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

... I'll let you in on a secret. Big people are exactly the same as little people. They're selfish, squabbling children whose motivations are jealousy and greed. No one becomes big when the hit adulthood. They just become better at hiding how small they are.

—Jonathan Rosenberg