CheerupSilver Very Cool!!!

FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Dirtylogy It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Rosie Searle It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Robert J. Maxwell Folks, it's the late 60s encapsulated. If it was being thought about by anyone in 1969, it's in here -- Vietnam, yoga, homosexuality, narcissism, complacency, and mostly greed.Peter Sellers in Guy Grand, a Londoner with so much money that he can buy anything and anyone. He fills an outdoor vat with a vile mixture of pig's blood, urine, and fecal matter, then throws handfuls of "free money" into it, inviting a horde of dapper observers to take as much as they want. They do, wading slowly into the slime with their three-piece suits, bowlers, and brollies. He corrupts the rowing teams of Oxford and Cambridge.The most outrageous episodes take place aboard the luxury liner "The Magic Christian," the passage for which costs a fortune. The genial Wilfred Hyde White is the reassuring and confident captain, who enjoys handling the helm by himself. And the funniest episode aboard "The Magic Christian" has Christopher Lee as a vampire barging onto the bridge, sucking Hyde White's blood and injecting some substance from a large syringe directly into his SKULL.There are multiple cameo parts for easily recognizable stars of the period, but none involves much effort or screen time. It's captivating to watch Yul Brynner as a transvestite -- he makes a passably good-looking woman -- sing a seductive Cole Porter song to an indifferent Roman Polanski.At times it gets a bit frantic and the episode aboard "The Magic Christian" ends in a kaleidoscope of frenzy, as if the writers felt they needed more flash and less filigree to what had come before. The same mistake was made in "Sex and the Single Girl", the 1967 "Casino Royale," and "What's New, Pussycat?" Not even writers like Terry Southern and John Cleese can solve the problem of bringing a successful farce to an even more impressive conclusion. The shot of Christopher Lee plunging the hypodermic into Hyde White's head lasts about two seconds -- not nearly long enough to be appreciated.I hate to say this, but the novel was funnier. The comic incidents were presented in the context of everyday events. That is, the mind-blowing scenes came as a surprise. Here, they're more or less piled on top of one another and the set-ups are done too casually.Terry Southern's brand of satire rarely fits comfortably on the screen, partly because the stories themselves may or may not be comic but Southern's prose style transforms them into humor. "Candy" was a funny book but failed as a movie. "The Loved One" had its moments but was knee-capped by Robert Morse's too-cute protagonist. The exception, of course, was the nearly flawless "Dr. Strangelove," adapted from an entirely serious apocalyptic novel.Let's put it this way. It's a funny movie with incidents that made me laugh out loud. If you liked Monty Python, you'll enjoy this episodic flick. And if you enjoy this movie, try reading Southern's short novel of the same name. Then try "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," the book.

rajah524-3 Limited "cult following" status to the contrary, I'm not surprised at the 5.9 rating by the 1,500 odd voters accustomed to the current marginal (and copy cat) plots, limbic manipulations, clichéd special effects and derivative nature of post-millennial film-making. This, after all, is a Monty Pythonesque rendition of a Terry Southern novel (see "Candy," "Barbarella," "Easy Rider," "The Loved One" and "Dr. Strangelove…"). (Would those who beat their brains senseless by pounding on their PDAs and X Boxes know the truth if it bit them in the nose? Please.)Southern saw the culture for what it is… and has been since the Old Kingdom on the Nile five thousand years ago. "Money talks." Most of us want to believe we care about AIDS in Central Africa, the starving in Dafur, the oppressed in Lybia, the fate of the Tibetans, the fate of the over-populated, under-educated, over-heated, radiation-poisoned =planet=. But what we really care about is comfort, and what it takes to purchase however much of it we believe to be our due. Born in Alvarado, Texas, and strained through the sifter of military experience in World War II, Southern was no "hippie." He was far more down with Marquand, Richler, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Sartre and Camus than the histrionic, wanna-be-hip, but discipline-bereft and chemically crop-sprayed pseudo-intellectuals of the late '60s and early '70s. If you're into psychology, think Bateson, Baumrind, Berne, Ellis, Fairbairn, Henry, Jackson, Karpman, Klein, Laing, Miller, Schaef and Sullivan rather than Bradshaw, Dyer, Forward, Harris, McGraw and Schlesinger, for example. If you're into music lyrics, think Lennon, Morissette, Olazabal and Townshend rather than Hayward, Jagger, Lynne and Tyler. That there are people in the world who can buy the behavior of virtually anyone, including those who =appear= to be "powerful," may continue to make many folks squirm. We'd like to believe in truth, justice, freedom and the Easter Bunny. That Vegas doesn't fix major sports events, that doctors know best, and the Supreme Court doesn't steal elections. But… money talks. In "TMC," that particular message is packaged a bit heavy-handedly at moments, but the piece can be as beguiling – and actually meaningful – as the similarly rompy "Rocky Horror Picture Show," "The Meaning of Life," "The Producers," "Blazing Saddles," and "Network," if one knows how to pry their mind open for 92 minutes in some (ahem) appropriate way.

t_atzmueller Subconsciously I have avoided this movie for about 20 years. One reason being, that I grew up with the Peter Sellers comedies, having watched most of them with my parents and having eventually discovered, that a lot of them don't age terribly well. The second reason was that, although Sellers has produced much, much quality work, he's at time delivered horrible performances.However, the other day I had a DVD copy from a friend-of-a-friend fall into my hands and around that same time I felt like watching something with Sir Christopher Lee – something I hadn't yet seen, mind you. The nearest and only thing in reach was that 'Magic Christian' DVD, so into the player it went.The first ten odd minutes made me sure that once again my suspicions were correct and that I was watching a Sellers movie that was both outdated and definitely in the weaker category. Inflated nonsense, pointless slapstick and random attempts at squeezing laughs out of a more innocent 1970's watcher, thought I while my index finger was nervously tapping the 'stop'-key.However, I kept on watching. And suddenly something made 'click' inside my head. I had found a gem, a diamond of a comedy and before Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr made it unto the Magic Christian, I was a believer and convinced that this film belongs right up there with Sellers greatest works.If you haven't seen Peter Sellers take his adventurous 5 course diner at a French restaurant, haven't experienced Yul Brunner singing "About the Boy" in drag to an inebriated Roman Polanski or a crowd of essential British citizens wading through a tank of urine and manure for paper money, then you haven't seen it all. And by the way: if you're a Christopher Lee and Dracula fan, you haven't seen it all either if you haven't seen Sir Christopher on board the Magic Christian.To those among the readers who have been put off from watching this by certain critiques of the time who gave the movie a finger or those who believe that the film is a random sequence of anarchic and even more random gags and sketches, please reconsider. Believe an old movie buff who says: this movie is a forgotten gem!

fedor8 Maltin the Leonard calls this pathetically pretentious comedy "fiendishly funny", which is in itself the best confirmation and most dire warning one can hope to get that a movie sucks. When Leonard gives a film his unholy blessing, then that sort of becomes "a seal of disapproval". If he says it's black then it must be white: that nerdy critic is the perfect anti-litmus test.Based on a novel by Marxist Terry Southern (who gave us lovely cinematic garbage such as "Easy Rider", "Barbarella", and Kubrick's vastly overrated and unfunny "Dr.Strangelove"), this absurdist experimental comedy makes the rather trite point that people are bribable, greedy, obsessed with money, la-di-da... What an amazing discovery Terry had made there: "Hey, I just figured out that people lust after money! I must write a novel in which I can hammer that point home, over and over, through a series of oh-so symbolic vignettes!" Money rules the world! Eureka! What a shock...You gotta love it when a hypocritical Western Marxist, of all people, drones on about the supposed evils of Capitalism and money. What I'D like to know is how much money Southern earned from his TMC book and movie profits, and to which charities he gave all his money away to, the generous and ungreedy Leninist that he is, totally and utterly incorruptible and uninterested in money, the hippie idealist that he surely must have been... Oh, but I forgot: the movie flopped, which means it made no money. How ironic. What sweet poetic justice. Apparently, the audiences made the strange error of expecting a movie billed as a comedy to be funny. How weird of them; don't they know that comedies are all supposed to be unfunny, dumb satires? A very rich man (Sellers) decides to adopt Ringo "The Lucky Beatle" Starr, and no reason is given. They then proceed to harass everyone in sight, but mostly rich people, but again no explanation is given. Sellers has two sisters, but their inclusion is pointless: they serve no purpose in the story at all. The movie is like a bunch of badly strung-together sketches that are almost never funny. The exceptions are the John Cleese scene and the mildly amusing Spike Milligan scene. The rest is a mixture of confusing, chaotic, weird-for-the-sake-of-it drudgery that just screams SIXTIES (in the negative sense). Watching Yul Brunner in drag as he caresses Polanski's nose and sings for minutes (which seemed like hours) is the absolute low-point in this crap-fest. In the meantime, most of the cast mumble half the time, making it difficult to understand half the bull...Even the music is garbage. Paul McCartney donated one of his "throwaway songs" to the movie. Sort of like: "You can have this one. I wouldn't even put it on a C-side - if there were such a thing - but it should do for your movie." "Come & Get It" is played AD NAUSEAM throughout TMC, but the vile repetitiousness of the movie's same-subject skits (greed, greed, greed...) blends in well with the annoying song.The movie's finale includes celebratory images of Che Guevara and Mao Tse-Tung, i.e. two mass murderers - and I, for one, believe that being greedy for cash is a comparably tiny sin when put in contrast to GENOCIDE. There is nothing quite as touching as the humanism of a Left-wing extremist. They so care about the proletariat and humankind... Sniffle. There is also a "Crush Capitalism" banner being waved in that appallingly chaotic, idiotic (and other "tic"s) finale. I do so regret that Mr. Terry Holier-Than-Thou Uninterested-In-Materialistic-Possessions Southern isn't alive today so that I could ask His Red Deity why he let CAPITALIST companies and corporations distribute his ineptly written novels and films, if he is such a back-to-basics back-to-the-cave Communist... The general rule with "humanists" is this: the more a "humanitarian" is known for his "selfless self-sacrificing work", the bigger his villas and the faster his private jets are. (At this point I would like to say "hi" to Bono, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, Steven Spielberg, George Bernard Shaw, and Lady Di. May you all rot in Heaven, for ye are all so so utterly unselfish and wonderful.) TMC ends with Peter Sellers saying: "There must be a better way." How utterly poignant. Yes, Southern's idea of a better way is going back to nature, which is so veeeery cleverly symbolized by Sellers and Starr taking their sleeping bags into a London park. Southern was an anti-intellectual moron, hence his pitiful and arrogant attempts to "enlighten" us - the ready-to-be-brainwashed proletariat viewers - about this "Red New Way" deserves the biggest laugh. Meanwhile, while that movie was being released into UK and US cinemas, thousands upon thousands of innocent civilians were being killed in Mao's Happy China... Where are the 60s movies crying out for political change THERE?