Friday, April 23, 2010

#102 Brazil: The morning found me miles away

1985. dir. Terry Gilliam, starring Jonathan Pryce, Robert DeNiro, Katharine Helmond, Kim Greist, Michael Palin.

Seen it before? No.
"I want to talk to you about ducts."
Ducts are everywhere in this movie, usually strung haphazardly through a room in a cluttered and disorganized manner. The ducts are a metaphor for the bungling yet omnipresent bureaucracy that controls every aspect life in Brazil, which is a twisted take on Orwell's 1984. The story centers around Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), a low-level functionary who learns that the Ministry of Information has "deactivated" an innocent person, and tries to correct the mistake.

Katharine Helmond (you know, from Who's the Boss) plays Lowry's mother, who wears a shoe on her head and has lots of plastic surgery. Robert DeNiro is in a couple of scenes as a rogue duct repairman. Oh, and Lowry keeps going into these fantasy sequences where he has armor and angel wings, and... yeah, I don't know. There's really too much bizarre stuff going on to keep track of. This movie is sort of like Blade Runner meets Beetlejuice. If you see this movie, watch carefully, because there are lots of little jokes and oddities in the background that sneak by.

Position on the list: Bumped
Policy on bumped movies: After we finish the "current" list, we watch the new ones. As of today, that includes Avatar, The 400 Blows, The Truman Show, and Shutter Island.

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