Latest news with #MontyPythonandtheHolyGrail
The National
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
Family-run cafe overlooking famous Scottish castle closes suddenly
Castle Stalker View Cafe and Giftshop closed their doors for good at the start of May, according to local reports. The venue was popular with locals and tourists as its terrace offered 'stunning' views of Loch Linnhe, the Islands of Mull and Lismore. Along with its loch views, the cafe was popular with those visiting Castle Stalker, a four-storey tower house, located midway between Oban and Glen Coe. READ MORE: Gary Lineker issues statement as he's to leave the BBC this weekend The Scottish landmark name originates from the Gaelic 'Stalcaire,' which means hunter or falconer, and is a fortified building dating from 1320 and belonging to the MacDougalls. It is also well known as Castle Aaaaaaargh from the cult classic movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. (Image: Supplied) The cafe offered a selection of food including homemade scones, paninis and burgers, and also boasted a panoramic gift shop which sold jewellery, childrens' clothing and toys along with knitwear and pictures. Google indicates the business is now permanently closed, with the Castle Stalker View Cafe and Gift Shop's Facebook page also being taken down. On social media, one person who claimed to have worked at the cafe said the business closed its doors for good on Sunday, May 4. They said: 'I'm sorry to say, but both the cafe and shop are closed. I was working there in the shop and our last day of trading was Sunday, 4th May. 'All staff very upset to see it close as a lovely atmosphere to work in. Hoping that it might open again but we just don't know.' People flooded the comments of the post to share their disappointment that the business had closed, as one person said: 'So very sad as it was a great place to visit and the restaurant was so good, will miss going there. They added: 'Hope someone else will open it again soon.' While a second person said: That's awful, this was a great cafe, and staff were lovely, so sad they have had to close and staff losing their jobs. 'Hopefully someone buys it and gets it up and running again.' A third person added: 'Sad news.'
Miami Herald
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Miami Herald
Struggling fast-food chain has 2 locations, down from over 800
A one-time mighty and national fast-food chain seems a lot like the famous Monty Python Black Knight. The Knight, who appeared in the iconic "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," downplays his injuries as he gets hacked to pieces. Black Knight: 'Tis but a scratch. Arthur: A scratch? Your arm's off! Black Knight: No, it isn't. Arthur: Well, what's that then? BlackKnight: I've had worse. Arthur: You liar! It continues like this for a while until the Black Knight has lost both his arms and both his legs before telling Arthur,"All right; we'll call it a draw." As Arthur leaves, the Knight is outraged and calls after him. Don't miss the move: SIGN UP for TheStreet's FREE Daily newsletter "Oh, oh, I see, running away then. You yellow bastards! Come back here and take what's coming to you. I'll bite your legs off!" the Knight yells. Arthur Treacher's Fish & Chips has had all of its limbs lopped off as the chain which once had over 800 locations has dwindled to three. Despite that, its owners remain hopeful (perhaps irrationally hopeful) of a comeback. Nathan's Famous, the Coney Island hot dog chain known for its 4th of July eating contest, owns the Arthur Treacher's Fish & Chips brand and it had a plan for a comeback. "Arthur Treacher's was a major quick-service fried seafood chain founded in Columbus, Oh. that hit its peak in the 1970s with more than 800 locations. The UK-style fish and chips chain was named after British actor, Arthur Treacher, who was known for playing butler roles," Nation's Restaurant News reported. None of that information appears on the seafood brand's website which is basically blank aside from the addresses of the two remaining stores using the brand name. Nathan's tried to bring the brand back as a virtual kitchen in 2021. "We are thrilled to provide operators across the country with the opportunity to add Arthur Treacher's to their portfolio. Nathan's Famous and Arthur Treacher's have a long-standing relationship and we have worked diligently to keep the brand's traditional menu items while also evolving the menu to fit the Nathan's mantra of the 'craveable, memorable and Instagrammable' product that we believe both operators and customers will love," shared Nathan's Vice President James Walker. More Food News: Popular breakfast restaurant chain menu adds deal amid closuresPopular restaurant chain's massive change may anger customersWendy's menu adds fast-fast food take on hot new trend That effort, which included an expanded menu with more focus on shrimp, did not last very long. No statement has been made, but It's probably telling now that Nathan's Famous does not make any mention of the Arthur Treacher's brand on its website. You could argue that Arthur Treacher's is America's second-most famous barely existent seafood fast-food chain behind Long John Silver's. The chain, however, refuses to die and a third location recently opened. The near-dead chain just opened its third restaurant in the Cleveland area, returning to a spot it once had a location in over 30 years ago, After a fire delayed the homecoming, the new shop has opened for business. "We're here now. We're ready to go. Full interior renovation, all new equipment. New hoods, you name it. We didn't spare any expense on the inside of this building. It looks great and can't wait for you guys to see it," said Arthur Treacher's Operations Director Oliver Savander, News 5 Cleveland reported. The chain has not shared any plans for further expansion. Its near-blank website does include the hashtag "#treachyourself." A search for that brings you to the company's Facebook page which offers sporadic posts to the company's 3,100 followers. Related: Struggling national Mexican chain closes locations, gets new life Arthur Treacher's social media presence, however, has been saluting its recent 50% growth in store count. "This Lenten season just got even better. For the first time in a long time you now have THREE opportunities for the best fish & chips in Ohio!" it shared. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc.
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week
Following the record-breaking opening weekend for 'A Minecraft Movie' and the breakout success of Ryan Coogler's 'Sinners,' a new slate of blockbusters and indie films are hoping to drum up excitement in May about what 2025 has to offer in the cinema landscape. Starting with the weekend's wide releases, Marvel is betting big on 'Thunderbolts' after a series of underwhelming releases with 'Captain America: Brave New World' and 'The Marvels.' Starring Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Sebastian Stan and Wyatt Russell, the film follows an unconventional team that bands together after being sent on a rogue operative mission. To give 'Thunderbolts*' a different flair, Marvel's marketing has focused on the talent behind the camera that previously worked on A24 projects like 'Beef,' 'Midsommar' and 'A Different Man.' More from Variety For moviegoers not quite on the Marvel train, Nicolas Cage stars in the new psychological thriller 'The Surfer' directed by Lorcan Finnegan ('Vivarium' starring Jesse Eisenberg), which premiered at last year's Cannes. After returning to surf with his son at his childhood beach, Cage's character gets humiliated by the locals in 'a trippy slapdash comic nightmare,' Variety's Owen Gleiberman said in his review. So far, the film has an 88% critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Beginning Sunday, May 4, 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail' will be back in theaters for its 50th anniversary re-release. Over limited release, audiences can check out director Durga Chew-Bose's new take on Françoise Sagan's classic novel 'Bonjour Tristesse,' now starring Chloë Sevigny and Lily McInerny, while the indie neo-noir thriller 'A Desert,' featuring Sarah Lind, Kai Lennox and David Yow, follows a photographer in the American Southwest. Check back each week to find the latest releases in theaters, from major wide releases to niche independent titles. Friday, May 2 'Thunderbolts' Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures (Wide and Imax) 'The Surfer' Roadside Attractions (Wide) 'Magic Farm' Mubi (Wide) 'Bonjour Tristesse' Greenwich Entertainment (Limited) 'A Desert' Dark Sky Films (Limited) 'The Dumpling Queen' CMC Pictures (Limited) Sunday, May 4 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail' Fathom Events (50th Anniversary re-release) Best of Variety Sign up for Variety's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Wall Street Journal
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
Coconuts Still Clopping, ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail' Turns 50
After a week of shooting 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail' in 1974 the results were clear. Graham Chapman, who starred as King Arthur because nobody else wanted to play the straight man, 'said what a complete disaster we were making,' co-director Terry Gilliam later recalled for David Morgan's book 'Monty Python Speaks: The Complete Oral History.' Neither Mr. Gilliam nor the other director, Terry Jones, had any experience in making a movie, the main camera broke on the first day of shooting, the budget was laughable (roughly half a million dollars), and Jones and Mr. Gilliam kept contradicting each other's orders to the crew. 'What egomaniacs, megalomaniacs, useless pieces of s— we were,' was Chapman's assessment, according to Mr. Gilliam. But like the purportedly dead peasant in the movie ('I'm getting better'), the production wasn't quite so dead as all that. When the six Pythons began showing footage at the Stirling, Scotland, hotel where everyone stayed for the shoot, locals (many of whom served as extras) laughed heartily. And thanks to the debut of the 1969-74 BBC series 'Monty Python's Flying Circus' on American public television in the fall of 1974, fans were primed by the time the movie was released in the U.S. in April 1975, with a marketing strategy that included having a man clop together coconut halves on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Theaters are celebrating the 50th anniversary with screenings on May 4 and 7.
Washington Post
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail' turns 50 but still hasn't grown up
This essay killed me. Terry Jones, from somewhere in the back: 'You don't look dead to me.' I got better. But, honestly, what is left for a writer to say about 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail,' the seminal comedy that seemingly dropped from the heavens like one of the movie's cartoon God hands? Aside, of course, from 'Ni!' Far smarter, funnier and more insightful people than I have spent the past five decades poring over its every frame, so perhaps it's best to focus on how it made an entire generation of comedy nerds — emphasis on 'nerd' — pretty much undatable. 'You had to memorize 'Holy Grail,'' Jimmy Fallon once said. 'If you play 'Dark Side of the Moon' while you watch 'Holy Grail,' I guarantee you're not getting laid.' 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail,' written, directed, acted in and produced by the comedy troupe of Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Michael Palin and Jones, hopped into theaters like the Rabbit of Caerbannog 50 years ago and forever altered the trajectory of modern comedy. On Sunday and Wednesday it returns to screens nationwide, courtesy of Shout Studios and Fathom Entertainment. A legion of lovable losers (hi) were turned on to the movie (alongside 1978's 'Animal House' and 1974's 'Blazing Saddles') by their equally nerdy parents the way we'll probably show our kids the quotable comedies of our prime years in the 2000s, such as 'Anchorman' or 'Wet Hot American Summer.' We quoted 'Holy Grail' ad nauseam. ''Tis but a flesh wound' become our rallying cry. When we prepared meals, we would joke we were having 'lambs, and sloths, and carp, and anchovies, and orangutans, and breakfast cereals, and fruit bats, and large chulapas.' How many first dates ended when one of us accurately — thus, earsplittingly — quoted one of the Knights Who Say 'Ni!'? (If the answer is even one, which it undoubtedly is, the Pythons should be flogged.) And I cannot be the only one who, when preparing to get married, was told by my future spouse in no uncertain terms that our wedding invite could not include the question, 'What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?' Also, God bless if your name happened to be Tim. Some of us (hi) performed improv that we're glad was never filmed. Sadly, more of us (sigh, HI) thought improv would lead somewhere. For many, it sparked an obsession that did lead somewhere. For one, the film's secret language spoke to Judd Apatow, arguably the last defining voice in cinematic comedy. 'When I was a kid, I was obsessed with comedy but had no one — literally, no one — to talk to,' Apatow told the Guardian in 2009. 'So all my friends would be playing sports after school, and I'd go home alone and watch Monty Python.' He memorialized his experience in his cult classic high school TV show 'Freaks and Geeks,' set in 1980. In the pilot, the geeks skip the homecoming dance (to their parents' chagrin) for a screening of the 1975 movie. Later, after being traumatized by the jocks, they find solace in the movie. For a generation of geeks, it wasn't only a revelation, it was a warm blanket. One of the first movies I remember watching is 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail,' and I sincerely believe it informed my sense of humor if not my entire worldview. The guiding light of Monty Python was, of course, silliness. They believed that back in 1975, the world needed a touch more of it. In 2025, we need a chalice full. As in their time, modern politics lack a sense of play while emulating it. The Call of Duty/Elon Musk/Donald Trump-style 'own the other side' type of the right, which elates in the demonization, demoralization and submission of others. The cringeworthy performative play of the left, seeking to connect with voters. But as the Pythons probably would have guessed, that sense of play grew within the jesters of modern culture — sometimes mainstream, sometimes underground. 'The Simpsons' creator Matt Groening was inspired by the 'high-velocity sense of the absurd and not stopping to explain yourself.' The creators of 'South Park' were inspired by the crude animations found throughout the Python catalogue. That kind of boundless play — the kind you find when you're a kid bumming around the neighborhood with your friends, creating grand adventures out of nothing but imagination and maybe a few props either purchased (like dolls) or discovered (like weirdly shaped rocks), the kind inherent in riffing with buddies in an accidentally and organically secret language — has now migrated to social media, seen in the style of non-sequitur short clips that sprang up from Vine and migrated to TikTok. Here's an alpaca playing soccer. Here's a dog with a cicada buzzing around in his mouth. Here's a kid who really likes turtles. (Yes, my algorithm tends to feed me animal videos.) This is where it lives now: that sense of whimsy, of discovery, of wonder. The Pythons taught us that all the rules are simply human-made. Anything can happen. That's what I remember most about seeing 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail' for the first time. I spent most of it thinking, 'You can do that?!' The movie begins before it begins, explaining to the viewer that anything is on the table by subtitling the credits with fake (and obviously incorrect) Swedish subtitles that slowly transform into English ones about a moose biting someone's sister. Sometime after a credit 'signed' by Richard M. Nixon, these very British words flash across the screen: 'We apologise for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible have been sacked.' And then another, announcing the people who did the sacking have been sacked. The gag doesn't stop there. The jokes shift from moose to llamas, and the whole ridiculous sequence lights the beacon for what's to come: Not a second of screen time will be wasted without some attempt to be funny. That promise is fulfilled seconds later, when the film begins with an extended argument between King Arthur and castle guard about whether a migratory European swallow could carry a coconut on its journey. Then we're immediately in a town, where a medieval garbageman is rolling around a cart topped with dead (or, in one instance, almost dead) bodies and yelling, 'Bring out your dead.' The economy of the movie is striking. Sans the closing credits, the entire genre-defining comedy runs under 90 minutes — nearly all of them memorable and easily referenced by shorthand some 50 years later. One of the movie's tricks is how simple it all seems while it also pushes the boundaries of form and imagination rather than social norms. It doesn't try to shock as much as surprise, scandalize as much as delight. The harshest things said in the whole movie are probably the French taunter's infamous insults to Arthur and his crew: 'I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries! … Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time!' Yes, many of the jokes seem almost designed for pre- or newly pubescent boys (and, in fairness, probably were): squirting blood, goofy made-up words, a castle of horny young maidens. But as I've gotten older, aspects of the movie revealed themselves like said maiden to Arthur and his knights. Sure, I still love watching the Black Knight get his limbs lopped off while confidently insisting on continuing the sword fight. But what sends me reeling now is when King Arthur stumbles upon an anarcho-syndicalist commune whose members reject his kingship because they never elected him. As stirring music swells, Arthur explains to the unimpressed workers how the Lady of the Lake gave him Excalibur, thus cementing his status as king of the Britons. 'Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government,' one responds. 'Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony. You can't expect to wield supreme power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you.' In 2025, the exchange almost feels like one you would find on X or Bluesky. When our American body politic is as absurd as the limbless Black Knight, the sequence is strangely comforting (or terrifying, depending on the day). Are farcical aquatic ceremonies really that bad? Arthur, of course, doesn't take kindly to this, grabbing the peasant, who shouts: 'See the violence inherent in the system! Help, I'm being repressed!' The absurdity and, ultimately, banality of power structures — the political and religious — are baked throughout the film. The ruling class — in this case Arthur, his knights and their coconuts — are nothing more than fools, ultimately in control of essentially nothing. Of course, Monty Python would never put forth something so boring, so droll. They sneak in political commentary the same way the Trojan Rabbit in the movie tries, and miserably fails, to sneak Arthur and his band into the French castle. A four-sentence exchange between peasants, as Arthur 'gallops' past, gets the point across. 'Who's that, then?' 'I don't know. Must be a king.' 'Why?' 'He hasn't got s--- all over him.' Ultimately, for any writer foolish enough to attempt it, a search to find deeper meaning in the movie is as absurd as Arthur's search for the grail itself and would rightfully be mocked by the Pythons just as heartily. Better to go watch 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail' for the 100th time. And, after that, go find a nice shrubbery. Maybe laurel.
