Stars: 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano, Omar Epps, Tatyana M. Ali, Kuroudo Maki, Masaya Kato, James Shigeta, Susumu Terajima, Ren Osugi

Director: 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano

Summary: Yamamoto, a Yakuza ganster who is forced out of his own country, travels to America to find his brother Ken. Whilst there he meets up with Denny, a hustler and together they set out to make Ken's crime syndicate the post powerful gang in Los Angeles...

In his first film shot in the United States, Japanese director Takeshi Kitano stars as Aniki, a stoic "yakuza" (the Japanese version of the Mafia) who heads to Los Angeles after his clan loses a mob war. Unable to speak English, he still manages to take control of his little brother's small-time gang of drug dealers and quickly moves them up the criminal ladder by impassively blasting all their higher-ups and imparting an Eastern sense of honor to the new "family." Between the ritual suicides, tortures, self-mutilations, and blood-soaked gun battles, Aniki forms a special bond with black gang member Denny (Omar Epps), who teaches him some English slang in exchange for guidance. As with Kitano's previous films such as FIREWORKS, VIOLENT COP, and SONATINE, an overall sense of Zen stillness contrasts with sudden macho eruptions into violence. The film takes a uniquely Japanese look at the male psyche, which makes it nicely comparable to the works of Takeshi's American counterparts like Peckinpah, Tarantino, and Abel Ferrara. Offbeat and strangely subdued, BROTHER still delivers all the desired gangster goods and should make new Takeshi fans out of anyone who has seen SCARFACE or THE GODFATHER.

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The cutting wit of Tina Fey (the first female head writer for US comedy breeding ground Saturday Night Live) brilliantly fuses pop culture and smart satire. Fey wrote Mean Girls, in which a formerly home-schooled girl named Cady (Lindsay Lohan) gets dropped into the sneaky, vicious world of the Plastics, three adolescent glamour-girls who dominate their public high school's social heirarchy. Cady first befriends a couple of art-punk outsiders who persuade her to infiltrate the Plastics and destroy them from within--but power corrupts, and Cady soon finds the glory of being a Plastic to be seductive. Mean Girlsjoins the ranks of Clueless, Bring It On, and Heathers, cunning movies that use the hormone-pressurized high school milieu to put the dark impulses of human nature--ambition, envy, lust, revenge--under a comic microscope. Fey manages to skewer everyone without forgetting the characters' hapless humanity; it's a dazzling and delightful balancing act. --Bret Fetzer

Aspect Ratio:	16:9 Anamorphic Wide Screen
Main Language:	English, Japanese
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Theatrical Trailer, Featurette, On Location, Cast And Crew Interviews, Scenes By The Sea, The Life And Cinema Of Beat Takeshi Kitano
Year:	2000
Release Date:	January 13, 2003
Runtime:	108 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	C C D 9114
Label:	Film Four Distributors
Keywords:	Brother, General, Wide, Screen, Thriller
Genre:	Thriller