The Brothers Sun
is an eight-hour limited NetFlix series that I found funny, clever, complicated and smart. It’s also laced with exquisitely long fight sequences that don’t jiggle & jitter. The first of these fight scenes begins two minutes into the first episode and reintroduces the viewer to the great relief of watching violent oners; unbroken sequences that aren’t staccato fragments edited in one-second bursts shot from a dozen camera angles and designed to confuse the crap out of anybody constantly looking at the wrong part of the screen, infuriating 3-card monte style manipulated frustration.
The downside of a series like this one set in Los Angeles and Taipei is the reliance (for many of us) on subtitles that translate English and Mandarin. Since I’ve relied on subtitles since the late ’90s for Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s wonderful use of the English language and far less wonderful use of young actors to articulate and enunciate you know … WORDS, the ability to touch the remote control and skip back 10 seconds for an instant replay of dialogue I didn’t grasp the first time is greatly valued. Fully realizing that a slow reader like me is still disadvantaged, even with the replay workaround, and that reading subtitles is a corruption of the preferred mode of apprehension because there’s no text superimposed on a conversation anywhere but onscreen, drawing attention away from the nuanced performances of the professional actors and the cinematographer’s intentions. But what the hell else is an aging media enthusiast to do as the actors mumble and whisper more and more unintelligibly (it seems), the captions whiz by more tachistoscopically, and the bilingual dialogue in this particular series requires that the viewer strive to keep the fuck up already?
The answer to that rhetorical question is important. We devalue movies and television; literally. In this new century, we can own copies of these things and revisit them at will. That’s new. The habit of valuing Casablanca or any Preston Sturges film evaporates when the habit leads the viewer to Equalizer 3 (I went there last night) only to find Dakota Fanning sharing a scene with Denzel Washington and all of her lines of exposition are delivered faster than his, with less elocuted precision than his and at a lower volume than his. It seems odd that our post-racist society spent a minute patting itself on our backs before women stepped out of the abuse closets, but the sexual discrepancies persist in ways that go unnoticed (except by old farts who can’t understand what young women, in particular, are saying on these wildly proliferating screens. When an early-release VHS copy of Good Will Hunting went for $89.99 in 1997, if you were lucky enough to know somebody connected, a copy of the same film, or The Martian costing $4.99 at the iTunes Store (and delivered instantly, wirelessly, without a tedious trip to Blockbuster) means the content as been devalued by the industry in the course of 25 years, and the audience is following the industry’s lead. I’m re-evaluating the new product in comparison with The African Queen, and devalued content suffers greatly.
WHAT IF all the cancelled #himtoo?! bastards stripped of their powerful cloaks of invisibility banded together to use whatever’s left of Weinstein Wealth to make new content? If anybody has the chops to tell stories about toxic work environments and vile miscreants like Billy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_(Angel) from a new, engaging and butt-parking angle, my best guess is that Joss Whedon deserves first crack at the job. When in the 1930s, Billy Wilder and the real talent left/fled Germany for Hollywood, the pseudo-talent residue, like Leni Riefenstahl, got new and rewarding jobs and Hollywood got great filmmakers, so maybe someone should hire Our Cancelled for a dime to make a few billion/trillion dollars. Oh yeah, I mentioned a while ago that the Firefly forums way back when drew rabid fans together from very strange bedfellow quadrants of the political spectrum. Of course, anyone with the chops to greenlight projects stopped reading this nonsense at “billion/trillion dollars”, but WHAT IF Whedon somehow knows how to knit our nation back together with his goofy-but-brilliant stories? … and now, back to our regularly scheduled other rant.
And the upside here in The Brothers Sun is that ignorant monolingual sluts like me can experience the cosmopolitan point of view of a characters in a series as sophisticated as this one is without overdosing on xenophobia because these points of view on matters of family, legacy, personal responsibility, freedom, duty and independence are very carefully and clearly delineated through the many character foils that develop and change throughout the eight episodes … with reason to expect and rejoice at the prospect of a second season somewhere down the road. I loved this one!
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