Brazil

BRAZIL is Terry Gilliam's masterpiece. Cowritten by Gilliam, playwright Tom Stoppard, and Charles McKeown, the cult-favorite film is set in a futuristic society laden with red tape and bureaucracy. When a bug (literally) gets in the system, an innocent man is killed, leading mild-mannered Sam Lowry (an excellent Jonathan Pryce) to reexamine what he wants out of life. He decides to fight the totalitarian system in his search for freedom--and the woman he loves. The terrific, offbeat cast features Robert De Niro as a renegade heating engineer; Katherine Helmond as Sam's ever-younger mother; Michael Palin as a government-sanctioned torturer with a distaste for upsetting the status quo; Bob Hoskins as a vengeful Central Services employee; Jim Broadbent as a wacko plastic surgeon; the wonderful Ian Holm as Sam's nerve-ridden, pitiful boss, afraid of his own signature; and Kim Greist as the rebel Sam falls for. The look of BRAZIL is relentless, overwhelming, and outrageously spectacular. Giant monoliths rise from the street; government offices are a network of computers, pneumatic tubes, and narrow hallways built with Nazi-like precision; and apartment complexes are a maze of washed-out grays and numbers, all frighteningly uniform. The terrorist explosions actually bring color into this dull, monochramatic world. BRAZIL is a nightmare vision of the future, yet also hysterically funny and incisive, one of the most inventive, influential, and important films of the 1980s.

Cast:

"...Gilliam creates this dehumanizing universe with demented wit, sane anger and the most eye-popping visuals since METROPOLIS..." -- Peter Travers , (Rolling Stone)

"...Landmark retro-future tragicomedy..." -- Rating: A+ -- Chris Willman , (Entertainment Weekly)

"...BRAZIL, a jaunty, wittily observed vision of an extremely bleak future, is a superb example of the power of comedy to underscore serious ideas, even solemn ones....Ambitious visual style..." -- Janet Maslin , (New York Times)

"...It's a knockout..." -- Michael Wilmington , (Los Angeles Times)

"...It's rich in irony, steeped in surrealism and touched with genius....Easily one of the greatest movies of the '80s..." -- Dan Jolin , (Total Film)

"...Hugely inventive..." -- Geoffrey Macnab , (Sight and Sound)

"Gilliam's belief in the evil of banality is on full display here, made all the more dazzling by Norman Garwood and Maggie Gray's Oscar-nominated art direction." -- Grade: B+ -- Keith Staskiewicz , (Entertainment Weekly)

Shipping or Dimension weight in pounds: 0.9

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