The Brother variations: finger cuttings, disembowelings, censorship, and hilarious text on two Takeshi Kitano bootlegs

Sometimes there is a respectable cinephilic reason to seek out a Chinese bootleg of a movie. The best case in point I can offer - besides the obvious one of Asian films that aren't even available in North America - is probably Takeshi Kitano's 2000 film Brother: while I haven't consulted the North American version in quite some time, as I recall, it censors the "guts" of a disemboweling and parts of a subsequent finger-cutting that take place starting at about at the 1 hour 16 minute mark. There may be other scenes that are changed - I think a blood spatter is darkened, too, at one point, so it looks a bit less shocking - but chopping out parts of this near-climactic moment always pissed me off. The scene is necessarily bloody, essential to the plot, and very powerful; sanitizing the gore also sanitizes the emotions behind the scene, in which an honorable Yakuza, upset at discussion of betraying his brother, asserts to a thug named Matsumoto not only that Matsumoto is wrong, but that said honorable Yakuza will demonstrate his sincerity by cutting his own belly open (the ultimate "we mean it, maaan" in Japan. You've probably heard it said that "seppuku" is the proper term for this, but I only ever heard it described as hara-kiri - literally, belly cutting - when I lived over there; there's also an idiom, "jibara-o-kirimasu," which equates cutting upon your belly with opening your wallet, meaning basically "to pay for dinner!"). I had seen the film theatrically, first-run, in a theatre in the Kabukicho district of Tokyo in 2000, and was startled by how powerful the moment was; coming home, I bought it on DVD, and was  very disappointed that you only get the briefest glimpse of what is going on in the American version. Screencaps from the original follow...

Intensity is followed by intensity, in the original: as the gangster is carried out, intestines dangling, the oyabun - the clan boss - demands Matsumoto atone for his wrongdoing by chopping off his little finger - a traditional mode of apologizing amongst gangsters over there. In these zombie-gore times, it is hard to imagine how, um, gutless the American distributors of the film must have been to tone down this scene. Sure, it's an intense moment, but it's a Japanese Yakuza movie, for godsake. Nothing says "Yakuza" like this odd cultural practice. Plus the actual finger cutting doesn't even occur onscreen!

So point the first: make sure you get the right version of the film, if you're shopping for it on DVD. The one to avoid has this cover - the only official North American release on physical media, as far as I know:

Both Chinese versions of the film I've encountered have the whole scene, so presumably any version that looks like this will serve:

There is an added bonus, however, to buying the unofficial versions of the film: in both cases, the English description is mangled. The one on the left is actually pretty accurate in its plot description, and only suffers from a missing verb and a missing article, which is not bad at all for a Chinese boot (it reads, "Abandoned by the brotherhood of his yakuza clan, tough guy Yamamoto is forced to leave Tokyo. He flees to Los Angeles and finds himself quickly back into the routine violence of his old Tokyo life there. Before long, his gang grows in number. Business flourishes, money flows. Soon after he starts an all-out war against Mafia, his brothers betray him again..."). There is, on the front, a bizarre, place-filling "QIWYREI Through AETRAF AIE!" at the bottom, which as far as I know means nothing in any language at all. But the version on the right - the one featuring both French and German on the front cover - gets full-on surreal in its English.

First off - you might have a hard time reading this - the credits for the film are actually for Patton. The top plot description is from a negative review of 3000 Miles to Graceland, with Kevin Costner and Kurt Russell as Elvis impersonators. Like George C. Scott and Karl Malden in the Patton credits below, Costner and Russell have absolutely nothing to do with Brother. The text reads, in complete:

the many gapsin the story -- which certainly looks like it might have been fascinating and provocative in an early script form wo tell us how often Lichtenstein drops the ball on fundamentals yet isn't worried that views will demand their money back. Here is what we know Two career crimnals, pragmatic Michael and psychopathic Murphy (Kevin Costner), meet in prison.

But wait, there's more! See the text box below the credits?  - the place where you might expect to read about standard and widescreen versions on a vintage DVD? ...It's actually a plot description of the film Monkeybone: 

On the plot level, it's about a cartoonist, Stu Miley (Brendan Fraser), whose comic character Monkeybone is about to make him a rich man. But Stu is a depressive art type; his black-and-white sketches look like storyboards for a Kafka biography. On the night he plans to propose marriage to girlfriend Julie (Bridget Fonda), a car accident puts him in a coma. Naturally, we journey with him to the strange half-world of his mind: Downtown, a loading zone between heaven and hell, where (oddly enough, for the purposes of the film's entertainment value) not a great deal happens.

...which is at least grammatical, but again, has nothing to do with Brother. It appears to have been just randomly cut-and-pasted for the benefit of people who cannot read English, to just give the box art at least the appearance of English, because that somehow validates the product, I guess. It's something I saw often in Japan; I remember buying a lamp, I think it was, that came with a sticker on the bottom with a chunk of random English text taken from a description of a soccer match. As long as the text they insert "looks English," it's enough, even if it's not about the right movie (though one wonders if any Chinese purchasers of Brother who WERE able to read the English were upset to get the film home and discover it doesn't feature George C. Scott, Brendan Fraser, and Kevin Costner in it? The actual cast members are not mentioned, at least not in the English text). 

Fun, eh? Vive le boot, tho' now that I see that there is a Japanese blu of it that might just play over here, maybe I am duty bound to upgrade. Presumably this is the full film! It's not Takeshi's best film, but it was the first of his I ever saw, so I'm pretty fond of it...

Post-script: It's out of print.