Monty Python Live (Mostly)

Having watched a lot of the Monty Python sketches on TV as a kid, I have always had a particular fondness for the comedy from these English chaps. And the 2014 farewell show definitely is something you have to watch if you enjoy Monty Python.

With 45 years of comedy, the guys certainly have brought a lot of laughs to the audience throughout the years. And what works is the quirkiness of the sketches and their ability to take things a step further out than what you expect and still keep it hilarious and enjoyable.

And the six chaps, being John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Graham Chapman each brought something unique and funny to the troupe, giving the sketches their own personal and memorable touch. And that is what I enjoyed throughout the years.

It was good fun to watch the guy revisit old and classic sketches and songs in this 2014 show, and I will say that they went out with a bang, because "Monty Python Live (Mostly)" was great entertainment.

My rating of "Monty Python Live (Mostly)" lands on a six out of ten stars.

it's very hard to go wrong with these guys. they are the funniest comedy group ever! just got back from the live broadcast at my local theater and my only complaint was the sound. the echo was just awful. couldn't catch the lyrics to any of the songs that included more than one voice. wish the whole thing had been subtitled. the good news is that most of the classics are there. I was laughing out loud and clapping along with the rest of the audience. it was especially funny when the cast members messed up or laughed. I can't wait to own the DVD. I'll watch it again and again. hope they can clean up the sound though. MONTY PYTHON IS THE BEST!

Imagine having won a competition 40 years ago, then imagine that until now people do not remember you or relate you with anything other than having won that bleeding competition! All your life's journey, all your successes and failures, your whole existence on earth has been reduced into one achievement that happened almost half a century ago...as if all what you've done since then didn't count! That is what a person like, say, Douglas Adams always felt when people remembered him only as the writer of his very first novel, The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy, even though he had written 8 other books. That is what people like Arthur C Clark smiled bitterly whenever people remembered him only as the Author of 2001 Space Odyssey.

And that is how the five great geniuses who participated in this show would feel when, after 45 years of amazing achievements and spectacular successes in transforming the humor culture of the whole world in all of its visual, musical and conceptual aspects, they are remembered only as "Pythons", the group they had once belonged to 40 years ago!

People Always kept pestering Douglas Adams to write "another hitchhiker's book", and forcing Arther C. Clark to finish yet another 2001 Space Odyssey sequel, as if writing sequels to those particular works was the only thing those great minds could do, as if the rest of their creations wasn't significant. Similarly, people(myself included) hoped 'The Pythons' would come up with 'new Python material' for this live performance. 'The Pythons', no doubt, were not very excited about doing so. Quite understandably in my opinion.

We don't consider pestering John Cleese to create another Fawlty Towers, or Fish Called Wanda, or even Fierce Creatures. We don't Ask Terry Gilliam to give us another Brazil. We don't believe it is a very good idea that Terry Jones would try his hand in a sequel for Starship Titanic, and only a few of us ever watched Michael Palin's travelogues, but whenever one of those names is mentioned our mind flashes 'Pythons'! Yes, that was great. We want more of that. And the more we want it, the more we prove to the Pythons that they were really nothing else than Pythons. That was their finest hour. And the past half century really didn't count. Do not expect them to be happy about this!!

It is then understandable that they would've never bothered to comply with our sadistic desire to lock them inside the Python's sarcophagus... if it wasn't for money. Especially at this old age when they would've enjoyed their retirement, or at least their attempt to make use of their remaining years in creating something good enough to be remembered for other than their one and only achievement that counts in the past half century!

And since the money they needed wasn't a huge amount, for John's Alimony is almost paid for, and the costly legal dispute that forced the group into reunion would require less than a million quid, then their collaboration can be as brief as possible. In fact they mentioned it several times that they turned down a huge number of offers to perform this show all over the world.

Wouldn't it have been wonderful if they had came up with new material? New sketches? New brilliant Pythonic insights on the social and political dilemmas of our age, and the absurdity of the human condition in general? Of course it would. It would've also been a great farewell from them to their audiences, and a great generator of huge sums of money. But, above all, it would've cemented them in our memory and in the deep bleeding annals of history as nothing but 'The Pythons'.

Think about it.

I really wanted to get tickets to this but they were hugely expensive and very difficult to get hold of also I couldn't attend the 'live' cinema screening of the last night as we were on holiday. For both of these misfortunes I can now in hindsight be very glad.

A re-union after such a long time is always risky and likely to disappoint, just ask many rock bands that tried to re-capture the old magic, and the Pythons pretty much fail in the expected ways. They're old tired-looking men performing material written by bright energetic young men and it shows. In many of the routines they appear to be simply going through the motions, there's no energy or edge to the performances. The sharp comic timing is generally absent and instead there's heavy reliance on the good will of the audience enjoying the familiar favourites.

Eric Idle and his team did put together a cleverly constructed show, with big musical and dance numbers in a Python style to give the Pythons themselves time to change costumes and, presumably, have a little lie down.

Very little of it made me laugh out loud and the bits that did were generally the big-screen inserts showing famous sketches from the TV-era Python, such as Philosopher's Football, and their series of spoofs on the Olympics, the hundred yard dash for people with no sense of direction etc.

It was great that they included Carol Cleveland, the unofficial seventh Python and the only regular female performer in the shows and films, and there are a couple of funny cameos from Professors Brian Cox and Stephen Hawking at the end of one of the few bits that really did still work, Eric Idle's Galaxy Song from the film "The Meaning of Life". The Argument Sketch, the Dead Parrot Sketch and The Cheese Shop Sketch all worked pretty well as did "Nudge Nudge" but aside from that very little of it would have attracted a paying audience if it wasn't part of an established and historic team.

The DVD itself was badly let down by the appalling picture quality; it was often like watching something on YouTube! It was grainy and fuzzy in almost all the close-ups and I wonder if there had in fact been no close-up shots filmed and the close-up was just a computer- enhanced zoom in on an existing wide shot with the usual loss of resolution that this entails? If so then someone from the film production team needed firing.

For die-hard Python fans only, and even then you'd be better off watching "Life Of Brian" or "Holy Grail" again.

Back in the early 1970s, the Monty Python troop made a wonderful film, "And Now For Something Completely Different", and it consisted of the guys remaking their best skits from their TV show for a movie audience. The production values were a bit better and their accents were deliberately softened and the overall effort is, in my opinion, their second best film (after "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"). Now a similar sort of thing has been created--but instead of shooting it in sets like you would for a typical film, it was presented in front of a live audience (like "Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl") and it is, apparently, the group's final performance.

As a HUGE fan of the show, I was actually very disappointed in this film even though I did enjoy it. Much of it is due to the old saying 'you can't go back'--and after many decades the performances seemed a bit flat. Additionally, and I think this is a bigger problem, the skits offer no improvements over the originals. In most cases, it's almost a word-for-word recreation and there is nothing new or energetic about the whole affair. At least with "And Now For Something Completely Different" the skits LOOKED a lot better--but here they didn't. And, oddly, many of the team's best skits were not included in this performance. Not terrible...but it just isn't what I'd recommend to anyone who isn't a die-hard fan.