{"id":1919,"date":"2012-03-14T11:49:45","date_gmt":"2012-03-14T17:49:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=1919"},"modified":"2012-03-14T11:49:45","modified_gmt":"2012-03-14T17:49:45","slug":"brother-from-another-planet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=1919","title":{"rendered":"Brother From Another Planet"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Stars Joe Morton, Picked up as homeless, he is deposited in Harlem. The sweet-natured and honest Brother looks like any other black man, except that he is mute and – although other characters in the film never see them – his feet each have three large toes. The Brother has telekinetic powers but, unable to speak, he struggles to express himself and adjust to his new surroundings, including a stint in the Job Corps at a video arcade in Manhattan.<\/p>\n

He is chased by two white Men in Black (David Strathairn and director Sayles himself); Sayles’s twist on the Men in Black concept is that instead of government agents trying to cover up alien activity, Sayles’s Men in Black are also aliens, out to re-capture “The Brother” and other escaped slaves and bring them back to their home planet. Unlike the many human characters in this film, the aliens themselves are oblivious of skin color, and screenwriter Sayles has one of the Men in Black utter an epithet “Three Toe” when describing their quarry, in attempt to prove that skin color is just as arbitrary as number of toes or any other human characteristic that would make one different from another.<\/p>\n

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Cast<\/p>\n

\u2022 Joe Morton as The Brother<\/p>\n

\u2022 Rosanna Carter as West Indian Woman<\/p>\n

\u2022 Ray Ramirez as Hispanic Man<\/p>\n

\u2022 Yves Rene as Haitian Man<\/p>\n

\u2022 Peter Richardson as Islamic Man<\/p>\n

\u2022 Ginny Yang as Korean Shopkeeper<\/p>\n

\u2022 Daryl Edwards as Fly<\/p>\n

\u2022 Steve James as Odell<\/p>\n

\u2022 Leonard Jackson as Smokey<\/p>\n

\u2022 Bill Cobbs as Walter<\/p>\n

\u2022 Maggie Renzi as Noreen<\/p>\n

\u2022 Olga Merediz as Noreen’s Client<\/p>\n

\u2022 Tom Wright as Sam<\/p>\n

\u2022 Minnie Gentry as Mrs. Brown<\/p>\n

\u2022 Ren Woods as Bernice<\/p>\n

\u2022 Fisher Stevens as card trickster<\/p>\n

\u2022 Dee Dee Bridgewater as Malverne Davis<\/p>\n

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Production<\/p>\n

Sayles spent part of his MacArthur Fellows “genius” grant on the film, which cost $350,000 to produce.<\/p>\n

Variety called it “vastly amusing but progressively erratic” film structured as a “series of behavioral vignettes, [many of which] are genuinely delightful and inventive”; as it continues, the film “takes a rather unpleasant and, ultimately, confusing turn.Vincent Canby called it a “nice, unsurprising shaggy-dog story that goes on far too long” but singled out “Joe Morton’s sweet, wise, unaggressive performance.” Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four, saying “the movie finds countless opportunities for humorous scenes, most of them with a quiet little bite, a way of causing us to look at our society”, noting that “by using a central character who cannot talk, [Sayles] is sometimes able to explore the kinds of scenes that haven’t been possible since the death of silent film.”<\/p>\n

The A.V. Club, in a 2003 review of the film’s DVD release, says the film’s superhero scenes are “often unintentionally silly, but again, Sayles shapes a catchy premise into a subtler piece, using Morton’s ‘alien’ status as a way of asking who deserves to be called an outsider in a country born of outsiders”; commenting on the DVD, they note its “marvelous” audio commentary track by Sayles, “who moves fluidly from behind-the-scenes anecdotes to useful technical tips to unpretentious dissections of his own themes.”<\/p>\n