Holy Flying Circus (2011)

[Drunk Monk]

Came up on Hulu+ this week. How is it I had never heard of this before? It was a BBC4 film, a semi-fictional retelling of the controversy surrounding the release of Life of Brian. It's done in the python style with actors portraying the pythons to a T. Charles Edwards, who plays Palin, is so spot on with his impersonation that there were moments when I was thinking it really was Palin. And Darren Boyd's Cleese is hysterical, although really he's doing Basil Fawlty and admits to doing as such in a sketch-like scene interjected part way through the film. Great stuff. I was really entertained by this. It's a brilliant homage to python, picking up on that hilarious rhythm of their comic banter with plenty of callbacks to the show and easter-egg references to their separate careers and personalities that any diehard Python fan will get. It also has some great hallucination scenes - very Gilliam-esque (in fact, there's a truly disturbing retina-raping image in Gilliam's dream appearance that I will probably never clear from my memory). It's got tasty cheese references, which are rare treats for sure. And best of all, it has a sword fight. Srsly! The only thing missing for me was a bollywood dance number (coulda happened - Meaning of Life had plenty of those).

This is a MUST SEE flick for anyone that shares DM's tastes in entertainment (I confess, there aren't many, none that I can think of in fact, but surely DOOM shares some similar likes, especially Python).