Word: sams
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...BEST MOMENT in Robert Altman's film version of Sam Shepard's play Fool For Love comes when the heartsick cowboy Eddie pops a quarter in a motel room Magic Fingers machine. Sprawled out on an unmade queen-size bed, dressed in faded jeans and a trailworn denim jacket, and nursing a tin of day-old Skoal and a bottle of worm-blessed Mexican tequila, Shepard rides the bed like a rundown rodeo star, and when he throws his girl May a particularly wistful smile, all the humor and pathos of Shepard's writing comes shining clean through...
...ensuing kickoff, Los Angeles' Sam Seale fielded the ball at his own nine, dropped the ball, picked it up, then fumbled again when he was hit by Mosi Tatupu. The ball rolled towards the goal line with a covey of players chasing it until Jim Bowman, a rookie safety, fell on the ball for what proved to be the winning score...
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 Sam...
...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. Sam and a man in the next office share a desk that each keeps yanking through his own side of the dividing wall. Every romantic impulse is stifled by the system's suffocating incompetence. In one poignant scene, Sam descends in an open elevator and ecstatically spots Jill on the lobby level...
...still six minutes over the limit, Sheinberg determined to withhold the film until Universal minions could prepare their own version: shorter, more "accessible," and with a more "satisfying" ending, which the director believed would fatally distort his film. By this time Gilliam was seeing life imitating Brazil. Like Sam, he was being compromised by a "ruthlessly legal" cadre of apparatchiks. "If I go into Universal and even mention the word art," he said then, "security forces will come and take me away...