Word: gilliams
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...child] will die, and I will leave you in this room to rot. Let the game begin." It's Jigsaw's favorite, and only, game: confining his victim in some medieval-looking device made of old found objects (the movie takes its anachronistic notion of production design from Terry Gilliam's Brazil), then telling the prisoner that in a few minutes the device will be activated, resulting in death or its jaw-breaking equivalent, unless the victim can find a key hidden in, say, the stomach of a wounded man in the same room...
...screening was held in a small theater off the rue d'Antibes, because this most film-savvy film - in part a homage to The Seventh Seal ("Ingmar Bergman's going to be jealous of this one," co-director Gilliam promised during the filming) - had not been deemed worthy of inclusion in the Festival proper. Such is the tardiness of official culture in understanding radical popular art. (The same thing happened this year with Borat. Sacha Baron Cohen, mocking the Festival's fabled history of topless starlets, paraded down the Croisette in a chartreuse G-string, but the film...
...least one of the Beatles saw the connection. "George Harrison was always convinced that Python was the spirit of the Beatles kept alive," Gilliam notes in The Pythons, "because we started the year they broke up. George was convinced there was this transference of spiritual essence." (Another fan, apparently, was Elvis, who is said to have watched MP&HG at least five times.) Harrison's company, Handmade Films, produced Life of Brian and Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl, then subsidized many of the projects starring or written by members of the splintered troupe: Gilliam's Time Bandits, Palin...
...Cleese is the elder statesman of the group, Gilliam the member who carved the most distinctive post-Python career, and Chapman the figure of poignancy - the homosexual alcoholic who was dead at 48. His demise touched all the survivors, but it didn't stanch their biting wit. In fact, now that he's dead, they make fun of Graham a lot. On the BBC2 show 30 Years of Monty Python, Cleese intones: "And I'd just like to say for the whole gang, except for the dead one of course, how pleased we are..." And in a 1998 reunion...
...book. "But of course at this age it's good to be four years younger than John." At other times, Python writing sessions sometimes deteriorated into skirmishes between the C's (Cambridge alums Cleese, Chapman and Idle) and the O's (Oxonians Jones and Palin and Occidental College graduate Gilliam). It wasn't so much a clash of school ties as a debate of which was the more important element in their comedy: the verbal or the visual. It was also, Gilliam would have you believe, a tussle between the queen bees in the first group and the worker bees...