Episode Details

Andy Nelson has been sitting on this one. He's been talking about movies on The Next Reel since 2011, and when Mandy asked him to come back and pick anything, he chose the film he has loved most for his entire adult life, because he suspected (correctly, it turns out) that it would require a Xanax. Terry Gilliam's Brazil is a comedy about paperwork. It is also a horror movie about paperwork. A man is arrested in his living room because of a typo, his wife signs for him in triplicate, and the government is very sorry for the inconvenience. Mandy, a mainstream mom with a documented sensitivity to bleak world-building, spent large portions of the film feeling nauseous, anxious, and deeply disturbed, and then cackled out loud at a plumbing joke. That is the whole experience of this movie, and Andy has seen it countless times.What neither of them expected was how little of it would feel hypothetical. The forcible removals, the bombs people step around to finish lunch, the machines that do everyone's jobs badly: Mandy keeps circling back to the fact that she might have enjoyed this ride in a different decade, and Andy, who has carried this film around since high school, hears his favorite jokes land differently in real time. There's also a cameo from Robert De Niro that Mandy considers a bait-and-switch, a Jim Broadbent plastic surgery subplot she diagnoses as a Real Housewives lunch, a studio-mandated happy ending that Criterion preserved as a warning, and a brand-new nightmare creature Mandy would like to name a band after. Press play.Guest SpotlightAndy Nelson is a partner at TruStory FM and co-host, with Pete Wright, of The Next Reel, now in its sixteenth season. He also hosts Cinema Scope, where he brings in an expert to go deep on a single genre, subgenre, or movement, and Movies We Like, which invites industry guests to talk about a favorite film. Before and alongside podcasting he has spent more than 25 years in film, TV, and commercial production, with writing, directing, and producing credits on shorts, indie features, and documentaries, and he teaches screenwriting, producing, editing, and podcasting.

• Andy Nelson on TruStory FM
• The Next Reel Film Podcast
• Cinema Scope
• Movies We Like

Links & References
The Film

• Brazil (1985) on Letterboxd
• Brazil (1985 film) on Wikipedia

Terry Gilliam's Filmography

• Terry Gilliam
• Films directed by Terry Gilliam on Letterboxd
• Time Bandits (1981)
• The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)
• The Fisher King (1991)
• Twelve Monkeys (1995)
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)