Great Film overall

There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

The Crimson Permanent Assurance is, to me, one of the high points of Monty Python and His Flying Circus. It was created in conjunction with the film The Meaning of Life but was created by Terry Gilliam in a separate studio. He went way over budget without informing the others and when it was finished, they wondered what to do with it; it did not fit in with the rest of the movie. They decided to include it as if it were a separate short to be shown before the feature. The short was so well received at the Cannes Film Festival that The Meaning of Life was guaranteed to be a success.The short was originally intended to be a five-minute animated short but Gilliam felt that it would be more suited to live action. It became a 30 minute film and was then edited to 16 minutes. The film is a wonderful, highly imaginative, funny, anti-capitalist fantasy, with a very nice song.It begins by showing what appears to be a ship's sails, which turn out actually to be canvasses that are covering the face of a large old building that is being cleaned. The original impression, however, turns out to be the reality. The Crimson Permanent Assurance Company is a very British company that has been in existence for a long, long time. Its staff loyalty has left it with a geriatric staff, who have worked there all their lives. The company has been purchased by The Very Big Corporation of America, which brings in efficiency experts to rank the staff. When a staff member is fired for being slow, rebellion erupts. Evidently, this moment has been anticipated, because everybody seems to know exactly what to do: how to use office equipment as weapons, the chain of command, that the building is able to sail off on the "Wide Accountant-sea", etc. Since the charm of the movie is its element of surprise, I will say no more (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).One question remains: is The Crimson Permanent Assurance a separate short film or an integral part of the feature film The Meaning of Life? The answer is, "Yes!"For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crimson_Permanent_Assurance

I hadn't seen "Monty Python's 'The Meaning of Life'" since it first came out, way back when I was still in high school, so it was with mildly delighted anticipation that I popped in the new Special Edition DVD into my player the other day. Boy, did I waste $15.00! I barely made it to the midway part of the feature ("Where are you, fishy?"), but I almost didn't even make it to the opening credits, thanks to this worthless trifle of an utterly insipid, humor-free ball of whimsy-snot. If one needs proof of the axiom that animators make lousy live-action film directors (Frank Tashlin, Tim Burton, Ralph Bakshi, et. al.), here is yet more. Terry Gilliam, get thee back behind an animator's desk and out from behind a camera!

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

A satrical look at the way the business environment was changing after downsizing became the latest American import into the U.K. The central theme of men pushed beyond their limits is explored in an extremely entertaining, surrealistic, typically Gilliam fashion. The use of totally inapt equipment, filing cabinets as ship's cannon, is somewhat reminiscent of the use of musical instruments in the Square World episode which won the Golden Rose of Montreux. All in all a sidesplitter!