#102 Brazil - this movie is all kinds of screwed up!

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

Seen it before? No.

The start of the movie has a man being arrested at Christmas time and his wife gets handed a bill for his arrest while his apartment (and the one of his upstairs neighbor) gets completely trampled on (understatement). The main character, played by J. Pryce, discovers the error - the guy who was supposed to be arrested had the name Tuttle and they arrested a man named BUTTLE...whoops...who's in charge here? Chaos and mayhem, and Robert DeNiro - as a duct engineer, ensues and the story is VERY weird...Mona from Who's the Boss is Pryce's eccentric surgery driven mother. Food comes in weird rectangle concoctions resembling nothing but a pile of crap and did I mention that the movie has 'duct engineers' because of all the tubes (read DUCTS) that are all over the world? And the same song "Brazil" gets played in different renditions...There's even a love story...kind of...

This movie would be fascinating if I wasn't so bloody confused! Women wear shoes on their heads. Men work in offices that resemble 20's newsrooms or the sewing room in the Pajama Game but don't seem to be getting anything done while the boss' door is closed (they watch a movie). Pryce gets promoted and has his own office but the wall (and the desk) are shared with a very weird man who keeps on pulling on his side so that he gets more desk space...comical but still weird...

OVERALL opinion - this movie would probably be really excellent if I was high.
See it again? Yes, but only because I'm sure I missed something the first time.
Own it? NO thanks

#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.