Product: Brother [VHS]
Rating: 4.0
Beat Takeshi: Paragon of cool.
Brother (Takeshi Kitano, 2000)When I see a film that has both the names Ren Osugi and Ryo Ishibashi in the credits at the video store, I know I'm in for a good time. Brother did not disappoint.Kitano does what so few foreign directors manage to do: come to Hollywood and make a good movie despite having to work within the strictures of the MPAA. That said, the DVD release is, of course, unrated; it makes me wonder what on earth the MPAA found so objectionable that the film would have required an NC-17 rating had it not been cut. (One note on IMDB mentions that not only was the movie cut, but cut heavily.) Just another confusing moment trying to figure out the MPAA.Brother may not be Takeshi Kitano's best film, but it's still a lot of fun. Aniki, a yakuza (Takeshi) displaced by the merging of his former family into that of their rival is marked for death, and his best friends are ordered to perform the hit as a test of their loyalty. Instead, they allow him to escape to America, where he goes into hiding with his younger brother, Ken (Beat's Claude Maki), and Ken's band of small-time dope dealers. Well, yakuza-born, yakuza-bred; Aniki sees an opportunity to build an empire from scratch, and he takes it.Rather than attempting to work out how to take a story conceived in his native land and adapt it to an American treatment, Takeshi comes up with an idea (or, perhaps, managed to put himself in a position where he could make a movie he'd been thinking about already in the best way possible) that blends the two cultures, and turns the movie, at least in part, onto a meditation between the differences between the two.That, however, is not what you will notice while watching the movie; what you'll notice is the movie itself. That's part of the magic of films like this; things are moving so fast that you don't really have time to look at the deeper aspects until later, but those deeper aspects will be easily found with a few moments of reflection. While you're watching the film, though, you're far more likely to notice the acting (Takeshi himself simply exudes cool, and even House star Omar Epps manages to use a few expressions that have not crossed his face on a screen before), the camerawork, and the violence. Maybe I'm used to Takashi Miike movies, but to me, the violence in Brother seemed almost understated much of the time; while the movie's body count is admittedly high, those who have seen Ichi or the Dead or Alive trilogy will certainly find nothing here nearly as ostentatious.Fun, fun movie. If you missed it the first time around, now's a good time to catch up. ***