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

In the wake of 9/11, we [in America] have made the decision as a society that we can never again create something in which we can take pride, for fear that someone will destroy it. Moreover, we must suppress any trace of individualism, lest someone have the desire to rise above the bland sameness that protects us. I have, alas, no idea how to recapture our courage.

—Anonymous post to boingboing.net, 2009