Octagenarian Dada

Rating: Null/10 (20 February 2013)

What the Pythons did goes back to Dada in the 1910's—against logic and bourgeois complacency, for irrationality, chaos and the absurd as by-roads to unconscious inspiration. In this film, usually accepted as one of their best, they rail helter skelter against authority, masculine heroism, sexual hypocrisy, the chastity of romantic legend.
Some of the skits work, the coconuts, duck, French siege. It's funny when it is, precisely because it's non-sense, a shrubbery of very smalls rocks. More often, it's just silly. The more of logic that is applied to explain say, coconuts in Britain, the more ludicrous logic appears to be, we recognize the truth of this in our own irrational world.
But the overall film fails for my taste.
It had two competing directors in Jones and Gilliam, this may account for some of it. But mostly, it is poor cinematic storytelling, one skit after the other. Even surrealism benefits from some overall framework for the experience, something to be directed to beyond reason.
At the time, this wasn't as clear as it is now. The Czechs were still making movies in this disconnected vein, Svankmajer to this day. Late 60's Godard, more famously. All those things were very much in the counter-culture air in the 1970's.
So as with most things of the era, this is fun for a while, fun but stale.