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The Rutles - All You Need Is Cash

The Rutles - All You Need Is Cash

List Price: $19.99
Your Price: $15.99
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Very funny--and well thought out
Review: When watching this movie, the more the viewer knows the Beatles, the harder he will laugh!! Eric Idle (of Monty Python fame) did just and excellent job researching to put this together. You will see a lot of familar faces, like Glida Radner, and even George Harrison!

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: pretty good movie
Review: this movie was overall enjoyable, but it was slow at times. the humor was very good in it. i especially liked the part where they were making the movie 'ouch' (which was really a take off from 'help'). george harrison makes a small appearance in the movie as a news caster interviewing a man on the 'rutle corps'. watch it--it's good.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: THE DVD HAS EXTRA FOOTAGE IN THE FILM!
Review: Yes, Although the running time is the same, The DVD has extra footage that is not on the Rhino VHS and it's not just the deleted scenes.
There are some extended scenes wich are halarious and concert footage of The Rutles singing Number One live!
And it's all in the movie itself!
So if you already have the VHS, It's well worth getting the DVD.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: If You Love The Beatles ...
Review: ... and a good laugh (no, a HOWL), then buy The Rutles. I've seen it at least 500 times, and never get tired of it. it's like Abbey Road ... the more you take it in, the more it reveals.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Twist and Rut
Review: Probably THE funniest moive I have ever seen - but one must be a fan of the Beatles and/or Monty Python to appreciate the humour. Guaranteed you will be quoting this film for years afterwards.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Like Spinal Tap, but funny.
Review: A classic parody--and what better subject than the Fab Four? Besides being much, much funnier than Spinal Tap, The Rutles is precise in nearly every detail, so the more you know about the Beatles, the funnier it is. I had to tweak my stereo a bit for the "Rhinophoinic" sound but other than this, a perfect 5 stars. Do not miss.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Eric Idle's crowning ex-Python achievement
Review: Upon the break-up of the TV Pythons, John Cleese studied the fundamentals of French and Italian farce in order to create the outstanding 'Fawlty Towers', Michael Palin and Terry Jones went back to boyhood adventure stories to devise the brilliant 'Ripping Yarn' parodies, and Eric Idle teamed up with ex-Bonzo Neil Innes to write the 'Rutland Weekend Television' (RWT) series for BBC2. Borrowing most of its name from a genuine TV station (London Weekend Television), RWT anticipated the unstoppable rise of regional television produced on a shoestring. (Several comic teams have copied the idea since, for instance the Deayton/Perkins/Pope-created 'KY-TV'.) I saw many of the episodes of RWT, but it's no coincidence that they were rarely (if ever) repeated and that the series has never made it to video. The sketch failure rate was very high on RWT, far higher than even late Python episodes. We watched RWT less for the jokes and more for the anarchy. The Rutles started off as short spoof pop video for one episode and got expanded into this 70-minute mini-film documentary.

'The Rutles' was an exception to the rule that a single sketch can't be built up into a full series or film. It worked brilliantly. Until buying this DVD, I had only seen the film once -- on its original UK broadcast at 8.45 on 27th March 1978 -- but I was instantly overcome with Rutlemania, buying the LP and writing off to WEA for any posters or Rutle merchandise they could send me.

I'm sure the Rutles documentary helped to define the classic visual moments in the Beatles' only story. George Harrison was closely involved in the project, so it had the stamp of approval of at least 25% of the original Fab Four. According to Eric's commentary on the DVD, both Ringo and John also enjoyed it. I suspect that Paul McCartney had more problems with it; Eric's imitation of Paul's wide-eyed innocence is stunningly accurate, and the scene in which Dirk is struggling to compose a nursery-rhyme-like song for his nuptials with Bianca Jagger is an incisive and wicked depiction!

The jokes, such as they are, have not stood the test of time. From this evidence, Eric comes across as better at networking than at humorous scriptwriting. As is obvious from the stars who appear in the film and Eric's constant name-dropping on the DVD commentary, he has known many of the top stars in the pop business. The improvisational star of the video is really Mick Jagger, lying through his teeth, and as Eric cleverly points out, giving away far too much about his true feelings towards the Beatles and women. The other star is Neil Innes, for his song-writing and his Lennon impersonation.

One of the best decisions that Idle took for the creation of this film was to play the pop videos pretty well straight, without trying to insert many jokes into the performance. Most of the opportunities for visual humour within a mimed pop video tend to be fairly Chaplinesque knockabout and don't last well for the tenth viewing. (Not that any of us expected in those pre-video days to be able to see programmes multiple times.) In those videos, Idle reveals himself as arch-copyist: so long as you change just a few actions or expressions, then copying the original Beatles films as closely as possible is the best way to let the humour in Innes' songs to shine through. Innes revealed in a radio interview at the time that his composing strategy was to take the original Lennon/McCartney tune and change as few notes as he could get away with, without being prosecuted for copyright theft. (No doubt Harrison, with his subsequent experience of being sued for stealing the tune of the Chiffons' 'He's So Fine' for 'My Sweet Lord', could have helped him here!)

Eric reveals that he's writing a new Rutles documentary, though it's hard to believe it will be as good as this one. Presumably the one-legged Leggy Mountbatten returns to Britain in response to the teacher shortage, announces that he is no longer quite the man he once was, and gets engaged to Dirk. Stig sits at home in his fortress, having become a vigilante. When he's not waiting with his nuclear arsenal for the next attempted break-in, he's busy inventing new media formats (beyond CD and DVD) to enable yet more re-releases of Rutles' material. Nasty can only be contacted via e-mail; he runs an Internet Web site which dispenses multi-faith blessings and online tea at reasonably exorbitant prices. And Barry has sold his chain of hair salons to present a weekly radio show for the over-60s; he also does the voice-over for a series of sex education videos.

The problem is that too much tragedy has crept into the Beatles' lives in the past quarter-century for it to be made fun of. Awareness of personal tragedy may be the key reason why many comedians who hit the big time in their 20s gradually become less funny as they get older and their loved ones die.

But 'All You Need is Cash' is Idle at his post-Python zenith, not quite in his 20s, but close enough. I much appreciate the arrival of this film on DVD and can only lament the fact that I had to visit the US to buy it. This is a region-1 only DVD, so those of us in region-X will need to run it on our PCs or multi-region players.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Rutles 4-ever!
Review: Though often overshadowed by that OTHER band from England, the Rutles were a great influence on the music of the sixties. Unfortunately, this documentary is the only remaining Rutles film in the catalog that is available to consumers.

Perhaps interest in this DVD will encourage their record company (Banana Records) to re-release the Rutles entire film and audio catalog so we can determine once and for all who the prime band of the decade was!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Great Little film, Pretty good DvD, a MUST for Beatle fans.
Review: Was i Dissapointed, Yes and no, as always :)..for one- the "songs only" feature i expected to be like an album that i could play, when ALL it was was scenes from the movie itself meshed together, it is great if you want to just listen to the songs, and it does serve as sort of a second chapter selection. (but i was expecting it to be the Full length songs in audio Only, like a Rutles cd included as an extra) The film itself is great, the audio commentary was very ammusing, and informative (i don't usually enjoy most commentaries) the notes taken from the book by Eric Idle were also informative, and hilarious too.. picture gallery was ok, but not that great other than having the album covers, and they don't have ALL of the album covers for some reason, it would of been nice to have all of them, and make it to where you have a page to choose which picture you want (with a small sample) instead of the dumb 10second skip thing.the animated menus are great, and the rest are pretty good too.. is the movie "Really Really Great"? =No its Not, but it is "Really good".. :) i am a huge Beatle fan, if i wasn't this wouldn't probably apeal to me, but i can't see how theBeatles couldn't be appealing to EVERYBODY.. :) only 70minutes, it does cover a lot of stuff, and its fast paced/edited .. like most Python stuff -different skits are sure to annoy different people, and others will love them.. some parts are just plain silly, some are really funny/smart/well timed.. and yes some are even classic.. this DOES hold repeated viewings.. my favorite thing that Eric Idle ever did... i love it..

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: DVD really worth the cash
Review: The movie is a brilliant parody (as has already been stated in other reviews). I wish to comment on the DVD presentation.

The movie itself is an excellent transfer of an old (fairly) low budget movie. There are some scratches and other minor imperfections, but on the whole it looks great. The sound is also well restored and makes good use of the surround channels without going berserk.

The extras are: an introduction by Eric Idle (about 60 seconds and quite amusing); a commentary track that is both amusing and informative; an option to play the music video's only and a couple of other things.

On the whole, this is excellent value if you like the Beatles or Monty Python (as Idle and Innes wrote all the music).


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