"RUN AWAY!!!" Celebrating 50 Years of MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975)

I just attended Fathom Events' 50th anniversary screening of MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975), the film I have seen countless times since discovering it at age ten. I went With dear old friend Matt Snow, whom I met nearly a half century ago, and one of the many things our adolescent sensibilities bonded over was our love of all things Monty Python. Some things you never outgrow.

Me representing as Tim the Enchanter, and Matt, wielding the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.

If I had to guesstimate, it was an audience of perhaps thirty people, many of whom were under-16s who had been brought by parents.I wonder how they processed the film, and Python in general, because Python's bizarre style has been well-absorbed into the global language of comedy over the past 55 years, so does their flavor have the same kind of seismic impact on today's youth as it did on my generation? I kinda doubt it, and it saddens me to think that works such as this may now reside in the "you had to be there" category. Nonetheless, MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL remains my personal pick as the funniest film ever made. Definitely not for all tastes, but its utter absurdity has always resonated with me.

Representing with a female Sir Bedevere cosplayer, Note her bag: a duck. If you know the movie, you get it.

HAPPY 50th ANNIVERSARY, PINK FLAMINGOS (1972)

No lie, one of the movies that changed my life.

 

Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the general release of PINK FLAMINGOS, the third feature by legendary groundbraking writer/director John Waters, and I shared it at a screening at my friend Lexi's place. Including myself, there were eight attendees, three of whom had not seen the film. I was somewhat disappointed to see the reaction of the newbs, which was far more reserved than I would have thought. Too bad they did not see it before years of being able to watch any kind of filth imaginable fro the privacy of a laptop. Anyway, when I asked "Well?" at the end, Charlie, the hostess's little brother, simply said "Of all the films I have seen, this one of them."

Consuming a chocolate Ho-Ho, in honor of the film's legendary ending.

 

The classic ending.

SHOGUN ASSASSIN (1980) at the Alamo Drafthouse, Brooklyn

Saw the screening of SHOGUN ASSASSIN at the Alamo and, as I had been afraid might be the case, it was the same mangled veteran-of-grindhouses print that I saw over a decade ago during a Subway Cinema classic martial arts film festival. The print was scratched-up and random seconds were missing here and there, which haphazardly cut off parts of the dialogue and caused some of the important exposition to be lost. The hero's brief underwater battle with the female ninja was entirely missing and — most unforgivable of all — the legendary gout of blood that geysers from the slashed neck of the leader of the Masters of Death immediately after he delivers his poetic/hilarious dying speech about "how the sound of wailing winter winds" is heard when such a magnificent cut is administered? Completely missing due to it having been excised from the print during its long years of service in sleazy 24-hour theaters that once dominated areas like the Deuce.

When I saw the film at that Subway Cinema screening a decade back, the showrunners were aware of the print's horrendous quality, as it was allegedly the only extant 35mm print that could be found, so the show's host told the audience up front what they were in for. (The disappointed hew and cry of the packed-to-capacity audience when the aforementioned neck geyser was missing was one of the greatest displays of simultaneous audience sadness and ire that I have ever witnessed.) The showrunners for tonight's screening were apparently unaware of just how dilapidated this evening's print was, so I'm not going to hold their not informing the audience ahead of time against them.

The damaged print is introduced to an unsuspecting audience.

BOTTOM LINE: SHOGUN ASSASSIN is one of my all-time favorites and it's a hell of a lot of fun, but it's very much a visual piece that needs to be see in pristine condition in order to be properly experienced. Thus I suggest that you avoid 35mm screenings of it, should you see it listed, if there truly is only this one damaged print still available for projection. Criterion has issued it in a gorgeous edition on DVD and BluRay, so go with that instead. Or, better yet, just watch the unedited, full-length, subtitled Japanese originals that Criterion issued as a boxed set (which includes SHOGUN ASSASSIN while simultaneously rendering it superfluous).

All-Time Favorite Movies: A PATCH OF BLUE (1965)

 Home is where the heart is...NOT.

In an effort to take my mind off of my current medical woes, I'm going to start posting capsule looks at my favorite movies of all time, in no particular order. Hopefully, you will find some items that interest you enough to check them out. 

Today we start with A PATCH OF BLUE (1965), a sweet but jarring and tragic tale of the friendship between Sidney Poitier, in yet another of his "perfect negro" roles, and Elizabeth Hartman as the blind, isolated, and abused daughter of aging whore Shelley Winters. (Winters won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for this performance and deserved every ounce of it.) It's Hartman's journey from an abused adolescent to blossoming womanhood as her friend (Poitier) teaches her how to be come self-sufficient in the sighted world during daily visits to the local park, a world her horrible mother has intentionally kept her unprepared for. As the pair become close, the young woman develops deep romantic feelings for her friend and intends to act on them, but he kindly keeps her at bay due to her age and innocence. 

Life lessons in the park.

But as the narrative progresses, he and the audience learn just how unspeakably horrible the young woman's life was until she met him, a tale involving her witnessing her mother's work as a low-rent whore in their apartment, her being blinded by acid thrown at her father during a vicious spat between her parents, and getting raped by one of her mother's customers while her mother had stepped out for some reason, a scene made all the more terrifying because we experience it from the girl's blind and uncomprehending point of view. Seeing her friend as a way out of her hellish life with her mother, she tries to convince him to take her in as his willing lover, which she says is alright because she's "already been done over." She relates all of this in a matter-of-fact way that communicates that she has accepted such violence as just the way life is, so her relationship with her friend/desired lover is something she never considered as possible. (The appalled look on Poitier's face after her recounting of her sexual assault is like being hit in the face with a hammer.) 

The film's sole decent man holds in his horror and disgust as our blinded and abused heroine nonchalantly recounts being sexually assaulted by one of her mother's vile clients.

And things are further complicated when the evil prostitute mother gets wind of her daughter's friendship with a black man who intends to honorably save the girl and enroll her in a school for the blind, but mom thinks his plans are more lecherous, which does not sit well with her nigger-hatin' attitudes. And worst of all, the mother plans to retire from hooking and open her own brothel, pressing her innocent blind daughter into unwilling service as her first deployed whore. It's a gripping study of world-class family dysfunction and a touching tale of a damaged young girl blossoming to womanhood under the most adverse conditions possible. A hardcore tear-jearker if ever there was one, and hands down my favorite drama from the 1960's, HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION.

 Poster from the original theatrical release.