If you are not prepared for something completely different, the movie can become tedious rather quickly.
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"Brazil" is the kind of satire people either love or hate. I mostly love it, but I can easily see why other people do not. If you are familiar with Monty Python's Terry Gilliam, the American of the group who did all the wacky animation, you will already be familiar with the movie's style. Director Gilliam creates a brave new world of bizarre sights and sounds, a kind of visual representation of the cartoons he had been creating for so long. If you are not prepared for something completely different, the movie can become tedious rather quickly.
The year is indefinite, but it appears to be a droll Orwellian future filled with rampant bureaucracy, paranoia, and gadgetry. Orwell wrote his novel "1984" in 1948, and in Gilliam's world everything from clothes to architecture has the look and feel of the late forties. Gilliam has said that he was trying to show the past in the future, what the French call a retro-future, because we often fail to learn from our previous mistakes.
In Gilliam's retro-future, everything, and by extension everyone, is connected by ducts, wires, hoses, pipes, and pneumatic tubing. It's a surrealistic nightmare world of endless red tape, conformity, number crunching, mindless busy work, and regimented inefficiency. Into this world is set an innocent, idealistic dreamer--Jonathan Pryce--who falls in love with his dream girl, literally--Kim Greist--another innocent. Together, they wander through a series of misadventures, encountering a number of famous names along the way--Robert De Nero, Bob Hoskins, Ian Holm, Katherine Helmond, Ian Richardson, and old pal Michael Palin. I am quite sure I even noticed Sir John Gielgud in there, but, if so, he goes uncredited in the cast list.
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[release]178[/release]