A Liar's Autobiography (now on video)

[A LIAR'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY is now available on home video.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

I usually have OCD-style rules about always reading the pre-existing book before watching a movie adaptation - not because I'm all that insane; I just need some kind of protocols that I maintain to put the brakes on me wasting my life possibly watching every movie available at all times. And that way I get an excuse to read a few interesting books, apropos of very little.

One book I managed to skip was A Liar's Autobiography, the 1986 memoir by Graham Chapman, UK comedy writer/actor best known for being one of the Monty Python troupe. The urbane, pipe-smoking Chapman - who would be dead at 48, just four years later, of throat cancer - evidently took a `Pythonesque' approach (well, what would you expect, the Spanish Inquisition?) to his life story, evidently, sort of, based on the evidence of this new feature-film adaptation, also called A LIAR'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY. Guess it's a bit of an occupational hazard, but how truly `Pythonesque' Chapman's Life of Graham was I wouldn't know, because, as I say, I never read the book. Too busy singing about spam with a bunch of Vikings in a diner.