Brazil

Here is a truly bad picture. It actually defames the nation of the same name merely by the association. Remind me never to see anything by Terry Gilliam ever again. This is an irritating, bombastic black comedy which suffers from the always fatal misconception that volume and humor are interchangeable. In this case there is more volume than humor. It is weird, self-indulgent, self-consciously avant-garde, and generally annoying. How it ever got a good review is utterly beyond me. It draws from “1984,” Monty Python, and the Three Stooges, but just mangles whatever conceits it attempts to borrow, and all three look vastly superior by comparison. The so-called hero is more of a whiny pain in the ass than anything else, and without someone to root for, how are you supposed to give a shit? Robert De Niro shows up unexpectédly in a role that has much greater promise but is equally unexplained. For most of its 131 minutes, this picture is actually painful to sit through, and the remaining minutes do not redeem it. No wonder nobody wanted to make it. It's the old question: to make a movie about oppression, is it really necessary to oppress the viewer? Apparently, Terry Gilliam thinks so.