Monty Python and the Holy Grail  Bring Out Your Dead. Strange
Women Lying in Ponds. Flesh Wound. Large Wooden Badger.Wicked
Bad Naughty Zoot. Electric Donkey Bottom Biters. Rarely does a
film penetrate the public consciousness so thoroughly that it
can supply the names for three decades’ worth of college bands.
Indeed, Monty Python and the Holy Grail is so indelibly
imprinted on our cultural DNA that a theatrical rerelease hardly
seems necessary — even those too young ever to have seen it have
inherited our knowledge genetically. Yet, here it is, back
again, like a favorite, boozy uncle at Christmastime.
Exceptionally literate yet devotedly silly, the movie is a
masterpiece of cinematic Dada. Its knowing subversions of both
the medium (the coconut hoof beats borrowed from radio, a
Camelot debunked as “only a model”) and narrative itself (the
last-second escape from a cartoon dragon thanks to the
animator’s heart attack) were years, if not decades, ahead of
their time, and precursors of everything from the Air