Customer Reviews:
My favourite film EVER.......2006-01-21
I first discovered this film when I was around 5 and 11 years later it's still the best and most original film I've ever seen. Amazing and often very surreal, I guarantee you will have seen nothing like it. I've watched it countless times and yet never get bored. Watch this film...you won't regret it.
Forget the Cat in The Hat.......2004-01-17
This is a rare and disturbingly entertaining film that is absolutely like nothing else. The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. is a musical fantasy written by Theodore Geisel Suess also known as Dr. Seuss. Salvador Dali had a hand in the production design and his work contributes to the eerie beauty of this bizzarre piece of cinematic obscurity.
Made in the shadow of World War II this story focuses on a little boy (Timmy from the Lassie show) and his single mother as they try to navigate through a deceptively simple universe. The performance by Hans Conried (veteran British stage actor and cartoon voice of Snidely Whiplash) as Dr. T, the evil, scheming piano teacher who dominates the boy's life, is unforgettable.
Dr. Seuss not only wrote the story but all the music for this film. There are some songs in this movie that should be as well remembered and loved as anything from Sound of Music or Wizard of Oz but are instead completely forgotten - or perhaps never known at all. One of the best songs, called "Because We're Kids" was recorded by John Coltrane and (if I'm not mistaken) Bill Evans.
If you are a lover of a) Post War Cinema, b) Obscure Films, c) Musicals, d) Dr. Seuss, or e) Any or all of the above - CHECK THIS MOVIE OUT! There is nothing like it anywhere. You WILL be entertained (and slightly unsettled). My jazz piano teacher turned me on to this film years ago and it is one of those dicoveries in life that make you wonder what other marvels are languishing in obscurity just awaiting a curious mind.
Amazon.co.uk Review
If Franz Kafka had been an animator and film director--oh, and a member of Monty Python's Flying Circus--this is the sort of outrageously dystopian satire one could easily imagine him making. However, Brazil was made by Terry Gilliam, who is all of the above except, of course, Franz Kafka. Be that as it may, Gilliam sure captures the paranoid-subversive spirit of Kafka's The Trial (along with his own Python animation) in this bureaucratic nightmare-comedy about a meek governmental clerk named Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) whose life is destroyed by a simple bug. Not a software bug, a real bug (no doubt related to Kafka's famous Metamorphosis insect) that gets smooshed in a printer and causes a typographical error unjustly identifying an innocent citizen, one Mr. Buttle, as suspected terrorist Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro). When Sam becomes enmeshed in unravelling this bureaucratic glitch, he himself winds up labelled as a miscreant.
The movie presents such an unrelentingly imaginative and savage vision of 20th-century bureaucracy that it almost became a victim of small-minded studio management itself--until Gilliam surreptitiously screened his cut for the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, who named it the best movie of 1985 and virtually embarrassed Universal into releasing it. --Jim Emerson
Customer Reviews:
Orwell would be proud..........2003-11-15
Terry Gilliam is one of my all-time-favourite directors. From a contemporary stand-point at least, the Python films were his least ambitious adventures, even though they were perhaps his funniest. It was after he left the fold of that inimitable crew that he really came into his own, not just as 'the-guy-who-did-those-funny-British-pictures', but as one of the greatest film maestros to ever walk the face of the earth.
Brazil is one of his crowning achievements, from a contemporary stand-point or otherwise. The story encapsulates every pessamistic idea ever dreamt up by the world's grumpiest old men, Orwell's '1984' being the most obvious. What Gilliam brings to this tried and tested form is not the usual straight-laced satirist tendancies, but instead the creation of a somewhat opaque and entirely interpretable cinematic world simply derived, rather than copied from works such as Orwell's.
The protagonist, Sam Lowry, is unhappy for sure; trapped even. But he never displays the same reactionary zeal that Smith develops in '1984'. There is a certain resignation to Lowry's character; a symptom of the society that he was born into, but also it seems, a symptom of his own unshakably sheepish nature. Jonathan Pryce, as usual, never falls short of the director's vision, persistantly surprising us with just how cowardly he can be, whilst at the same time seeming to constantly ask, "well, what would you do?".
Robert DeNiro is tremendously funny as Harry Tuttle; a superbly realised character, classified in my mind as a 'guerilla heating engineer'. This fellow is the epitome of a rebel in an oppressive world; lots of thumbs-up and 'cheer up, champ' kind of behaviour. Fantastic.
The film meets, at it's ending, with it's originators. No hope of rescue from that most desperate of species; the human race. Gilliam always leaves open the hope of a happy ending, even until the bitter end...I shan't give it away, but be prepared for a horrowing resolution to an otherwise quite uplifting film.
If there was any justice in the world, this film would appear beside all possible synonyms of the word 'great' that the dictionary of English speech has to offer.
A Cult Classic.......2000-03-08
One of the cult films of the last century, This is possibly one of the greatest films Terry Gilliam has ever produced. Once again using his obsession with a dark futuristic world (twelve monkeys) He delves into the depressing world of 1984 & Fahrenheit 451 to produce this surreal life of a government cleark trying to survive in a world of opression. Where personality is the last thing you need.
UK DVD:
- DVD Maximum: Complete Yoga and Pilates (REGION 1) (NTSC)
- DVD Maximum: Complete Yoga and Pilates (REGION 1) (NTSC)
- Easy Techniques For Self Defense [2005] (REGION 1) (NTSC)
- Fabulously Fit Moms: Lower Body Burn - Featuring Jennifer Nicole Lee [2007]
- Fat Free Yoga: Lose Weight and Feel Great
- Finger Cymbals (REGION 1) (NTSC)
- Graham Kerr: Lifestyle Nine 6 [2006] (REGION 1) (NTSC)
- HIP HOP ABS Package - Fat Burning Cardio, Ab Sculpt, Total Body Burn, Secrets to Flat Abs (2007) by Shaun T
- Hot Nude Yoga, Vol. 3: Partner [2005] (REGION 1) (NTSC)
- Inside Man [2006]
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