Tag Archive: Monty Python
UbuWeb today turned me onto The Nothingists.
I had never heard of this Dadaist, NO! NO! , group from Russia .
This is not surprising when you learn that their nihilist manifesto was summed up by the slogans:
Write nothing!
Read nothing!
Say nothing!
Print nothing!
Their “Creative Bureau of Nothingists” sounds like it would have made a great Monty Python sketch and would be a good name for many political departments.
The Nothingists [Nichevoki] were short lived.
They formed in Moscow in 1919 and ceased all (in)activity in 1923.
Nothing more is known.
LAMBCHOP Live at Teatro Masini, Faenza – 21st June 2013
On the night Lambchop played Faenza, the town’s annual deranged chariot races (“La folle corsa delle bighe”) were taking place in streets nearby.
From footage of previous years’ derangement these look like something out of a Monty Python sketch in which home-made chariots, with occupants dressed in makeshift medieval robes, are pulled by two men to race one another around a short circuit.
I think Kurt Wagner could write a pretty decent song about such orchestrated madness but you could count on the fact that it would be no straight narrative of events. His is another kind of strangeness. Continue reading
Continuing my list of the fifty Greatest British Cult Movies, here is my selection from 20 -11:
20. KES Ken Loach (1969)
One the most remarkable screen performances by a child actor. David Bradley plays Billy Casper, a bright, scrawny 15-year-old kid who is frequently bullied at home and at school but finds an outlet for his frustrations by keeping a pet kestrel. Based on a novel by Barry Hines, it is a moving and brilliantly observed study of hope amid the drabness of working class life in Northern Britain.
19. SHAUN OF THE DEAD Edgar Wright (2004)
The definitive modern day zombie movie with a fine comedy duo of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. Good jokes about struggling to tell the real zombies from the ‘normal’ brain-dead citizens with plenty of surprisingly gory splatter effects. Continue reading
Watching Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain in 10 minute chunks on YouTube may not be the ideal way to view this cult movie but it doesn’t feel inappropriate. After all, the movie is not much concerned to maintain a narrative flow. Only in the last half hour does it finally get around to telling something that resembles a story. This revolves around the journey to the summit of The Holy Mountain on Lotus Island where nine wise mean live. These know the secret of immortatity and the mission is not to learn from them but simply to kill them and take their place. Even then there are plenty distractions and bizarre scenes.
If you watched the movie in a random sequence I don’t think it would be any more confusing – it may even help.
Along with ‘The Wicker Man’, ‘The Holy Mountain’ is one of the films regularly cited by the new ‘freaks’ of the avant-folk underground as an influence. Arthur Magazine’s new Uber-video channel include a profile of Jodorowsky and a kick-ass record label based in Portland, Oregon takes its name from the movie title.
The soundtrack, co-written by Don Cherry, is fairly whacky with jazzy/psych/drone interludes but it’s main appeal lies in the uncompromising celebration of altered states through mystical, transcendental experiences . Or, as one YouTube viewer put it more succinctly – “this is a fucking trippy movie“.
Jodorowsky is commonly regarded either as a madman or a genius and often as a combination of the two. (Although anyone who makes it a condition that all the women who appear in the movie sleep with the director cannot be said to be completely deranged ! ).
The movie’s cult status has ensured its longevity despite being obviously dated (it was made in 1973) with many unintentionally humerous scenes which look like raunchy Monty Python sketches. There are ‘artists’ who paint with their bare arses or the blind man who makes decisions based on a feel of his wife’s sex – wet for yes, dry for no.
You also see a mechanical vagina, a bottled testicle museum, a battle scene between toads and lizards,hot women dressed like extras on sci-fi movies, numerous Christ lookalikes. I could go on, but you get the point. Like the man said – trippy.
This spiritual hocus pocus, not to mention the gratuitous blood lettings and general debauchery, is a surreal period piece but has to be admired for the fact that it still looks subversive and cultish.
