Return I Will, to Old Brazil.

“An opening title card declares that Brazil takes place ‘somewhere in the 20th century,’ but the date and location are deliberately muddy; it’s a dystopian world built from a mishmash of eras, part future and part past. Sam Lowry (played by Jonathan Pryce) is a competent, content functionary in a world ruled by a hideously broken bureaucracy, under assault by unknown terrorists, and compensating with kidnapping and torture…in Brazil, over and over again, people turn to fantasy to let them briefly step outside a junky, dysfunctional world controlled by an oppressive yet strikingly indifferent government.”

“Sometimes, madness is the right response to a mad world. Sometimes, illusion is the only way out.” By way of a longtime reader, The Keynote‘s Tasha Robinson discusses the origins and greatness of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, one of my trifecta of all-time favorite films (along with Amadeus and Miller’s Crossing) and at least partly the namesake of GitM (Ere I am, JH…) — I got the still above signed at a Gilliam event in NYC in October 2006. Some great stuff in here — I actually never knew, or had forgotten, how close this came to being a Tom Cruise vehicle — That would’ve been a error of Tuttle/Buttle proportions. Da dum, da da da da da dee dum…