In response to my review of Terry Gilliam's classic film "Brazil," Eric of San Francisco had this to say.
Dear Mr. Smithey,
Relative to your August 2009 review of Brazil:
I'm a San Francisco criminal defense lawyer. As one of many on the front lines of the war against the brutal Law Enforcement Cartel, I applaud and thank you for your comments of "incendiary theme", so persuasively expressed in your review of Brazil. Your art went beyond a brilliant review of an excellent film . You who are in the light and spoke to us who remain in the shadows, daily fighting against the jack-boot tyranny of the police state. Your succinct observations, silent on the page, summed up Eugene Zamiatin's We, Adolph Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's prophetic 1984 and Animal Farm".
Since plagiarism is the greatest complement in art and life, I will use your words, with citations to your authorship, as I endeavor being both sword and shield, against those very forces, that truly free men must fight and that you and other artists embrace. Sam Clemens would have enjoyed your company.
Thanks,
Eric
Here's the original review:
Brazil
If anyone ever doubts the visionary significance of Terry Gilliam's once bright genius as a filmmaker of enormous depth and cynical humor, you need only to visit upon his career-topping 1985 masterpiece of surreal satire, "Brazil." Co-written by Gilliam with Charles McKeown and Tom Stoppard, the story is an ingenious blend of sci-fi, political satire, and dystopic comedy. Jonathan Pryce gives his own career high performance as Sam Lowry, a kind of Peter Sellers surrogate searching for the woman of his sleeping dreams and working as a government bureaucrat drone at a soul-crushing job that resembles something out of George Orwell's 1984. There are plenty of other thematic and visual associations made to Orwell's all-too-accurate vision of a totalitarian society where a government error dooms an innocent man and an equally guiltless woman named Jill Layton (Kim Greist) who, although she's deemed a terrorist by a complicit government, is the woman of Sam Lowry's dreams. Sam's desperate attempts to liberate Jill from the government's labyrinthine clutches marks him also as a "terrorist."
Gilliam called the film, "the Nineteen Eighty-Four for 1984," and it's telling that other working titles included "The Ministry" and "1984 ½." Gilliam sparks a fierce anti-consumerist flame with prescient pokes at things like plastic surgery and credit cards. However, the film's most incendiary theme is that the media-hyped concept of "terrorism," which went on to become an all-encompassing excuse for every form of war crime imaginable after 9/11, is merely a thought-control fear mechanism for governments to enact carte blanche policies via an invisible (read non-existent) enemy. By the standards of America's unwritten moral code circa 2009, "Brazil" is a dangerous film. Watch it.
