The only problem is I can't remember how the second one ended...

I don't know how many of you went poking around that link I put up for Chicago last night, but the Cap'n did a bit more digging and found the following classes from 1999-2008, any of which would have brightened up a semester:

Mastroianni and Keitel: Comparative Masculinities and Ethnicities
Eastern European New Wave
Issues in Film Music
Sound Theory/Sound Practice
New Deal Culture: Stage, Screen and the Public Sphere in the 1930s
African-American Migration Narratives
Eisenstein and Soviet Aesthetic Theory
The Divided Heaven: The 1960s in West Germany and the German Democratic Republic
Slavic Critical Theory from Jakobson to Zizek
The Persistence of Surrealism: Buñuel and Beyond
Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev
Novel Films: Cinematic Adaptations of Russian and Polish Literary Works
Pinocchio's Afterlife in Cinema, Literature, and Popular Culture
The Detective and Crime Film
Jan Svankmajer and Contemporary Surrealism
Cinema and the Queer Avant-Garde, 1920 to 1950
From Page to Screen: Literary Adaptation in the Italian Cinema
Cinema as Vernacular Modernism

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In other news, I've been watching IFC's Monty Python: Almost the Truth, which is - if possible - even more thorough and comprehensive than previous documentaries on the subject. That, of course, is exactly what the opening title song says, which itself is a re-working of the title song to The Life of Brian and sung once again by Sonia Jones.

You'd do well not to heed the episode titles, as "The Not So Interesting Beginnings" is actually quite interesting, particularly for the access to the British comedy that preceded Monty Python's Flying Circus. The episode does a good job of juggling just how the Pythons met each other, circled around the core group writing for David Frost, and came together almost as an accident.

as a side note: the clips from Do Not Adjust Your Set and At Last the 1948 Show look much better here than they do on the dvd releases. Curiously, Flying Circus looks roughly the same, which raises questions about whether the show is actually going to be cleaned up for the inevitable Blu Ray release. Considering how astonishing The Prisoner looks, I'd be disappointed if the Python result was merely a dvd quality upgrade.

Sensing that most people want to jump straight to the show itself - even though they ought to watch episode one - most of the "famous Python fans" begin popping up in episode two. Truthfully, I found it less odd seeing Russell Brand and Steve Coogan juxtaposed than I did realizing Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson is one of the very first celebrities to describe the show from a fan's perspective. Odd.

I haven't watched episodes 3-6 yet, although they should be quite interesting; other than the book The Pythons by the Pythons, you don't often hear the members of the group talking about why they kept splitting up and reforming for the movies, which is what the second half of the six hours is about. I shall dutifully report my findings upon completing the series.