Terry Gilliam's materpieces Brazil is one of my all time favorite movies, and I found out not long ago that my wife had never seen it. So I rented the DVD last night and we watched it, the first time I'd seen it in probably a decade or so (though I've watched it a few time, which is highly unusual for me with a movie.) I was somewhat aware that there had been some infighting with Gilliam and the studio about the film, but this was actually the first time I saw the 142 minute director's cut instead of the 131 minute compromise version.
What was immediately scary was how much less funny the movie seems today compared to the last time I'd watched it. Certainly it was always darkly comedic, and that is not lost, but it has eerily taken on a new realism where there used to be absurd extremes. We are almost living in Gilliam's nightmare world today. I had forgotten that what motivated the 1984ish bureacracy of his film was a war against terrorists. He deserves major credit as on of the few people doing science fiction in any media in the 1980s to predict that sad fact of life (Mike McQuay did so in a different way in the novel Jitterbug, and Kathleen Ann Goonan looked at this a bit in the '90s in Crescent City Rhapsody, where she also eerily predicted a flooded New Orleans.)
If you have not yet seen the director's cut, which is primarily the European version but with some beautiful opening scenes from the U.S. one, you owe it to yourself. If what you've seen is the original U.S. release, however, prepare for a bit of a hit to the stomach.
What was immediately scary was how much less funny the movie seems today compared to the last time I'd watched it. Certainly it was always darkly comedic, and that is not lost, but it has eerily taken on a new realism where there used to be absurd extremes. We are almost living in Gilliam's nightmare world today. I had forgotten that what motivated the 1984ish bureacracy of his film was a war against terrorists. He deserves major credit as on of the few people doing science fiction in any media in the 1980s to predict that sad fact of life (Mike McQuay did so in a different way in the novel Jitterbug, and Kathleen Ann Goonan looked at this a bit in the '90s in Crescent City Rhapsody, where she also eerily predicted a flooded New Orleans.)
If you have not yet seen the director's cut, which is primarily the European version but with some beautiful opening scenes from the U.S. one, you owe it to yourself. If what you've seen is the original U.S. release, however, prepare for a bit of a hit to the stomach.
