Cinema: Happy Ending for a Nightmare Brazil

Directed by Terry Gilliam Screenplay by Terry Gilliam, Tom Stoppard and Charles McKeown

It started with a dead bug. The squashed insect dropped into a 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...

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