The Muppet Movie 1979 A Movie A Day Day 38

There is only one thing this entry and yesterdays have in common. As with New York, New York the Muppet Movie has a truly terrific song that failed to win an Academy award. If anyone can whistle the tune from Norma Rae that won this year, I'll fall over on my butt. The Rainbow Connection inspired artists, film-makers and musicians around the globe, and the song was actually performed by the star in the movie. As with many things in the Universe, this phenomena cannot be explained. The song is perfect as is the film it comes from. This lighthearted concoction of music, comedy and stars is just what a family audience should want. I love Pixar Movies but there needs to be a new Muppet film now. These characters are too lovable to lay dormant for a dozen years on our movie screens.

In the summer of 1979, I floated in the pool, Dee worked her first job out of college at the Bank of America, and we spent our leisure time going to Hollywood to see movies. At the point the Muppet Movie had opened, we had already been downtown to see Alien a couple of times. Later we would be seeing The Life of Brian and Apocalypse Now. Thankfully, one summer night, probably a weekend evening, we enjoyed the bliss that is the first feature film from our hero Jim Henson and his pals. We saw this movie at the Cinerama Dome with my friend Don Hayes. The show was so packed that we had to sit in the third row and all of us got cricks in our necks from looking up at the giant screen just a few feet away from us. Don was my best friend in the Seventh and Eighth grades. We had moved to Alhambra and I was going to a new school. I think Don took pity on me, (I was a year younger than everyone else) but decided I was alright when I talked back to another kid who had been picking on me. (I did that talking with my steel lunchbox against the kids head). Don had gotten married to his high school sweetheart Cheryl the year before but it was not working out. I don't remember if they were separated when we went to the movie, but I do know that she did not go with us.

Kermit the frog was actually a television star at this point. He and his cohorts had been ruling the airwaves with a syndicated TV show that was chaotic and hysterical. If you parents out there have not shared the Muppet show with your kids, shame on you. All of the characters from the show are in the movie in one way or another. The film purports to tell the backstory of the Muppets rise to fame. It is really a road picture, with a chase thrown in to add some drive to the narrative. Along the way, Kermit picks up a best friend, a girlfriend, and a cast of goofballs that should delight anyone. They run into a couple of dozen Hollywood big-shots who show up for a scene or two or sometimes just a single line. Orson Wells gets more out of his one sentence than he did in the last three movies he directed. What a joy it was to watch an old hand like Bob Hope trade quips with Fozzy Bear, like they were an old vaudeville act. The film marks the final appearance of Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, a ventriloquist act that found fame of all places on the radio in the 1930s. My Dad had a antique spoon that had Charlie McCarthy's likeness on the end. It went with all the other radio premiums that we had to sell when he needed care in his last years.

Paul Williams wrote the wonderful songs in the film, along with Kenny Ascher. Rainbow Connection is the star among the songs but I love "The Magic Store", which finishes off the film with a piece of heartwarming legerdemain. "Moving Right Along" is a highway song that I know we must have burst into on our trip around the country back in 1999. This is the second movie on the list to feature a cameo by Steve Martin, but unlike Sgt Pepper, he doesn't get to sing, he only gets to be hilarious. There is nothing that would improve this movie. So along with Alien, the summer of 1979 had two perfect films.

Dolores and I have quoted lines from this movie to each other our entire marriage. "Myth,myth!" "Yeth". "I'm lost", "maybe you should try Hare Krishna". "No Problem". Next to Star Wars and Star Trek, the Muppets are our greatest cultural touchstones. The songs from this movie resonated in my head for years. I hadn't seen the whole film for at least a decade, but as it was playing tonight, it was easy to sing along with. We have loved all the motion pictures featuring the Muppets, even Muppets in Space, which was not a great effort and their last major film. There is supposed to be a new Muppet Movie at Christmas 2011, please let it show up. Re-watching the first of these classic puppet movies featuring characters that are more real to me than many live movie stars are, I must agree with Rolfe the Dog when he sings the refrain, "You can't live with em, you can't live without em, there's something irresistible-ish about em."

New York, New York 1977 A Movie A Day Day 37

The title tune for this movie became Frank Sinatra's signature song in the last couple decades of his life. Liza Minelli still performs it and It brings the house down. In the movie "Lost in America" the advertising firm is creaming their pants because they secured the rights to the song. Yet in 1977, when the song was the theme from this movie, it did not win an Academy Award for best song. Hell, it was not even nominated. How could that happen to a song that became and remains so popular. It's simple, Academy members must have seen the movie.

Martin Scorsese is probably America's greatest living director. His movies are widely praised by critics, fawned over by industry types and beloved by film fans. May all of those people be spared having to sit through this horrible mess of an idea, in search of a movie. I told Dolores as I was watching it, that it reminds me of the scene from Raging Bull where Jake LaMotta is arguing with his wife in the kitchen over how long the steak should be cooked. That was a good dramatic scene. Now take it and stretch it to almost three hours, add music and make the main character even more loathsomely hateful than LaMotta, and you have New York, New York. This is a bad marriage displayed for people to be entertained by. "Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf" at least had some tension and humor and good performances. This movie has the one song, they save it for the end, it is the only effectively presented musical sequence in the film, but the last 10 minutes cannot erase the memory of the turgid dramatics of the preceding 153 minutes. I took Dee to see this when we were dating in 1977. I think we saw it at a theater in Cerritos or the Norwalk area. I'm surprised that she married me after this.

There are two things about the movie that I liked, (other than the fact that it finally ended and I will never have to see it again). The art direction is really nice at evoking the post war period as we remember it from movies. The night clubs are spectacular and the lighting is atmospheric. Some of the outdoor sets are deliberately designed to look fake in a Hollywood back-lot fashion. The colors pop out at you and the wall decorations make you wish that you had an artist like that available to do murals in your house. The other thing that works are the costumes, they are lush and quite entrancing. Liza has some terrific suits she wears and the hats and gloves are really classy ways of emphasizing a different time. DeNiro starts off in a Hawaiian print shirt that is tacky as hell but shows how he is trying to throw off the drab Army clothes he has been burdened with. Later he has some suits that are loud but stylish, they are the flamboyant kind of clothes an entertainer might very well have worn in those days. OK, that's all I liked.

There are scenes that go on for painful minute after painful minute. The first half hour of the movie is practically a conversation where DeNiro's character tries to pick up the girl. He is so obnoxious that I can't figure out why she doesn't have the manager of the club throw him out. (The reason is that if she had any sense at all there would be no movie and we could cut straight to the music video at the end. The DeNiro character gets progressively more annoying, alienating every one else in the story. The final shot of the film must be intended to be ironic, she decides not to meet him after all outside of a party where they briefly re-connect after he has abandoned her and their newborn son for 7 years. If only she had given him a fake phone number at the beginning we could have been spared this waste of time.

I read that Scorsese was despondent over the failure of this film. He had intended it to be experimental and to take him out of the grim urban dramas he had been making up till that point. This movie was grimmer than Taxi Driver, how was it going to get him out of his rut? Apparently, the lack of success lead him into a period of drug use, but from what I saw here, he was already under the influence of something. If you ever want to break someone of the movie watching habit, I suggest a double feature of Nashville and New York, New York. They may never want to see another film and you will understand what killed musicals for twenty years.

Animal House 1978 A Movie A Day Day 36

This last week of films from the seventies has got to make you movie goers of today jealous. Jaws, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and now Animal House. This was the college comedy of the seventies. It defined what a campus comedy would be for the next 30 years, it made a movie star out of John Belushi and established John Landis as the go to director for comedy themed material for the following decade. The poster of Belushi as Blutto with a beer, hung on dorm room walls, office doors and anywhere else people could fit it. The movie was set sixteen years earlier then when it came out, but college students have emulated the attitude ever since. Amanda believes that the Trojan Marching Band is trying to exist as a clone of Delta house. From all the drinking and stupid nicknames I saw when she was in the band, I don't think she was far off the mark.

This was the summer of 1978, the last summer before my final year as an undergraduate. The debate team had been doing research all summer long, the Western Forensic Institute was convening for the last time, and we were getting ready for what we expected to be a banner year. My debate partner Rick Rollino and I, felt like the chance to be the top USC team was in our grasp. Maybe this was a distorted view, because there were still several great debaters coming back for that year, but the legends that had dominated our time there had moved on. We had swagger in our attitude. It did not work out as well as we had hoped based on the previous year, but we still were quite successful and I am proud of what we accomplished. Rick and I had run for Co-Captains of the Debate squad and we were fortunately beaten by our good friend Leo Mohr. Leo was going to be debating with Bill Gross at that point but would soon move into a partnership with Kim Maerowitz. One summer night, as we were winding down a day at S.C. doing practice debates, the whole squad seemed to decide to go see this movie together. For some reason we ended up in Pasadena at the same theater I mentioned in my JAWS post a couple of days ago. Can you imagine anything more perfect than a group of good friends, seeing this movie on a summer night just a few days before the fall term started? We had a blast. The theater was full, I was a senior and we had freshmen and sophomores that looked up to us. And we were leading them into this debauchery. What Fun.

Animal House is critic proof because the audience for it is always going to see themselves in the story. There are plenty of jokes, but it is all in aid of a simple nostalgia story. Unlike some of the comedies that would come later, like Airplane, this was not a joke movie but a comedy. The humor grows out of the situation not from a sight gag or a throwaway pun. Even the wild out of control scenes stem from the characters or the story. Belushi's trip through the cafeteria has plenty of sight gags but they come from the devil-may-care attitude and slovenly character that Belushi created. His Blutto was a hero to college students, not because he was a slob, but because he was one of us. He takes advantage of too much beer, naive freshmen, and a general lack of supervision. There are only two sight gags in the movie that take us out of the notion that we are watching real events. One is Kevin Bacon flattened by the crowd at the parade (this is a joke that foreshadows Airplane! and The Naked Gun), the other involves Belushi. When he is on the ladder, peeking in the Sorority house, he bounces the ladder down to another window. It is just as unrealistic as the other gag but it works because we can imagine Blutto trying to do this even if it is not physically possible.

The scroll at the end of the movie, showing what became of the characters, was probably a parody of the more sober ending of American Graffiti. The jokes here were sly and topical. For several years after, Universal Studios also gave a discount to people who actually asked for Babs. This movie was re-released a couple of times in the next year or two, but that may have been the last set of re-releases for a movie except for special event type pictures. Video tape was coming, and people would enjoy reliving their movie experiences at home rather than at the theater. It was the end of an era because of technological innovation. The next summer would have some very different moods around it. I loved the summer of 1979 despite all the tough things that happened in our lives that year. The closing of summer 1978 marked the end of my childhood. The memory of going to this movie is a lot like a more heartwarming cross between the final character scrolls of Animal House and American Graffiti.

From an historical point of view the world was changing a great deal when Animal House was the king of comedy, but if you want to find the specific point that the 1970s came to a close, it won't be when the calender slipped into the eighties, it was not the election of Ronald Reagan or the death of disco. The 1970s died on a day in March 1981, at a hotel in Hollywood, where the shooting star that was Blutto in Animal House, went to that great Toga Party in the sky.

Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia 1974 A Movie A Day Day 35

This is one of the strangest movies I ever saw and that includes "Lost Highway" and "The Teacher". This was a contemporary western, featuring one of our finest character actors, in a role that allows him to show us his range and abilities. It comes together though like a nightmare, with bits and pieces of information floating in front of us but never quite coalescing into something fathomable. Sam Peckinpaugh was noted as a Director of violent masculine themed movies, and here he hits all the notes but they are sour. I think we are supposed to have a bad taste in our mouths after this, but it really needs to be a little more coherent. This movie has a reputation among film aficionados, and it is probably deserved, but I can't really recommend it to anyone except Peckinpaugh completists.

For years Dolores has given me a hard time about liking this movie. It is completely understandable why she would object. The main character is a disgusting slob, that sells himself out for money and doesn't really know what is going on. His girlfriend/fiance is a hooker, that really seems to love him and is maybe the one empathetic character in the film, and of course every bad thing you can imagine befalls her. Our third lead is a disembodied Lothario, responsible for impregnating a young girl, running away from her, whoring it up for three days and then dying off screen, all before he makes his first appearance as a head. Our main character Bennie, then spends days traveling around and carrying on a conversation with the dead guys noggin. Oh yeah, a whole lot of people die, some of whom deserve it and many who do not. All of this takes place in parts of Mexico that are not really on the tourist maps and that we would pay money to avoid. So the real question is, given all of that, why do I like the movie?

The number one reason I have already mentioned. Warren Oats was a guy that never became a big star, but he could make a movie better. He acts in this film, mostly with his mouth, since his eyes are covered by an ugly pair of sunglasses for 90% of the story. The character arc does allow him to grow and change as much as a man in his position could. He is not really a good guy, but by the end of the movie he is a righteous one. Compared to a slick revenge picture from today, a movie like "Taken", he seems way out of his depth. "Bennie" is not slick, he is sloppy and lucky and unlucky. He is more of the real world and therefore to a degree sympathetic despite his flaws. Oates gets some scenes of rage, self pity, romance, regret and stupidity. They do not always fit together, and there are long passages that seem like indulgences on the part of the director. Sometimes those slow moving sequences contain a gem of a moment, like the picnic under the tree, or the monologue with Alfredo in the shower. Other times they just seem slow, like Peckinpaugh is repeating the slow-motion part of the action scene in the dramatic scenes.

A second reason I like the film is the sleazy aura surrounding the characters. Not the locations, they are disgusting and not really something that hold our attention. I'm talking about the casualness with which Bennie falls in with Contract killers, who turn out to be sub-contractors for another group of contract killers. This makes "Bennie" the pilot fish of the food chain. Excited about the scraps he is going to get, and not realizing how much bigger the reward really is. Gig Young an Academy Award winner, and Robert Webber an actor we talked about before in this blog, may be gay, may be simply slumming it but they ooze silky creepiness. Their characters are in one big shootout that is set up very well and executed the way it should be. A later shootout with the higher ups has some of the same greasy slimy businesslike manner of doing things. The final shootout is an anti-climax except for the actions of the girl who bore Alfredo Garcia's bastard child.

Finally, I like the movie on general principles. It is a revenge story, which I always find satisfying. There is slow motion violence, which I first saw in The Wild Bunch and Bonnie and Clyde, and it seems so much more real and awful when it happens that way. Also, let's face it, this may be the Coolest title of a mainstream movie ever released in the English language cinema. You know what is coming at you from those seven gruesome little words.

Silent Movie 1976 A Movie A Day Day 34

I saw every Mel Brook's movie that ever came out. After Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks was the hottest movie maker in Hollywood and his movies are usually cited by comedians around the world as an inspiration. I think Mel is hit or miss. Hit or miss not from movie to movie but from scene to scene. In some movies there is a huge amount of consistency but in others there is not That doesn't mean they are not funny but it does mean that they do not always hold together that well and they may have some flat spots. Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles are both solid every single bit. High Anxiety is about 75 percent. Space balls is maybe 25 percent. To me, Silent Movie falls right in the middle.

This is a funny concept, film makers with a script for a Silent Movie to be made in contemporary Hollywood. Then you do the movie in a style similar to the old silent classic comedies. You populate it with popular stars of today and then let them loose on the screen. The big problem is that none of the movie is about the Silent Movie and how it comes out. It is all about the process of trying to get big stars in the picture, but we never see any of the script as the director finally put it together. That means that at best this film is going to be a series of vignettes, with thin plot to hold them together. So here is how I felt about most of those scenes.

The opening, with the three film makers picking up a pregnant woman and having the car tip up in the air falls flat. It looks like a one joke bit stretched over a couple of minutes, finished off with a payoff that has nothing to do with what came before. I have not seen a lot of silent comedies, but the ones I have seen hold together better than this. Here they are, fifty years after the introduction of sound and the movie has less narrative and pacing than a movie from 1920. The guys mug and there is one good joke about the dialogue not matching the caption cards. Then it is on to the set up of the plot. I like Sid Caesar, but there was no punch to any of the jokes in his scenes. He makes some funny faces that have very little context to the events on the screen and then we move on. The best bit here had to do with contagious crossed fingers, but why it is unique to a silent movie is beyond me. There are also two scenes in the film that clearly would not play in these politically correct times. The punchline involves three old ladies yelling the word "Fags".

On the other hand, the Burt Reynold's segment actually comes out pretty well. Burt make some fun of himself, there is an hysterical shower scene and then a classic old school comedy bit that falls a little flat involving a steam roller. I think this section works because Burt Reynold's knew how far to go in mugging for the camera. A little wink and a smile in the mirror is enough. James Caan on the other hand, overplays and then underplays the comedy bits he is in. Liza Minelli, is mostly lost in a bit that simply has her observing the antics of the three stars in Knight's Armour. Maybe this would have worked better with the clanking of the armor added in. As it was, it was maniacal without being funny. Paul Newman plays all of his part, sitting down in a motorized wheelchair, and it works really well, but not because it is Newman, but because they choreographed some good jokes in the chase. The payoff on the other hand works exactly because it is Paul Newman. Mel Brook's wife Anne Bancroft is in the film, playing herself, the best face joke is hers as she does a spot on Marty Feldman impression. There are also a couple of good visual jokes featuring the board of executives responding to a sexy image of Bernadette Peters.

I think the main problem with the film is timing. Brooks has a good ear for a funny joke and a good eye for a sight gag, but they do not flow smoothly or quickly. A keystone cops comedy should be paced like the race scene with Paul Newman, but the Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy, had dialogue to help set up the jokes and that is missing here. For a movie that is supposed to be light and bouncy, it feels slow and methodical. Those few scenes that are planned, take a long time to play out, the frenzied stuff just seems a bit random and goes on too long. I saw this movie with Dan Hasegawa, when it first came out and we liked it well enough then. I have not watched it in the thirty four years since it's release until today. I've seen "Life Stinks" more times then this, and to be honest, I now know why.

Jaws 1975 A Movie A Day Day 33

This is the granddaddy of all summer movies, which seems strange since I am including five years worth of summer movies on this blog before this ever came out. How can a movie that is younger than all the summers before it be considered the granddaddy of summer movies? The answer is simple. JAWS re-framed the way we viewed movies, all movies, but especially summer movies. JAWS is the standard that we will use to make comparisons of our film experiences and impressions. It is the prism through which we see our own history. Those of us who lived through the phenomena that was and is JAWS, can never look back without thinking how it changed us. Those who came after, can never live in a world where JAWS did not influence the way movies are made and marketed. Any one who lived before JAWS, knows how it changed the movie world, and looking back on summer movies will be a nostalgia of a different order because JAWS is in your world now.

Some might think that this is hyperbole but the number of films, filmmakers, academics, marketers, and film-goers, who have been influenced by this movie is undeniable. I have actually read on line comments that dismiss JAWS and suggest it is somehow just a footnote in film making history. If editing is a footnote, if the addition of sound and color to films are footnotes, if the study of film as an artistic medium is a footnote, then maybe they are right. (BUT THEY ARE NOT!!!) The combination of story, director, script, acting and especially marketing created the modern world of film. There may be some negative consequences (like Shrek 4 opening on 4000 screens), but the variety of stories and film-making that have resulted from JAWS is just undeniable. This is the gold standard.
The Shark is Still Working

I saw JAWS on opening day in the Summer of 1975, with my friend Dan Hasegawa. We went without Art that day because he was taking a girl to a different movie. Dan and I went to the Hasting's Ranch Theaters, three moderately sized screens located just north of the big Pacific Theater Hasting's Theater. We knew next to nothing about the film except what was shown in the trailer. The trailer gives you a good impression of the action and adventure that is coming your way, but I think it undersells the horror aspect and that is what we were most surprised about. From the beginning cello strokes and underwater POV shot, we are creep-ed out. It still did not prepare us for the intense opening sequence that everybody held their breath through. Later in the movie, I literally saw 500 people sink into their seats in dread and then jump out of the seat,simultaneously. I am not exaggerating, the audience levitated at least a foot out of their seats when Ben Gardner appears. There have been gotcha moments in films for years; Alan Arkin's dying leap for a blind Audrey Hepburn or Carrie grabbing poor Amy Irvings arm, are those kinds of jumps. This made them all look quaint by comparison. I had seen the Exorcist a couple of years earlier, after it had been talked about and described to me for months. It was still frightening and made me jump, but that was despite what I knew was coming. Here, we did not know what was going to happen, and after that first scene it seemed like anything was possible. Amanda has seen this movie maybe more than other movie in her life and she still covers her eyes for a few scenes.

The movie is so much more than a horror film however. This is a struggle of a family man to cope with the inadequacies that plague him, it is the story of a place that defines itself as a paradise, suddenly being stripped of it's self concept. Most of all, it is the story of a quest by an Ahab like character for vengeance against the monsters that have defined him for the thirty years since his own encounter with the Great White Whale. Quint is the greatest movie character ever prior to 1980. He is memorable for his tics,and dialogue and the performance of a great actor who's work in this movie was not properly recognized by any critics groups of the time. If you were to ask people, what great supporting actor role performance they remember from any time in the 1970's Robert Shaw in JAWS will be mentioned. I'll bet that none of the five other actors nominated for Academy Awards that year would make the top fifty mentions on that standard. The monologue that Quint delivers on the Orca, about the U.S.S. Indianapolis is without a doubt one of the greatest scenes in movie history. It stands beside Micheal's kiss in Godfather Part 2, Kane's rage in Citizen Kane, and even the Airport scene in Casablanca. Robert Shaw re-wrote the dialog for himself, and his delivery, starting off with a self knowing smirk, transforming to a terrified memory and finishing off with a self-deluding smile and bit of panache is something I would imagine every actor now looks at with awe. I am not an expert on performance, but this whole scene seemed real, every bit of it, and it was created by the film makers.

There are a hundred things about this movie that people should look for or notice when they watch it. Sometimes it is a bit of comic dialog delivered by a character that has a single line; it might be the framing of a shot that makes key information jump out without writing a big sign to signify it; maybe you should be watching the clever way that the shark is hinted at, without being shown or the wondrous shooting stars in the night time scenes on the Orca. I just watched this movie for what is probably the tenth time in the last year (including two big screen theater screenings) and I found something new about the main character. He is new at wearing glasses. It is hinted at, spoken of but never obvious, and I just got it today. Of course my kids will say I am not all the observant to begin with, just ask them about the tires in the trees if you want their insight. What kind of movie is it when you can watch it dozens of times, still be sucked in and find something new every time you watch it? I'll tell you what kind of movie it is, PERFECT!

Monty Python and the Holy Grail 1975 A Movie A Day Day 32

OK, I admit it, I'm an intellectual midget and I like giggling, so this movie is for me. This has always been, from the moment I first saw it, the funniest movie I ever saw. I have laughed at this movie for thirty-five years. Every time it comes on, all I have to do is see a small section of a single scene and I start cracking up. The silliness of the production, the clever language and the stupid sight gags are chuckle inducing, and if you disagree, your mother was a hamster and your father smells of elderberry.

Speaking of your father, as strange as it may sound, I saw this with my father. I have written before that my Dad would sometimes give me a hard time about movie going, but some of the best memories I have of him are those times we went to a show together. A family outing was special, but going to the movies, just my Dad and I was usually a big treat. My Dad did not fish, hike, play golf, watch baseball, or any other activities that fathers and sons have enjoyed over the years. We sometimes watched football together. Both of us rooted for the Rams and the Trojans. Sundays, in Southern California meant checking out the football game on TV. Often there was no game because of the blackout rules of the day. When that happened we would watch an old Sherlock Holmes movie or some classic Warner Brothers film that was on the Sunday Matinee. My Dad was not much of a TV guy though, and if I could find something to talk him into, we would go to the movies together.

We saw this movie at the Century Theater on Las Tunas, in San Gabriel, on a rainy overcast day. This must have been a weird summer, because in So Cal you don't get a lot of those kinds of days in the summer. I had heard about the movie from someone, but I don't remember who suggested it. We could barely get PBS on the TV so my knowledge of Monty Python was next to nothing. The only UHF channels I remember seeing as a kid, were Mexican stations that carried the bullfights. My Dad seemed to really enjoy stories about bullfighting, I think he must have read Death in the Afternoon. Anyway, I somehow got him to go with me to see Holy Grail. The poster for the movie at the theater looked really cheap. I remember it was basically a line drawing and the title, but my Dad did laugh at the tagline comparing the movie to Ben Hur. It was a double feature and we first sat through a George Segal comedy called "Where's Poppa?". We both laughed at some of the broader bits of that forgotten gem and hoped we would enjoy the feature that brought us there in the first place.

Then the movie started, and the opening titles begin to give credits to moose, their handlers, make up artists etc. The music was pompous and somber and the juxtaposition of music and silly title credits began my father's laughter. Now I had heard him laugh before of course, but not like this. There were deep guttural chortles and higher pitched guffaws that I never remember hearing from him before. When King Arthur and Patsy come over the hill, feigning horseback riding using coconuts, well the phrase "gut buster" was created for that. I was laughing really hard, but I was still worried because my Dad could hardly catch his breath he was laughing so much. We had a tough year in 1975, my older brother Chris had died in April and none of us was anywhere near over it. My Mom practically became a recluse and the only thing that finally got her out and about was having to drive me to USC in the fall for school. Monty Python and the Holy Grail, was the start of my Dad's recovery. Maybe he just needed something to push himself out of the funk. I would never have guessed he would like this movie, with it's strange British humor and funny looking men playing women. Something in it set him going and I was grateful for that and happy that we were sharing something between just the two of us.

"Holy Grail" is revered by geeks everywhere. Kids were doing the Knight's who say Nee at lunch time for their friends. The insults hurled by the French soldiers are classic lines that will be cited as if they were Shakespeare, by people a century from now. Two years ago we spent an evening in Vegas at Spamalot, the Tony Award winning Best Musical that is based on, or ripped off from Holy Grail. Entertainment is a resource that is scarce and to be valued, you deny yourself that resource if you don't see the musical play. And if you have never seen and do not intend to see Monty Python and the Holy Grail, then I fart in your general direction.