Monty Python's Life of Brian @ Whizzo Online

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[ Life of Brian ]

[ About the Film ]

Life of Brian is the story of Brian, a man who is born in the stable next to Jesus in Nazareth. Poor Brian then becomes mistaken for the Messiah, after getting involved with the anti-imperialist group, the People's Front of Judea and giving an impromptu speech in an effort to escape Roman soldiers. Graham Chapman plays the straight character, again who is surrounded by all sorts of extreme characters. The basic core of this film is taking modern attitudes and placing them in Biblical times.

The film also caused quite a large amount of controversy with Christians, but Terry Jones believes that Life of Brian might be heresy, but not blasphemy. The films message was not Jesus is bad or Jesus was wrong, but think for yourself. It pokes a lot of fun at the bickering between religious denominations (“It is his SHOE!!” “It is a SANDAL!!”).

"...Life of Brian might be heresy, but not blasphemy."

Terry Jones directed this movie alone, but Terry Gilliam did a shot here and there (i.e. The divine couple after the Wise Men leave Mandy). Terry Gilliam became the main designer, working with the old set of Jesus of Nazareth in Tunisia, and got quite frustrated that not a lot of the set seen in the movie.

This is the most cut-to-size Python movie, going from over 2 hours to just 90 minutes. Unfortunately fans will never be able to see the whole thing. When George Harrison sold Handmade Films to Paragon Pictures, Paragon threw out all the film that was cut from Life of Brian, the only thing left was a few scenes that were transferred to tape, which ended up on the Criterion Collection DVD.

This film had a significantly higher budget than Monty Python and the Holy Grail, with George Harrison founding Handmade Films to fund it. This film is still my favourite Python film. It currently (Jan 2000) ranks as #183 on the Internet Movie Database Top 250 Films with an average rating of 7.8/10.

For more information, see the entry in the Internet Movie Database.

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