Since watching Life of Python a couple of months back, I’ve been meaning to rewatch MONTY PYTHON’S LIFE OF BRIAN (wisely retitled from Eric Idle’s suggestion of Jesus Christ’s Lust for Glory!), which the group considers its last great work and the most fun to work on of any of their movies.
This starts out with the Three Wise Men arriving in a stable for the birth of the Messiah — then realizing this Brian brat isn’t him (Jesus is the next stable over). The child then grows up into Graham Chapman; despite not being the Messiah he winds up sparking devoted worship (“Gather round me, Gourdites!”), political unrest (a lot of satire on the radical left — though I wonder if it isn’t also riffing on the idea of Jesus as a revolutionary against Roman rule) before becoming crucified by error and dying as a neighbor sings “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” (perhaps their most memorable song, even making it into the musical Spamalot). I wouldn’t rank it above Holy Grail but no question it is very good. “It wasn’t meant to be taken literally — obviously it refers to any manufacturer of dairy products.”
LOST HEROES (2014) is a documentary on Canadian superheroes, starting with kids of the late 1930s embracing American comic books and American superheroes as much as children south of the border. When WW II economics forced Canada to stop importing them, enterprising publishers unleashed their own to fill the gap, including Cosmo, Freelance, and the best-remembered, Nelvana of the Northern Lights. While the war ending killed most of them off, there were multiple later attempts such as Captain Canuck, a Silver Age character whose been rebooted multiple times since (I have an issue from the 1980s attempt).
While Canadian publishers have launched other superheroes, none of them have had the success of Marvel’s Wolverine, debuting here on Herb Trimpe’s cover; that Alpha Flight, Marvel’s Canadian super-team, has never been as successful leads to the various talking heads interviewed here to conclude being Canadian is more a hindrance than a help (American superheroes are universal, Canada’s are just … Canadian). Interesting. “The secret of Wolverine’s popularity is that he doesn’t have to put up with you.”
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