Brazil (The Criterion Collection Single Disc Special Editon)
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Actor: Anthony G. Brown, Jim Broadbent, Patrick Connor, Robert De Niro, Roger Ashton-GriffithsBrand: Image Entertainment
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.1; English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.1
Format: Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.78:1
Running Time: 132 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-09-05
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Criterion
DVD Reviews of Brazil (The Criterion Collection Single Disc Special Editon)
DVD Review: Humorous biblical horror in future times
Summary: 5 Stars
Terry Gilliam is a raider, a looter, a thief, a borrower by definition.
So here like in most his other films he borrows, with the intention of
not giving anything back, something from about everyone. He borrows
from the Bible and an Archangel Michael killing some dragon. He borrows
from the Chinese and one of their bad spirits living in some mountain
and spitting fire. He borrows from 1984, I was going to say of course,
and of course it is evidently of course. He borrows from Fritz Lang and
his Metropolis. The list would be long and probably never ending. And I
have not touched the words that seem to be a long series of quotations
interspersed here and there with some original phrases though all the
words are of course borrowed from some dictionary, but this latter
defect is a common disease. Terry Gilliam is settling some accounts
with everyone you can imagine. First with his mother who is only
concerned by her skin and looking younger than she is, but also by the
future of her son and this enables her to pull some strings and she
loves that, and of course with the desire to marry her own son with the
daughter of her best friend who shares the same desire to look younger
everyday and ends up as a pack of rotting and rotten bones in a casket,
in a coffin, in a death box. Then he settles so many accounts with
bureaucracy and administrative or police hassling that I would not have
enough of three days and fifty five pages just to enumerate the evils
he exposes here, and yet without giving any details. But he also
settles some accounts with his own vision of the world, but -this time
without maybe knowing it. All structures in the shape of corridors
crossing or not, tunnels, byways, bridges but all designed from
straight lines are doomed to fail leading anywhere, are mazes and
labyrinths. Salvation, and Terry Gilliam believes in comedy hence in
happy endings, can only come from the very melting-pot of suffering and
torturing, from the big womb opening up onto the sky, but also to the
saviours that are air-lifted into this womb of evil to rescue their
friend. But this salvation will have to go through a small door at the
bottom of this womb, nearly at the back of it, and then through some
labyrinth to come back out into the sunshine through a double gaping
door. But this would not be finished if I did not mention the major
culprit he is settling accounts with, the city, the metropolis, the
city and suburban sprawl-drawl-crawl, the fire of the factories and the
gold of the rich, that urbanized humanity that necessarily hosts and
nurtures rebellion, subversion, urban guerrilla warfare and so many
clandestine, moon-shining, black market, unofficial and underground
activities, commercial, industrial or political as you like it. That's
Brazil. It is serious and yet it is funny, though the after-dinner mint
is missing and big brother has nothing of a big brother at all. In a
way, it is true, some scene make me think of some industrial district
in London or Berlin or Leipzig thirty years ago, the East End before
the rehabilitation of the Docks for example.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of
Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne
Description of Brazil (The Criterion Collection Single Disc Special Editon)
Studio: Image Entertainment Release Date: 09/05/2006If 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 unraveling this bureaucratic glitch, he himself winds up labeled 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. This DVD version of Brazil is the special director's cut that first appeared in Criterion's comprehensive (and expensive) six-disc laser package in 1996. Although the DVD (at a fraction of the price) doesn't include that set's many extras, it's still a bargain. --Jim Emerson
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 unraveling this bureaucratic glitch, he himself winds up labeled 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. This DVD version of Brazil is the special director's cut that first appeared in Criterion's comprehensive (and expensive) six-disc laser package in 1996. --Jim Emerson
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