus Dickus bit, while not really my thing, derives its humor less from the adolescent vulgarity itself than from the relish with which Palin's Pontius Piwate (no, Pilate) (clonk) deliberately tries to make his centurions involuntarily and suicidally giggle. And then the whole thing wraps up with Idle's magnificent bleakly ironic show tune. Too much of Jones' screechy drag act for my taste early on, and all the speech impediment stuff is a bit much (Chapman should only have played Brian), and Judith—an actual woman!—never quite works as a character or a narrative element, but those are my only substantial complaints about a movie that, more than Holy Grail, has remained surprisingly fresh, given how frequently and borderline obsessively I watched it as a kid.