journal features

movie review - Brother

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one 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

If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it. A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

—Roald Dahl