Movie Suggestion: Monty Python and the Holy Grail

            Okay! I’ve caught up on watching this movie: Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I’ve been told many times that I’ve been missing out because I didn’t watch this “classic”. Even in the chemistry department, Professor Northrup made a reference to it in one of his questions, and I didn’t get it at the time. Now I get it. Now, I get why it’s awesome.

            There are many trailers on Youtube.com for this film. This link is for the OFFICIAL trailer for the movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FhL2-KatRE:

This link is for the MODERN version of this movie’s trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKNDml12Big:

Yes, the official trailer accurately shows how the film was made on a low budget, BUT it's not the props that make this movie. It’s the acting. The modern trailer, on the other hand, is misleading. It makes a first-time viewer believe that this movie is a serious, action film: it’s not. (The modern trailer was probably made by a fan who loves the movie.)

First off it’s a comedy film about King Arthur and his fellow knights trying to find the Holy Grail. The Holy Grail is the MacGuffin (the object that organizes/motivates the plot). This film is full of inversions, and it pokes fun of customs and ideas of particular social groups. To top it off, the ending was unpredictable….

***** STOP! DO NOT READ PAST THIS UNLESS YOU WANT THE MOVIE SPOILED FOR YOU. If that doesn’t bother you, proceed.*****

            One of Henri Bergson’s quotes is, “Comic effects are incapable of translation from one language to another, because they refer to the customs and ideas of a particular social group.” In this film, there’s this group called the Knights Who Say Ni. They actually keep sputtering the word “ni” a lot in the film. It is part of this group’s daily language. The word “ni” is foreign to me, and the onomatopoeia from saying it makes me laugh. (I sometimes laugh at funny sounding words… foreign or not.)

            Bergson also said, “The rigidity is the comic, and laughter is its corrective.” For unexpected situations, we may laugh because we had expected something else. Here’s an example. In this film, the knights each go off on their own quest. In Sir Lancelot’s adventure, he finds a letter from someone who is trying to escape a marriage. He thinks it’s a damsel in distress. He goes to save the person, who turns out to be a prince who acts feminine. I laughed because it was supposed to be a princess. Another example would be in the scene with the wooden rabbit. The knights were supposed to hide in the wooden rabbit to enter their enemy’s castle, like the Trojan horse story. However, the knights forget to hide inside. They realize this as the enemy pull’s in their hollow wooden rabbit to the castle.

            Finally, we get to… THE ENDING. I won’t spoil exactly what happens, but it’s similar to the ending in The Beaver Coat in that it was definitely unexpected. The only difference would be that at least the film shows why the storyline ended abruptly. The Beaver Coat and this film had funny scenes but the main conflict was never resolved at the end. Mrs. Wolff wasn’t revealed to the other characters as the criminal mastermind, and King Arthur never got his hands on the Holy Grail. If we watch and analyze this film in class, maybe we can go back to the question of why some storylines like The Beaver Coat and Monty Python and the Holy Grail end abruptly with no resolution.