Brazil

Origin: G.B. (Embassy, Universal) 1985
Length: 131 minutes
Format: Technicolor
Director: Terry Gilliam
Producer: Arnon Milchan
Screenplay: Terry Gilliam, Charles McKeown, Tom Stoppard
Photography: Roger Pratt
Music: Michael Kamen
Cast: Jonathon Pryce, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Michael Palin, Ian Richardson, Peter Vaughan, Kim Greist, Jim Broadbent, Barbara Hicks, Charles McKeown, Derrick O'Connor, Kathryn Pogson, Bryan Pringle
Oscar nomination: Terry Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, Charles McKeown(screenplay), Norman Garwood, Maggie Gray(art direction)
Links: Brazil Trailer, Brazil Wiki

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The well-known history of bad feeling between Brazil creator Terry Gilliam and distributor Universal, in which the filmmaker resisted the studio's attempts to put out a severely truncated cut and eventually prevailed in getting his challenging picture released in the United States, has tended to soak up all the interest in this movie, which has its own unique strengths(and weaknesses) quite apart from any status it might retain as a near-political cause. Made significantly in 1984, and in parallel with the Michael Radford film of George Orwell's eponymous novel, Brazil is set "somewhere in the twentieth century," in an imaginary but credible oppressive state that combines the worst features of 1940s British bureaucracy, 1950s American paranoia, Stalinist or fascist totalitarianism, and the ills of the 1980s(e.g., and obsession with plastic surgery). Whereas Orwell's Air Strip One is built on an impossibly and horribly effective system of state surveillance, the worst aspect of Gilliam's invented dystopia is that it doesn't even work: The plot is kicked off by a farcical mistake as a squashed bug falls into a printer so that an arrest warrant intended for terrorist heating engineer Tuttle(Robert De Niro) is applied to an innocent Mr. Buttle(Brian Miller), and the grimly utilitarian city is falling apart even without the possibly state-sponsored terrorist bombs that periodically wreak appalling carnage.