Brazil [Blu-ray]

Format : AC-3, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, Dubbed, Subtitled, Widescreen
Publisher : Universal Studios
Company : NBC Universal
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Product Description

Jonathan Pryce (Pirates of the Caribbean), Robert De Niro (The Godfather) and Michael Palin (Monty Python and the Holy Grail) star in this landmark cult classic that dazzles and thrills with its Academy Awardr nominated, groundbreaking art direction and sharply satirical original screenplay. In a future world, a government clerk finds his life destroyed when he tries to correct an administrative error that caused a massive chain reaction of mistaken identity. Despite his efforts, he finds himself an enemy of the state. Hailed as a modern masterpiece, visionary director Terry Gilliam's (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) pitch-black comedy takes a highly imaginative and chilling look at a "perfect" future where technology reigns supreme and bureaucracy overrules love for the sake of efficiency.

Amazon.com essential video

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. Although the DVD (at a fraction of the price) doesn't include that set's many extras, it's still a bargain. --Jim Emerson

Amazon.com

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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