Brazil [1985]

See Larger Image	List Price: £15.99 Our Price: £4.98 Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours Manufacturer: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment Starring: Jonathan Pryce, Kim Greist, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm Directed By: Terry Gilliam Average Customer Rating:


Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1 Audience Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over Binding: DVD EAN: 5039036011891 Format: Anamorphic Label: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment Manufacturer: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment Number Of Discs: 1 Number Of Items: 1 Publisher: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment Region Code: 2 Release Date: 2003-05-19 Running Time: 137 Studio: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment Theatrical Release Date: 1985-12-18
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Editorial Reviews: If Franz Kafka had been an animator and film director--oh, and a member of Monty Python's Flying Circus--this is the sort of outrageously dystopian satire one could easily imagine him making. However, Brazil was made by Terry Gilliam, who is all of the above except, of course, Franz Kafka. Be that as it may, Gilliam sure captures the paranoid-subversive spirit of Kafka's The Trial (along with his own Python animation) in this bureaucratic nightmare-comedy about a meek governmental clerk named Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) whose life is destroyed by a simple bug. Not a software bug, a real bug (no doubt related to Kafka's famous Metamorphosis insect) that gets smooshed in a printer and causes a typographical error unjustly identifying an innocent citizen, one Mr. Buttle, as suspected terrorist Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro). When Sam becomes enmeshed in unravelling this bureaucratic glitch, he himself winds up labelled as a miscreant. The movie presents such an unrelentingly imaginative and savage vision of 20th-century bureaucracy that it almost became a victim of small-minded studio management itself--until Gilliam surreptitiously screened his cut for the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, who named it the best movie of 1985 and virtually embarrassed Universal into releasing it. --Jim Emerson
Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: Some will like this, I didn't Comment: Fans of Gilliam will find much to keep them happy here. There's nightmarish, dystopian imagery in spades, dream sequences are lavish and the finale is really quite masterful. The problem however, lies in the rest of the film. The humour kept me interested for about the first 30-45 minutes, after which it starts to wear a little thin. The same can be said about the plot - it starts out snappily enough but becomes seemingly endless in the latter half of the film. Logical ending points give rise to yet further story development and at over 2 hours in length, it became quite a slog to get through. Lastly, the characterisation just didn't work for me. Not sure if it was the acting, the script, or both but I didn't care too much for any of the characters, something that made it even harder to remain engaged with the film. In conclusion, I think this film could have done with a good deal of editing - the final scenes are memorable, but getting there is fairly forgettable. 2.5/5 Customer Rating: Summary: In short. Comment: Genius. Don't know what films you one-starers saw or what world you live in. Customer Rating: Summary: A True Classic Comment: More than 20 years after I first saw this film I still like it, which is not the same as saying that I entirely enjoy watching it. There are particular scenes I can always vividly recall, Robert DeNiro's subversive plumber character swooping off into the night, and later on vanishing in a swirl of wind-blown newspaper. These things are always a matter of taste, and to my taste this is a 5-star film. Customer Rating: Summary: don't waste 137mins of your life on this! Comment: I tried to watch the movie until the end, really I did. But when my other half thought revising was more interesting than eating candy & watching this film, what more can I say, it was rubbish! It just seems to spin off into the writers mind far too much with no real direction at times, so much so you can FF through whole scenes & not actually loose any of the story line. At the end rather than thinking at least I can say "I've watched it", I was left feeling, "why did I bother" and "I'll never admit to watching it". Customer Rating: Summary: Hilarious and horrifying Comment: Put simply this brilliant flim is a Monty Python take on 1984. In fact this is an example of how inventive flims can be outside the restraints of genre. The entertaning and twisty plot is set in a world as well realised as any sci-fi. The bleak story of how Jonathan Pryce's everyman character is destroyed by his romantic fantasies is balanced nicely by the dry, black humour you would expect of a former Python. More Reviews