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4.20.04 Watch Terry Gilliam's Brazil

"Brazil" (1985) is one of those movies that can be reinterpreted in every era, but it has special relevance in our age of Greed and Arrogance.

It takes place in a dysfunctional time. Terrorist explosions are everywhere and going after terrorism justifies everything. Services have been consolidated to the point where there is only one organization left: Central Services. Doesn't really matter whether it's private or governmental. They ineptly tend to a tangle of obtrusive conduits through which everything flows.

Computer systems are all linked and managed centrally. Privacy is only a vague memory. And yet the whole society is weighed down by a system of complex paperwork, so cumbersome that the average citizen really can't get a damn thing done. If you make a fuss, the guys in charge simply punish you and then hand you a bill for their work.

You can scale this movie to the state of our world or the state of your workplace.

The central character is Sam Lowry (Jonathon Pryce), a bureaucrat happy to keep his head down but who finds himself in a heap of trouble when he tries to correct an injustice. The only superhero is Harry Tuttle (Robert DeNiro) -- a freelancer who actually know how to get a job done.

The production design alone is worth the price of the DVD rental. This is not the sleek world of "Minority Report." The pneumatic tubes, 1920s switchboard plugs, and old Underwoods as computer keyboards are perfect props for making the corruption and retro-thinking of this world visible.

Brought to you by the creator of Monty Python, it is a darkly comic tragedy.

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