eric idle Tagged Articles at Cinematical

I'm not known to be the sentimental type, but occasionally even I can get a little choked up (and trust me it can come at the oddest times). Well, the other night on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon I had one of those moments when that goofy little girl I used to be and the goofy grown woman I am today came together to watch Eric Idle perform Always Look on The Bright Side of Life with Fallon's house band, The Roots -- who to my delight joined in on the trademark whistling refrain. The troupe was on Late Night to celebrate their NY Reunion show to mark the 40th anniversary of the comedy troupe and to promote the Pythonathon on IFC this Sunday.

Watching The Life of Brian as a child guaranteed that most of the jokes went right over my head, but it's effect was lasting, and I was never able to look at my Sunday school lessons the same way again. The flick was even charged with blasphemy when it was originally released, but over time has been recognized as one of the best British comedies ever made.

It's been a long time (30 years to be more precise) since Idle and Chapman climbed up on those crosses for the final musical number in the story of Brian, but when I watched this clip it didn't matter, and I was right back to being that little geeky girl I used to (and probably always will) be.

After the jump: Forget about your sin - give the audience a grin. Enjoy it - it's your last chance anyhow...

Where has the time gone?

The Independent reports that Monty Python will celebrate their 40th anniversary this October. As part of the festivities, Royal Albert Hall will host a one-night-only performance on the 23rd of Not the Messiah (He's a Very Naughty Boy). You may have heard of this -- it's Eric Idle and John Du Prez's wildly funny 1-hour oratorio based on Monty Python's Life of Brian. But this one-night-only deal is even more irresistible than usual -- Idle, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, and Terry Gilliam will perform in it. Unfortunately, John Cleese can't make it, which is a damned shame.

Nevertheless, here I thought that I was lucky that Idle's first cousin is Toronto Symphony Conductor Peter Oundjian, which led the world premiere to happen right in the T-Dot.

As Idle describes the oratorio: "It ranges in reference from Handel, through a naughty Mozart duet, to the Festival of Nine Carols, Bob Dylan, and the classic finale 'Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.'" (How could Dylan and Python possibly come together? You can see Idle's spin after the jump.)

For those of us who won't be there, The Independent reports that a documentary called Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer's Cut) is on the way, while Variety reports that there will be anniversary events in Hollywood and New York called "An Evening With Without Monty Python."

What's your favorite Monty moment?

The story behind the making of Delgo is heartwarming and inspiring. Fathom Studios, based in Atlanta, Georgia, has been creating commercial computer animation for more than ten years. When they decided to produce their own feature-length narrative film, they did it completely independent of the Hollywood studio system. They labored long and hard with a much smaller budget and a much smaller staff than the animation behemoths. They bravely posted "digital dailes" throughout production, a kind of progressive, online series of "making of" snippets. They recruited a slew of actors with name recognition -- Freddie Prinze Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt, Val Kilmer, Malcolm McDowell, Louis Gossett Jr., Michael Clarke Duncan, Burt Reynolds, Chris Kattan, and the late Anne Bancroft in her last performance -- to voice the characters.

If only the film as a whole was as dramatic and lively as the behind-the-scenes story. Under the direction of Marc F. Adler and Jason Maurer, the 3-D animation is quite lovely to behold, but the characters are one-dimensional and the script, credited to six writers, spends too much time on convoluted plot mechanics. Delgo falls into an uncomfortable place where the technical achievement can be admired without the emotions ever being engaged, provoking nothing more than a tepid response ("meh") when the end credits begin to roll.

Set in a lush fantasy world of flying creatures, colorful reptiles, and the odd monster, beast, and giant insect, Delgo pits two races against one another. The proud, dominant, invading race lords it over the humble, subjugated, native race. Sound familiar?

For once, the good times aren't rolling away. Or, if they did, they're about to roll right back because the children of Rock 'n Roll never grow old. Variety reports that thirty years after the classic, awe-inspiring British rock 'n roll band The Rutles hit NBC with All You Need is Cash, they will be reuniting for an anniversary celebration in Los Angeles as part of the Mods and Rockers Festival.

According to the fest website, the festivities will be held on March 17, at the American Cinematheque's Egyptian Theatre. Yes, that means Eric Idle, Neil Innes, Ricky Fataar, and John Halsey will be coming together for the celebration in Los Angeles, and I wonder if they will don the bowl-cuts again (one can only hope!) or if they will go for a later Beatles shagginess? Whatever the case, there will be a screening of the original '70s film, Rutles rareties (like footage of the band from SNL), highlights from the sequel film, and a Q&A.

You might notice that I didn't mention a performance. It's not a part of the listed plan, but they do say: "And the evening may also feature a couple of musical surprises!" I'd hope so! Tickets are available now, and you can find links through the fest website.

In the meantime, catch an old clip from the flick after the jump.

Note: This is the final review in my five-part series on the Vacation movies. Click on the links below to read my previous reviews from this franchise:

National Lampoon's Vacation / National Lampoon's European Vacation / National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation / Vegas Vacation

There are three factors that might compel you to watch Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie's Island Adventure:

1) Love for the original. "Hey, Christmas Vacation was hilarious! I watch it every year! And now my beloved characters are going on a new holiday-themed outing? Radical! Sign me up for some island fun and adventure!"

2) A desire to complete the series. "Well heck, Vegas Vacation was pretty lame, and my heart tells me this might be even worse, but I've got to see it, right? I've seen all the others!"

3) It is on TV, and you are trapped under something heavy. The remote is nowhere to be found, and your face is pinned to the floor in a manner that makes looking away from the television an impossibility.

Hopefully, after I share my thoughts with you, #3 will be the only reason you might watch this "film" in its entirety. Some of you might not even be aware that this "movie" existed (it aired on NBC in 2003 before being given a DVD release), so I guess what I'm doing here is a public service announcement more than a review.

Allow me to share the opening exchange of the "movie," a labyrinthine conversation that I had to rewind four times before I even understood what was being said. I'll set the scene. Clark "Third" Johnson (played by Jake Thomas), son to Cousin Eddie (Randy Quaid) and his wife Catherine (Miriam Flynn), is talking to a girl on the way home from school.

CLARK: I was named after my mom's cousin's husband -- Clark Griswold the 2nd. I'm the third Clark Griswold. Clark Griswold Johnson.
GIRL: Do you have any brothers and sisters?
CLARK: Yes, they're with my grandma in Kansas. Except for my oldest sister, she's working at a strip club in Las Vegas
GIRL: A strip club? Where do you live?
CLARK: My mom and dad and I are staying with my cousin Audrey Griswold. She's visiting her boyfriend in Indianapolis. So we're kind of house sitting for her. You know, over the holidays.

These are the first words spoken in the "movie!" As an aspiring screenwriter, if I ever put that exchange to paper I would shoot myself in the throat. What a needlessly complicated, bizarre bit of exposition! And that's how you hook the audience? That's your big opening scene? It would have been better to just have the kid look into the camera and explain, in monologue form, who he is related to and what the hell is going on.

Matty Simmons, producer on all of the Vacation films, "wrote" this one, despite having no real previous screenwriting credits. Hey Matty? I'd like to be a professional golfer, but I suck at golf. Therefore, I don't play golf on a professional level. Makes sense, right? If I were given two hours in the back seat of a bumpy truck, a note pad, and a stick with poo on it, I could write a better script than this. I'm not kidding. Give it up. You're a successful man in other fields, you've got loads of money. Don't write anymore scripts. Stop.

The "film" was "directed" by Nick Marck, a television director who has helmed episodes of some really great shows -- The Wonder Years, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Veronica Mars. Mr. Marck, I'm willing to believe this wasn't your fault. I'd take it off the old resume, though.

So Eddie and Catherine are house-sitting for Audrey. Fine. Whatever. As the film opens, a wasted Fred Willard is firing Eddie from his job, which seems to consist of playing tic-tac-toe with a monkey. There are several "jokes" about how Eddie is dumber than said monkey. Eddie returns home, decides to take a bath. Plumbing hijinks ensue. Their dog farts a lot (No, a lot). And they smell bad, see? The farts that the dog has, I mean. Laughing yet?

Through complications involving a monkey attack and fear of a lawsuit, Eddie is awarded a trip to the South Pacific by his ex-boss. Ed Asner (a loooooong way from The Mary Tyler Moore Show) inexplicably pops up as Uncle Nick, and he joins them on their vacation. They run into Eric Idle, whom I believe is supposed to be playing the same role he played in European Vacation -- British guy who gets beat up by accident a lot. Wasn't funny then, is far less funny now. The gang gets stranded on an island, some atrocious green-screen technology is used, Eddie flies a plane, they get off the island. Fin.

Quaid tries his best here, but the guy had funnier material in Pluto Nash. Cousin Eddie was in maybe five minutes of Vacation total, and didn't enter Christmas Vacation until halfway through. He's a funny character to be sure, but only when he has someone reacting to or commenting on his antics. No one fills that role here. Eddie can't sustain a feature film on his own -- let alone one as stupefyingly awful as this. Flynn isn't given much to do as usual. Thomas is cute, and I thank him for giving me something to do while waiting for the "movie" to end -- figure out where I had seen him before (turns out he was the non-Haley Joel Osment kid in Spielberg's A.I).

Dana Barron, who played Audrey in the original Vacation 20 years prior, returns here for absolutely no reason. My guess is that offers went out to everyone who has ever played a Griswold, and Barron was the only one who agreed. She is the only Griswold kid ever to reprise his or her role. So...put that in your history books.

Sung Hi Lee plays Muka Laka Miki (and I don't want to spoil anything, but that name gets hilariously mispronounced several times!), but she might as well just be referred to as "Token Hot Chick." I can imagine some stressed out producer throwing his hands in the air, and bellowing "At least get some T&A in this thing or no one's going to watch to the end!" I'd like to thank that producer I just made up, because that extremely mild, PG-rated T&A is really all that kept me going.

In fairness, not everyone hates Christmas Vacation 2. After all, it was nominated for Best Hair Styling in a Television Mini-Series/Movie of the Week at the Hollywood Makeup Artist and Hair Stylist Guild Awards. So someone was a fan. But please. Don't watch it. There isn't a laugh or a smile or a smirk or a grimace in the thing. It isn't so bad that it's good. It isn't even so bad that it's bad. To call it bad would be an insult to things that are bad. It hurt my feelings. They say depression rates go up at Christmastime -- I think I've found the reason.

Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie's Island Adventure made me long for the subtle nuance, in-depth character development, and rib-tickling tropical comedy of Saved By the Bell: Hawaiian Style.

The hills are alive with the sound of Griswold! This s**t's been around for a very long time!

-- Clark W. Griswold (Chevy Chase)

I'm reviewing all the films in the Vacation series over the next couple weeks, and in preparation I've been re-watching each of the movies. I thought I'd be able to save myself some time and skip National Lampoon's European Vacation, as I just saw it again a couple of months ago. Then I took a seat at the computer and realized I couldn't remember a damn thing about the film. I saw it a few times growing up, I saw it very recently, and yet nothing was sticking out in my mind. European Vacation is that kind of movie -- not terrible necessarily, just instantly and powerfully forgettable.

The movie would seem to have everything going for it. Sure, Harold Ramis was out as director, but was replaced by the great Amy Heckerling (whom I recently saw at an Elvis Costello concert, which earns her unlimited cool points even without the movie career). Heckerling was hot off the excellent Fast Times as Ridgemont High and the cult favorite Johnny Dangerously, and seemed a perfect fit for the material. John Hughes returned to flesh out the story and co-write the script. Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo were reprising their classic roles.

So why is European Vacation so completely underwhelming? I intended to start each Vacation entry with a memorable line from the film, and it took me forever to pick a decent one for European. Where is Hughes' sparkling, endlessly quotable dialogue?

I never really understood the premise behind Transformers, but I didn't care. They were above and beyond the greatest toys a kid could dream of playing with. Who needed either action figures or Matchbox cars anymore? The Transformers were both. And as a loyal consumer child of the '80s, I followed my favorite toy line as it spun-off an animated television series, a comic book series and a full-length feature film. As I said, I didn't really get the story. All that mattered was that there were good guys (Autobots) and there were bad guys (Decepticons), same as any action cartoon. Anyway, the more I try to comprehend the premise of Transformers, the more questions I have about its logic, so I kinda prefer to be in the dark.

It's been nearly twenty years since I sold all my toys at a tag sale, and I haven't watched the television show or read a Transformers comic in all that time. So, when I decided to take a nostalgic look at Transformers: The Movie I was more in the dark than ever. Because it functions as a continuation of the television series, existing chronologically between the show's second and third seasons, there isn't much in the way of introductions. This is a movie for people familiar with the premise, the story and the characters of the Transformers universe.

Now here's a trivial yet strangely amusing piece of non-news: While doing a radio show in Toronto, Monty Python veteran Eric Idle expressed some serious umbrage regarding the usage of the old "coconuts" joke in Shrek the Third. (Anyone who's seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail knows the coconut gag, and if you haven't, well, I'm not explaining it to you because I think it's freakin' shameless that you're old enough to read and still haven't seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail.) What's particularly weird is that, um, Eric Idle is IN Shrek the Third! And so is fellow Python John Cleese! Well, their voices are, anyway.

Here's part of what Mr. Idle said on Toronto's Mix FM: "...there it is in the first 30 seconds -- you go -- wait a minute, John [Cleese] and I are in this film and you steal our joke? Um, I don't know how the others are going to take to this ... I hope they (Dreamworks) cleared it with them -- the first I saw it was in the premiere -- and I was SHOCKED -- my whole family went WHAT! How dare you! So I walked out -- calmed down -- and walked back in -- but I was shocked and I think if you steal peoples jokes, I don't think that's homage, I think that's theft." And then over at Canada.com we get this quote from Idle: "It's been stolen patently by Shrek [the Third] I'm happy to say, so we'll be able to sue their asses." Damn Eric, that's cold. DreamWorks probably just gave you one of your career's easiest paychecks, man!

You don't have to be a rocket scientist in order to spot the pattern developing during this much-hyped summer of sequels. Following two highly-entertaining and well thought-out installments in the Spider-Man franchise, we were offered a discombobulated third part that couldn't clean up its room without making it messier. Though Spidey is certainly not a tough act to follow, our lovable green ogre was in a similar position. Both Shrek and Shrek 2 were gems; ideal family comedies. A little something for the kids, a little something for the adults, and a lot of something at the box office. But when you begin to venture into threequel territory, there's a certain amount of risk that continuously whispers in your ear -- "How do we keep this thing fresh?" it asks. After all, even a little kid -- the kind that jumps up and down, screaming "Do it again, daddy!" -- will eventually become bored and move onto something else.

Although it's become increasingly more difficult to stand out in an animated marketplace flooded with generic knock-offs, Shrek the Third makes a bold attempt to reignite the magic using familiar ingredients and a whole new cast of characters. That said, the series is beginning to lose its flavor; Shrek (Mike Myers) and his cohorts continue to remain sharp, witty and adorable, but that inventive shine is fading. And what remains is an enjoyable, yet predictable version of something we used to love ... when it was new, when it was fresh and when it wasn't trying as hard to send multiple messages through a few neatly-placed Hallmark-esque monologues. For parents (especially soon-to-be fathers), Shrek the Third might seem therapeutic in a way, and it's also a great film to show those kids struggling to fit in at school. As far as the rest of us go, well, Shrek himself summed it up nicely when, half-way through the film, he blurted out, "Would you like some eggs with that ham?"

There seem to be two distinct camps where the Shrek movies are concerned: The people who unabashedly love these sweetly silly revisionist fairy tales -- and the people who consider Shrek and Shrek 2 astonishingly overrated pieces of CGI goofiness that certainly didn't deserve their massive payouts. ($484 million and $920 million worldwide, respectively, and that doesn't include DVD sales.) Me, I fall firmly in the former camp: I'm a big fan of both Shrek flicks. I think they're light, witty, clever and stunningly animated family-style adventures -- but they're not over-scrubbed and ultra-sanitized like most of Disney's weaker attempts.

So obviously I'm pretty pumped to see Shrek the Third, and if this brand-new trailer is any indication, I'll probably be chuckling like a stoned monkey throughout most of this second sequel. The kids will go for the comedy, the characters and the colorful little adventures, but folks like me go for the cast: Mike Myers and Cameron Diaz have done some fine voice-work in the first two flicks, but I'm most fond of Eddie Murphy as Donkey, Antonio Banderas and Puss-in-Boots, and (of course) the immortal John Cleese as King Harold. (OK, so it's a small part, but just the sound of Cleese's voice makes me laugh.)

What I find most intriguing about Shrek the Third is its big list of newcomers: Ian McShane as Captain Hook? Eric Idle as Merlin the Wizard? John Krasinski as Sir Lancelot? Very cool! And get this line-up of prickly princesses: Cheri Oteri (Sleeping Beauty), Maya Rudolph (Rapunzel), Amy Poehler (Snow White) and Amy Sedaris (Cinderella)! How cool is that?! (Oh yeah, and Justin Timberlake as the young Prince Arthur, the only misstep that casting directors actually let Cameron Diaz talk them into made.) Anyway, fun stuff. New trailer here. The film opens May 18.