journal features

movie review - Brother

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 2002.11.13

This is an American/Japanese gangster flick starring Takeshi Kitano. It features Kitano as an exiled Yakuza lieutenant, and includes the gangster little brother, the brother's LA drug-dealing buddies, and a cast of hundreds from across LA's underground. The first part of the film takes place in Japan where a Yakuza war winds up with Kitano's flight to LA. The remainder chronicle's the volatile gangster's climb to power in LA's drug trade. It's a brutally violent tale, replete with representatives of the ethnically diverse city's Mexican, Chinese, Italian, Afro-American, and Japanese hoods. You come away with little sympathy for anyone in this thing, though even the cyanide pills, the executions, and betrayals don't seem all that unnatural to movie-land gangsterdom.

Recommended.

rand()m quote

Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.

—John Gardner