Thanks for the memories!

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Don't listen to the negative reviews

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

In the bleak days of 1983, the Crimson Permanent Assurance, an accountancy staffed by elderly workers much like a slave ship, has been taken over by efficiency-minded corporate types. When they sack an employee, there's an uprising, and the building is unleashed from its moorings to sail across the (dry) ocean and take on the financial centers of the world, starting with an all-out attack on the large skyscraper housing The Very Big Corporation of America, complete with filing-cabinet cannons, ceiling-fan broadswords, and paper-spindle short-swords. This Was The Only Part Of MPTMOL That I Enjoyed I Was Almost About To Give It A 2 Because Of This Until I Found Out That This & MPTMOL Were Accounted As Separate Movies On IMDb Then I Gave MPTMOL A 1. This Is The Only Reason I Have A MPTMOL DVD & Its The Only Reason Why I Watch It. Monty Python Is Great When Its Good But When Its Bad Its Horrible. All In All A Great Movie.

As the Monty Python troupe was finishing up their final movie together, it seems Terry Gilliam got his hands on some of the budget and went haywire creating his own little "supporting feature" to the show, a production that most certainly looks forward to his later work with Time Bandits and Brazil, et al, and gained him some control of the surrealist adventure escapades in Gilliam's fantasy land.Starting out almost something of a send-up of Ben-Hur, some elderly accountants under the whips and shackles of corporate England revolt and turn their office building into a sailing pirate ship of corporate pillaging, heading to America and converting the everyday mundane office supplies of filing cabinets and coat hangers into weapons. This movie seems like a bridge between Monty Python's surrealist send-up sensibilities and Gilliam's own desire to stretch his fantasies to their limits, a mode he's followed ever since, sometimes to his own detriment (I guess he's finally getting Don Quixote together for a second try?).Except for one interjection into the mad antics of The Meaning of Life proper, this movie really does stand alone and fills out a different role than the larger feature.--PolarisDiB

My very favorite is a documentary I saw called THE SUNSHINE, about a flophouse in the Bowery which like require intense callousness to not get some reaction. SO, it's not really a fair fight when it comes to considering fiction.Terry Gilliam has made a flick about old-world business versus corporate seizures that will make one who has an appreciation for physical comedy, the absurd, or business satire enjoy wasting fifteen minutes. It has the best music I have ever heard outside of Clint Mansell (PI and Requiem for a Dream.) It has some magnificent models, and a song that is so immensely witty I forgave Eric Idle for being in BURN Hollywood BURN.

This short movie was originally just one sketch in Monty Python's Meaning of Life (in the Part Middle Age, I think) and was to be done by Terry Gilliam by his famous animation style. Gilliam, however had directed his first movies by then (Jabberwocky and Time Bandits) and was somewhat bored with animation. So, thankfully he got to do this one live-action with his own actors, own budget and own will. So it became the only Python budget to go over the budget and the sketch bloated from five minutes into fifteen. So, the movie didn't fit into the center of the movie, so it was made as a "starter" to the feature movie. The Pythons themselves surprisingly do not feature all in this short. Only Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam can be seen as window cleaners and Eric Idle's voice can be heard when the pirates are singing Accountancy Shanty. This is only good, because the short makes you really confused, whether you have gone to a wrong movie. The best thing about this short is that it's so visually great. Every time I see it, I'll find something new. And the connections between accountancy and piracy are hilarious. Using filing cabinets as cannons and so on are very funny inventions. Every Gilliam fan will love it, but if you hate not only Gilliam, but do not like Python either, then avoid. 8/10