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.

July Fourth Preview

A little set up for the July 4th Blog


And an Addendum from the Expert

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Movie 1978 A Movie A Day Day 31

It appears that this movie is almost universally reviled, but the only I reason can see for that is that the Beatles music was somehow bastardized for the film. Nothing could be further from the truth, the music was very carefully performed and arranged for the talent that was available in the movie. Maybe there are participants that hang their head in shame over this, but they should not. This is a pop confection for a summer audience with a light sheen of camp and a heavy dose of 1970s sensibilities. It will not be everybody's cup of tea, but anyone who claims that this is the worst movie of all time, or even that it is especially bad, is simply taking a position. As I watched it again this morning, I was charmed by the vocal performances of the actresses that I never heard from again, and the star power of the Bee Gees.

Peter Frampton is the nominal lead, but it really is an ensemble piece. Frampton is fine but not particularly special. His vocals have some of the phrasing that were found in the big successes he had in the seventies, but he has very little on screen charm. He is getting by on his teenybopper good looks and a big smile. Other than that, he is pretty wooden. The one thing he should be embarrassed about is the first costume he appears in. He is wearing a pink checkered shirt with a brilliant white pair of overalls. I am sorry if this sounds politically incorrect, but he looks like a gay scarecrow in a Broadway revival of the Wiz. In fact this movie has much in common with the movie version of the Wiz, both are star vehicles for singers, who are not necessarily actors, both feature a strong 70's sense of style in palate of color and design, and both are less successful then was expected. The difference is the songs in Sgt. Pepper are by the Beatles and they were covered well, so the music is memorable. The Wiz has "Ease on Down the Road" which only has Michael Jackson going for it. There is one concert scene in Sgt. Pepper, where they recreate the look of Frampton's monster selling live album. Complete with pink back lighting and head movement, it is an attempt to remind the young girls of the time why they came to see the movie.

The story is more coherent than Mama Mia, which has become a big success despite having a ridiculous premise and even less reason for the songs to be in the order they appear. Sgt Pepper was based on a stage production that I never heard of or saw, but the story and songs fit it better than many Broadway shows I've heard about or seen. The word "cheesy" comes to mind for a lot of reasons, the film when it is shot outside, never escapes the back-lot feel of a TV movie. The costumes are cheesy simply because the fashions of 1977/78 were in fact cheesy. This movie is an accurate time capsule of the way stylish people dressed then. The neon colors from the interiors and night scenes are gaudy,just like the Sunset Strip was in 1978. I have a picture of the strip that I took in the summer this movie came out, with a giant billboard promoting the Kiss Solo albums, and those album covers featured the same sort of glowing neon back-lighting that you get in many sections of this film. Sure the movie comes across as a commercial endeavor to sell music, and cash in on the heat of the artists in the movie. I don't quite know why that makes it a bad film, simply because it is a good commercial.

If anyone wants to dump on the musical performances, I will point to three songs that were pop hits from the movie and show the quality of the work. Aerosmith does a sleazy version of Come Together, that used Steven Tyler's voice very effectively. I will admit that as actors the band did not do much, but Tyler, a beanpole of a singer is supposed to have a death struggle with Frampton, who is equally slight. It wasn't really supposed to be convincing. Earth, Wind and Fire are spared any acting scenes, they simply do a musical number at a benefit. Got to Get You Into My Life, is a funky seventies version of the Beatles tune, that really is adapted well to the talents of the group. The Bee Gees harmonies on all the songs they appear on are spot on. Each gets a chance to be featured on a song or two; but the standout is Robin Gibb's smoking version of "Oh Darling". There is minimal musical accompaniment during the whole recorded version, but in the film, he ends up singing nearly half the song a cappella. If you don't like this, you don't like music.

Dolores and I saw this opening day in July 1978, at the United Artist Theater in Westwood. We were expecting big crowds for the first show at noon, so we got there early and were the first in line. A line that ended up being about 20 people long. The theater was about half full by the time the show ran, and when we walked out and saw an even smaller line for the next show, it dawned on us that this was not going to be the next Star Wars cultural phenomena. We did have a couple copies of the soundtrack, and it was a pretty big success also, but they overprinted and it was in cutout bins for the next four years whenever we went into a record store. Dee and I were huge Bee Gees fans and enjoyed the movie a lot. This movie is a good time capsule for the late 70's, you get shots of the L.A. area on Sunset that most of us had spent time hanging around, you get the sounds and colors of the era. You also get to see the fashion of the times, but I can assure you I never owned a pair of overalls in my life.

Gator 1976 A Movie A Day Day 30

I have to admit I missed a day here. The Twilight midnight screening took so much out of me that I was a shell of my usual self yesterday. When I got home from school, which I went to after only 3 hours sleep, we had Amanda's friends over for a little birthday celebration. I ended up putting the movie in around 6:30 and waking up around 9:00. Yep, I fell asleep. At that point I did not have the energy to go back and watch the two-thirds of the movie that I had missed. There would also have been no way for me to blog on the film, either, I would have passed out a second time.

Now that the apology is out of the way, let's get to the movie. I read that the Character "Gator" is based on the same character from "White Lightning" three years earlier. I have that movie on my list also, but I have not yet obtained it so I'm going to go out of sequence. I am telling you it doesn't matter that we are starting with the second movie, because as far as I could tell, there were no story elements carried over from the first movie except the main character. This movie easily stands alone as a comedy/action film. It is the first feature that the star, Burt Reynolds, directed. You can tell that it is a first effort in a number of ways. The pacing is not very crisp, there are some long passages where pretty much nothing happens. Occasionally there is a pretty shot that the director lingers over because he is so satisfied with the image, he wants you to notice it, the shot that stood out for me was a tri-fold mirror image from a music box that featured a young girls face, the dancing musical ballerina, and the stars face, all in one frame. It looks great but it draws attention to itself. Also, the director let the star indulge in a lot of aside comments and laugh shots that go on too long. Some of it is funny but most of the time it hurts the narrative.

The movie is supposed to be about action and character. There are some good character performances in the movie. Jack Weston, a rubber faced actor with a soft voice plays a Department of Justice investigator that traps our hero into working for the law against an old friend from his moonshining days. You'll recognize Weston from a ton of films. I always liked him as the agent in Ishtar but you will have seen him elsewhere. In the opening part of the movie, he is playing the part as a bumbling fish out of water type, and the comedy boat chase in the first fifteen minutes will make you think that Dom Deluise must simply not have been available. As the movie progresses, it is clear that they needed a dramatic actor for some scence as well as the comedy. Weston can do that, I don't think it would have worked with Reynold's usual comic foil. Jerry Reed on the other hand is in this movie, as he was for a half dozen other Reynold's films of the time. He does the title tune, after all he was primarily a country singer, but I thought he did very well playing a nasty bad guy. He's a good ole boy in a lot of scenes but then, he turns brutal and carries it off pretty well.

Other than some awkward film-making my biggest issue with the movie is the tone. The opening is like a Smokey and the Bandit Comedy. It looks like Gator and the fed will have a Mutt and Jeff type comic banter for the duration. Somewhere along the line the though, the story turns serious, and although there is quite a bit of humor, it doesn't always play well next to the grittier stuff. For example, Alice Ghostly appears as an eccentric local who can help out the investigation. There is a section in which her love of her cats is played for laughs, but later in the film that idea becomes tragic and the fun good times get lost. The same sort of thing happens with the local Mayor and the corrupt police. It is all fun and games, and then there are fifteen year old girls strung out on drugs and used as prostitutes, with the officials turning a blind eye. The movie can't decide if it wants to be a slap-stick like comedy or a gritty crime thriller. Other movies have walked that line successfully (Beverly Hills Cop) but manage to do so while making the comedy stand separate from the crimes that are going on, here it does not feel that way. A running joke about a tall henchman having to sit in the drivers seat of the car while his head pops out of the sunroof is amusing, until that character turns out to be a sick killer.

I spotted Burton Gillian again in this movie, as Smiley, the tall guys buddy. Mike Douglas of all people makes a cameo in the opening as the Governor that hopes cleaning up the crime ridden county will clear his way to a Presidential Nomination. Those of you who don't know Mike Douglas, he was one of those avuncular talkshow hosts, whose syndicated programs filled afternoon TV time on local network affiliates in the 60s and 70s. I think it was his show where Cher and Gene Simmons (in costume) were shown ordering tacos at a Jack in the Box. Model Laureen Hutton, is the female co-star here and it was funny watching her make light of her gap-toothed smile in a romantic encounter on the beach. I seem to remember a song or a story that talked about the allure of gap-toothed women, she was fine and pretty appealing here.

My copy of the movie starts full screened, then goes to wide screen for the credits, back to full screen for the duration of the story and then wide-screen for the closing credits. I know there are contractual issues on the credits, and that is why they run them this way, but it makes it more noticeable how inadequate the pan and scan process is, because we have seen glimpses of the bayou and the back roads in panavision glory and it just looks better. Check out the movie poster above, it looks like James Bond became a hillbilly for this film. It's a great poster, but not really indicative of how the movie plays. Bond was smooth and polished and the action was choreographed really well, this movie is rough around the edges, with a lot of dirt in the story and on the actors. Typical Burt action film.

"The Spy Who Loved Me" 1977 A Movie a Day Day 29

OK, I'm going to be honest with you. Tonight at midnight, I will be lined up with millions of crazed Twihards seeing Eclipse. My darling wife won't wait and I'm not sure that I want to yet concede that I am too old to be staying up all hours for a movie opening. I enjoy the Twilight movies as much as any man can but they are really the territory of my wife. I would gladly be seeing the new James Bond movie at midnight but dammit there won't be one for at least two more years. So I came home today and took a nap instead of putting in my movie right away. Now, if I tried to watch a film, I'd be a dead man. I stopped writing just now to resolve a whole bunch of those issues related to going to the movie, at this point Dee is in the theater, Amanda is here with me and we will head back over to the Vampires at 11:00.

So in order to keep up with the Movie a Day concept, I am posting about a film I know so well that I feel confident about it without having just seen it. "The Spy Who Loved Me", is our AMAD subject. This film came out in the summer of 1977. Anyone who knows 70's films will tell you that the summer of 77 belonged to only one movie, and this was not it. The funny thing was that this was the biggest Bond success since Thunderball 12 years earlier, and there had been 5 Bond films in that time period. This was Roger Moore's third time out as Bond, and the movie that really established his mark on the franchise. I will be talking about one of his earlier 007 appearances later this summer. Although it might have been overshadowed by one of the biggest cultural phenomena of all time, people still remember this James Bond film.

The first time I saw it was with Dolores at the Twin Theater complex outside of the Cerritos Shopping mall. Inside the mall was a multiplex of six small movie screens but the complex outside was much more a movie going experience because the two theaters held at least 500 people each. Later in the summer we went back and saw the movie there again when Art was home for a short leave. I miss my friend every time a new Bond film comes out because it was such a big part of what brought us together. He read all the books also and after we were friends, we saw every new 007 adventure together. There is a better Art story for Moonraker, which I will save for that posting.

The Spy Who Loved Me had the best pre-title sequence of any of the films up to that point. It climaxed with that fantastic shot of the Union Jack floating across the snow capped mountains of Austria. If you have never seen it, I will not spoil it for you but it kicks the attitude of the film off perfectly. This is spectacular nonsense done with flair and showmanship. The rest of the movie lives up to it. They built a sound stage for the movie to shoot in, which became "the" place to film. It was used for the Superman movie, Spielberg extravaganzas, and of course for that film series that started by overshadowing this James Bond picture. It has burned down twice but has been rebuilt each time and it remains the largest sound stage in the world.

They needed that space for a climatic battle featuring two submarines that are supposed to be contained inside of a supertanker. In essence it turns the formula of these films a little inside out. Instead of trying to penetrate the impregnable fortress of the enemy, Bond and his allies are trying to break out. There is a gun battle, and explosions and the evil villain escaping to be confronted later in the movie. You can tell where all the money spent on production went in this movie. The art design and location shooting is really strong. I don't know if they have a dramatic light show at the Pyramids at night but this movie makes me want to go and find out.

As I said before, this is the Bond that Roger Moore should always consider the gold standard of his seven turns at bat. He looked great in the suits and jackets that are styled in a 70's form but do not look cartoonish today. People often complain that Moore never seemed threatening and dangerous like Sean Connery had. They are right, but as perfect as Connery was as Bond, Moore was for the Bond of his time. The humor was not strained, the quips came easily to him and he was clearly a Brit. There is a good moment though that shows that this Bond is tough and merciless when it suits him. As one of the heavies he has been fighting clings to Bond's tie as he is falling back from the edge of a high balcony, Bond presses the situation to get information. Once he gets what he wants, he swats his tie back, basically killing the bad guy with the back of his hand. That was a bad ass moment that went a long way in establishing some tough guy cred for Roger Moore's version of Bond.

The movies go a little over the top after this outing, and they do come back to earth again, but this is the quintessential James Bond film of the time. At the end of the credit crawl, the 007 movie announced the Return of James Bond in the next film. This movie ended with a promise for "For Your Eyes Only", but the success of that other 1977 film actually caused the producers to renege on their promise and Bond came back in the space based adventure Moonraker. Not hard to guess why they thought that was a good idea. By the way, the British based American actor I mentioned in the Rollerball post last week, has his second biggest part in this movie as the American submarine captain. Shane Rimmer is going to be the answer to a trivia question someday and you will thank me for mentioning this stuff.

Murder By Death 1976 A Movie A Day Day 28

Neil Simon was the biggest comedy writer of the 60s and 70s. He had plays on Broadway, books on the bestseller list and movies opening with his name above the title. What Steven King was to horror stories, Neil Simon was for comedies. His work was not always deep, but sometimes it was poignant and meaningful. He won the Pulitzer prize for one of his plays in the 1980's. So it is inevitable that one of his works turns up on my list for summer movies in the 1970's. Although many of the plays and movies were lighthearted romantic comedies, it is his slapstick work that seemed in tune with the summer seasons of my youth. The first of these movies I've watched this summer is "Murder by Death."

The story is a take-off on every mystery movie cliche from the thirties and forties. Including Charlie Chan, Sam Spade and the Thin Man movies. Throw in a couple of late arrivals like Miss Marple and Herciot Peroit and you have a meal that is much like on of the lines in the film, "lamb stew, a lot of ingredients gone to pot." These characters are all invited to a weekend at a spooky mansion for dinner and a murder. The mystery actually makes no sense at all by the end of the movie, and it is not really supposed to. The whole point is to baffle the audience and divert them with funny dialog and rich performances by the stars. All the actors do a terrific job impersonating the original movie characters, but making them memorable for completely different reasons.

Cast and dialog are the main reasons to see this movie. If you watch the trailer above, you will notice no shortage of star power. Peter Falk and Peter Sellars are dead on and politically incorrect beyond belief. The non-sequiters that Falk's Sam Diamond tosses out are hysterical, but you have to listen for them. Sellar's Sidney Wang could give fortune cookies a boost by comparison to some of his stupid sayings. Everyone is just a gas. I don't remember how much longer David Niven worked, but his light touch and elan were perfectly suited to an English version of Nick Charles. Most of the light comedians of today have him to thank, Hugh Grant may not know it but he steals from Niven in every movie he is in. The only link in the chain that seemed weak to me was James Coco, but I believe it was due to his part being broadly written that makes the performance a little too shrill. By the way, his driver/assistant in the movie is played by a young James Cromwell (Farmer Hogget from Babe).

A special note must be made of the appearance of Truman Capote in the film. He basically plays himself with a different name. Of all his work I only read "In Cold Blood" and I had seen "Breakfast at Tiffanys", but I knew him best as a kid through his appearances on talk shows. He was on Dick Cavett and Merv Griffin's shows quite often I think. He made up stories to share about people he had never even met. If anyone really believes that Errol Flynn and he had a love affair, they never saw an Errol Flynn movie. His high nasally voice was creepy by itself, but put into this silly plot, it stood out like it's own weird joke.

The movie is sometimes a criticism of the sloppy writing that detective stories might sometimes employ. Lionel Twain's rant at the end about characters that appear in the last five pages of a book, or clues that are not revealed to the readers until the climax of the story, sound a little too on point just to be taken as a joke. By the way if you miss the joke in Capote's character's name, you will miss a lot of the clever puns and plays on words that make the movie entertaining. There are other things to recommend it as well, but the writing of the dialog is the key element in the films success.

This movie played at the Hasting Theater in Pasadena, which at the time was a huge stand alone movie house. Later they added some other screens to the complex to make it more profitable, but if you got 1500 people in to see a movie there, I doubt they were losing money, and when I saw it the theater it was packed. Inspired by the success of this work, Neil Simon tackled another spoof based on the same kind of characters a couple of years later. Peter Falk returned as "The Cheap Detective". As I recall, I did not enjoy it as much and was a little let down, but that could be faulty memory. I hope by the end of the current summer blog to be more definitive and add that film to the list here.

Rollerball (1975) A Movie a Day Day 27

I have gone back and forth on this movie just about every time I saw it. The first time was in June 1975 with my friend Dan Hasegawa. I think we saw this without Art because he had just left for the Army. Either that, or Art was still trying to make time with Laura Charca and he did not have time for us. My guess is that if Jaws had not opened a few weeks later, this would have been the big picture of the summer and my favorite movie that year. As it was, I remembered it, but I did not have much loyalty too it. Second viewings reveal a lot of problems with the story and the film making. I still think it is a pretty good movie, but I look at it much more realistically now then I did then.

We saw it initially at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood on Sunset Blvd. The screen there was curved to accommodate films shot in cinerama, this one was not and it was simply blown up to fit the screen, which it did quite nicely. I don't remember noticing the importance of sound in a movie much before this. Maybe "The Exorcist" impressed me, but I don't think it was the stereo system that did it. This movie on the other hand, is much more impressive seen in a big theater with an immense sound system. At the dome, the opening segment with the Bach toccata was amazing. When the teams did their warm up laps on the Rollerball track, the rumble was impressive. Most of the hits, grunts and crowd noise was enhanced by simple volume. At the end the chant of Jon-na-thon, was almost hypnotic.

It's funny that sound is one of the big things I remember from the movie because it is also one of my biggest criticisms of the film. James Caan appears to have been directed to underplay every scene except the Rollerball matches. I suppose this is to show that he is not a crazed individualist out to take down the system, but just a guy who is really good at his job and doesn't understand why the corporation wants him to stand down. That is the essence of the conflict in the story, but Caan mumbles so much in the film, that it is hard to have a take on what his point of view is. His vocal delivery is low key and in many instances inaudible, and when you can hear him it sounds a little bit like the slow parts of "Smells Like Teen Spirit", where Kurt Cobain is inarticulate and gave Weird Al Yankovic an opportunity at an easy parody.

The look of the film is supposed to be futuristic, the key components of that are the Stadium itself and the architecture of the corporate world they live in. The plastic in the board rooms, and the odd shapes of buildings and hallways, are a quaint effort at a futuristic vision. The other thing that gives it away is the costuming. On the track, the players look like they could be competing in a real game set in the future. Off the track, they look like models from a Sears catalog in 1977. Leisure suits are not futuristic, they were fads. The corporate guys are still wearing suits so that part worked, but the non-executives look like they are dressed for a part in the chorus of a Cher concert. James Caan has the stupidest hat, it looks like a Spanish caballero hat with a ten inch brim. He tosses it into the crowd a couple of times, but every time he changes one of his leisure suits, there is another hat with material to match the suit. Having everything provided by your corporate masters does not guarantee good taste. The element that is accurate about the future is the video display. Big Screens for home viewing, with three alternate views on the top. You can't quite tell what the programs and pictures are recorded on, maybe small tapes, maybe disks but the effect is a lot more accurate than most of the other things in the movie.

The themes of the film are power and individualism. It is never quite clear why Johnathon is such a threat to the corporate order, but that ambiguity works toward making things a lot more ominous and believable. At one point, John Houseman's character explains how the corporations took over when the governments were all bankrupted. Maybe they were anticipating a world where the U.S. would triple it's debt in one year and spend itself twenty trillion dollars in the hole in a very short time. The vision of the corporations as evil overlords would be darker, if everyone on the movie wasn't so beautiful and happy. Hey, there is a side note that suggests that people in the future were medicating themselves into happiness. This looked like a pretty good criticism of the "if it feels good do it" attitude of the times, but I don't think that's what the filmmakers intended.

John Houseman made his last years very comfortable, by playing corporate types like this. In fact Smith Barney, an investment company that I don't even know still exists, built their image on his answer to the question how Smith-Barney customers get their wealth? "They earn it". Ralph Richardson appears in a scene that is basically unnecessary, just a little extra dig at the corporate future. He is as always, charming and there are two or three big laughs in this segment. An actor everyone will recognize but I will bet no one knows by name, plays the Coach-Executive in charge of the Houston team. This may be the biggest part he had in movies, but you will see him in two or three Superman films, at least three James Bond films, and even the first of the Christian Bale Batman movies. His name is Shane Rimmer, he is an American that ended up living in England, so all those movies produced at Sheppardton Studios that needed an actor with an American accent typically sought him out.

Like I said, I run hot and cold on this movie. There have been plenty of times that I thought it was a ponderous and pretentious movie that would benefit from being trimmed by half an hour. There are other times when I look at it and admire the 70's sensibility, that movies ought to be about something. Rollerball is supposed to be about the loss of individualism and the evil of corporate thinking. Or maybe it is about how the citizens will be satisfied with bread and circuses as in Roman times, entertained and distracted by a violent sport while the powers that be control their lives. But if you ask me what it's about I'll tell you it's about two hours.