Word: braziller
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...book is drawn from 23 hours of interviews Castro gave last May to Friar Betto, 41, born Carlos Alberto Libanio Christo. The author, a Dominican brother in Sao Paulo, Brazil, is a leftist churchman who served four years in a Brazilian prison for sheltering anti-government guerrillas. He embraces liberation theology, which offers theological support for resisting political and economic oppression and is usually based on Marxist analysis...
...typewriter at the Ministry of Information Retrieval; a bureaucrat typed the name Tuttle instead of Buttle; and poor apolitical Mr. Buttle, instead of the swashbuckling terrorist Tuttle, was taken away to be tortured and killed. Dear me, mistakes like this will happen in the Anglo-fascist fantasy world of Brazil. Imagine that Nazi Germany had colonized Britain after winning World War II, and you can visualize the film's architecture: mammoth and soulless, with huge intestinal piping that snakes through every elegant living room and posh restaurant. Imagine that the amiable English temperament was forced to accommodate itself to totalitarianism...
There is not a more daft, more original or haunting vision to be seen on American movie screens this year. But until last week there was considerable doubt as to when, if ever, Brazil would find its way into a U.S. movie house. For months the film had been held hostage in the continuing guerrilla war between movie artists and the industry that bankrolls their dreams. In Hollywood, such skirmishes are usually waged behind paneled doors and result in compromises, ulcers and the final sullen handshake. But Director Terry Gilliam is no gentleman warrior. Finding his picture in distribution limbo...
Gilliam has called Brazil "Walter Mitty meets Franz Kafka" and describes its unique, post-Orwellian setting as "somewhere on the Los Angeles-Belfast border." The film's hero, Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), shambles efficiently through his job at the Ministry of Information records department but lives for his dreams, in which he is girded like Lochinvar, aloft like Icarus, fighting to save a fair heroine from giant samurai and evil, baby-faced thugs. One day he meets Jill Layton (Kim Griest), a truck driver who lived in the flat above the late Mr. Buttle's and looks exactly like...
...story should seem familiar: 1984 a year late. But as in so many key movies of the decade (Blade Runner, Diva, the Mad Max films), texture is text here, submerging the plot in a garage sale of 20th century detritus. Brazil is a place, like Stalin's Russia or the British welfare state, where everything is planned but nothing quite works. A Rube Goldberg spy machine kibitzes with a roving bloodshot electronic eye, then wheels away in a deranged gait. Giggling plastic surgeons do their "snip snip slice slice" with metal clamps and Saran Wrap...