Brazil

Brazil (The Criterion Collection Three-Disc Special Edition)

Pitting the imagination of common man Sam Lowry against the oppressive storm troopers of the Ministry of Information, this bitter parable for the Information Age has come to be regarded as an anti- totalitarian cautionary tale equal to the works of George orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Kurt Vonnegut. Gathering footage from both the European and American versions of his celebrated masterpiece, Terry Gilliam has assembled the ultimate 142-minute director's cut of Brazil - now in a gorgeously remastered new transfer. Also available in a 3 DVD set loaded with documentaries and other unique bonus features.

Brazil [VHS]

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. --Jim Emerson