Brazil

Terry Gilliam's Brazil plays a critique of XX century city life, to bureaucratization, mass production of false needs, the spread of ideology through mass media. The story is located “somewhere in the twentieth century”, inside a metropolis whose irrational rationality the characters -as real people nowadays- are unable to scape. Though events happening around Sam (the main character), an anonymous bureaucrat disenchanted with his world, expecting, wanting nothing from it, Gilliam tells the common story of our world in the late twentieth and early twenty first century: The instrumental relations held between persons; the lack of meaning in everything; the impossibility of escaping; the destruction of nature; the alienation of men though work, but also though the use of free time satisfying false needs... OK, at this point of my commentary the movie sounds quite depressing, well, it is not. The story is told though hyperbolic situations and spaces, though rich aesthetic, narrative and visual resources which illustrate this dystopian fantasy metropolis as a grotesque, but yet familiar, common space in contemporary life. The irrationality and the banalization of life is accused, caricatured explicitly but also implicitly by the proper use omissions, the ingeniously display of accidents and incidental situations, the exquisite aesthetic dimension, the cheats made on the viewer's expectations, and also humor, aspects which makes this movie a masterpiece.

I have the movie, so if anyone in the class is interested just ask... shouldn't have said that, Big Brother is reading us!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzRHTKa8iDE