Hands down without an other flick coming in 2nd place. I will strive to have either disks or downloads freely available (whatever is the predominant format at such time} for any attendee who is twisted enough to want to see what it was that inspired and sustained me.

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?

I had waited almost 40 years before finally catching up with 1969's "The Magic Christian" the other day, and am still stunned with disbelief that the film has turned out to be so singularly wretched. Scripted by Terry Southern in the same year as his superb "Easy Rider" and featuring an all-star cast, the picture is nevertheless consistently and appallingly awful. In it, a British kajillionaire, Guy Grand, played by Peter Sellers, adopts, for no apparent reason, a young man named Youngman (funny, right?), played by Ringo Starr, who he finds living in the local park, and the two set about observing mankind's greed and hypocrisy and snobbery, or something like that. The virtually plot less film consists of a group of barely connected skits, and every single one of them--a stripteasing Hamlet, a boardroom meeting, bird hunting with machine gun and mortar, a dog show, an indoor war game, a visit to a gourmet restaurant, a boxing match, a sculling competition, a wrecked auction, and a cruise on the luxury liner The Magic Christian--bombs miserably and fails to provoke a laugh. It's like the worst episode of "Laugh In" or "SNL" that you've ever seen, and all the cameo players--Laurence Harvey, Raquel Welch, Richard Attenborough, Yul Brynner, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Roman Polanski, Christopher Lee--go completely wasted. Please understand that I AM a fan of anarchic British humor, and love Monty Python and Benny Hill and even '67's "Casino Royale" (which picture's crazy final 10 minutes resemble the shipboard pandemonium aboard The Magic Christian a bit), but this picture just did not work for me. The Badfinger and Thunderclap Newman tunes are a welcome distraction here from the vacuousness on screen. I am very sad to have to give this one a big fat raspberry.

One day the fabulously wealthy Sir Guy Grand who is Peter Sellers with a much larger nose finds a young orphan kid in a park. On the spur of the moment he adopts young Ringo Starr, probably because Ringo has a well known honker in real life and Sellers sees something of himself in Ringo.The idea is that Sellers has to have someone not just to leave his money to, but someone to impart his accumulated wisdom of the years which is boiled up into one single thought; that EVERYBODY has his price. The rest of the film is a Monty Pythonesque group of skits in which Sellers tries to prove just that to Starr. They range from Laurence Harvey doing a striptease while doing Hamlet's soliloquy to a beat cop eating a parking ticket for 500 pounds. The title The Magic Christian refers to a Titanic like cruise ship that only caters to the upper crust. Sellers and Starr integrate that ship's maiden voyage in a most interesting fashion.That the film is like Monty Python is no accident with Graham Chapman and John Cleese doing the writing. Ringo's former Beatle companero, Paul McCartney wrote The Magic Christian theme, Come and Get It which sums up the philosophy of the film.After almost 40 years, The Magic Christian is acidly funny, but a still unsettling.