For a wonderfully surreal time

…pop in the new Monty Python and the Holy Grail DVD, set the audio track to French (or maybe just mute it if you actually speak French), and turn on the ‘subtitles for people who hate the film.’

I watched about half an hour of the movie like this last night, and kept bouncing between laughing and just staring at the screen in bewildered amazement. I wasn’t sure what people meant when they mentioned that the ‘subtitles for people who hate the film’ were made up of text from Shakespeare’s ‘Henry IV, Part II’ — I thought they’d just run the text of the play underneath the Holy Grail. However, they’ve actually grabbed lines from Henry IV that are as close as they can be to the actual wording and intent of the lines in the Holy Grail that they’re replacing, and the end effect is truly, wonderfully bizarre. Some scenes don’t quite work, but in others, the correlation between what’s happening onscreen and what the subtitles are saying is freakishly accurrate.

I think this subtitle track may be one of my favorite features on the disc — probably not the one I’ll visit most often, but in terms of the sheer twisted humor of the idea (and the work it must have taken to assemble the track), I think it’s absolutely amazing.