brazil by terry gilliam

« An alternative version of George Orwell's 1984, film critic Pauline Kael perhaps said it best when she described Brazil as "a retro-futurist fantasy—a melancholy, joke-ridden view of the horribleness of where we are now and the worse horribleness of where we're heading. It's like a stoned, slapstick 1984 ; a nightmare comedy in which the comedy is just an aspect of the nightmarishness. The title refers to pop escapism of the past—what you can only dream about in the squalor and sporadic terrorist violence of an Anglo-American police state “somewhere in the 20th century.” Visually, it's an original, bravura piece of moviemaking, with a weirdly ingenious vertical quality : the camera always seems to be moving up and down, rarely across.

You get the feeling that people live and work squashed at the bottom of hollow towers.

The clothes, like the furnishings and the ancient TV sets and assorted gadgetry, suggest that nothing has been made or manufactured since the 40s. It's a thrift-shop world of the future." Fortunately Gilliam didn't quit filmmaking, but it would be almost five years before he made his next feature, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (in 1989). Obviously Universal didn't release that film - something they obviously didn't regret since it was a hugely expensive film that went on to be one of the biggest box office disasters ever. In the end the ex- Monty Python animator (he contrived all those extravagant opening sequences for their shows and movies) and director of Time Bandits went on to make the time travel sci-fi classic 12 Monkeys and modern day fantasy The Fisher King .

However, things look bleak for Gilliam again. His movie adaptation of the Hunter S.

Thompson novel, Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas was allowed be the sacrificial lamb at the American box office when it opened on the same weekend as the over-hyped piece of celluloid excrement known as Godzilla last year. Needless to say, it got stomped. PLOT SYNOPSIS Terry Gilliam has a warped mind. We all knew he was a tad bizarre when we saw his eccentric animation on Monty Python's Flying Circus and other British shows in the 1960's, but this is the film that separated him from the Python pack and established him as not only one of the greatest directors of our times, but as an intellectual, cryptic and bizarre individual.

Brazil is a black, black, black comedy set in an alternate reality or a future (the film cryptically says in the beginning 'Somewhere in the 20th century') probably in England. The world is ruled by 'The Ministry' which serves as a place where everything is ultra- organised and super efficient. But everyone seems to be happy because everything is convenient.. »