Review of A Liar's Autobiography: The Untrue Story of Monty Python's Graham Chapman (2012) by Stuart K — 27 Apr 2014

Based upon Graham Chapman's A Liar's Autobiography, Volume VI (1980), which was a fictionalised take on his life, this animated take was directed by Bill Jones, Jeff Simpson and Ben Timlett, who were behind the documentary Monty Python: Almost the Truth (Lawyers Cut).

It's visually striking, but it's more surreal than funny. Narrated by Graham Chapman, taken from an audio reading of his book recorded in 1986, it tells us of his "life", his childhood growing up with his father (Michael Palin) and mother (Terry Jones).

:P How Chapman found out he was gay, and the trouble he had coming out to his parents and people he knew, and how he gave up his career as a doctor to go into comedy after a chance encounter with the Queen Mother (Palin again), and getting work in TV with David Frost (John Cleese), but when he started Monty Python, he descended into alcoholism, but he beat the booze and went to live in Hollywood as a tax dodge.

It has some brilliantly animated scenes, but the joke that it's a fictionalised biopic of Chapman's own life, (and knows it), does work against it sometimes, especially if you want to hear some true facts.

But it does have some pretty memorable sequences, some sexual and some violent, oh and Cameron Diaz appearing as Sigmund Freud... :P.