Strictly average movie

Masterful Movie

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Listen to Me Marlon is a fantastic documentary about one of the best actors in the history of film. A treat for every film lover and everyone who enjoy learning and getting to know about genius people who changed and revived things in their field of work and were never afraid to be themselves. The narrator of this film is Marlon Brando himself. The audio material was taken from hundreds of hours of private recordings that he made and were never released to the public before. It was wonderful listening to some of the things he said about acting, life itself, his views on Native and African Americans, film business, success, his troubled youth and many more. I believe thet every person who is thinking of trying to get into acting should see this. Grat film about a great man.

*Spoiler/plot- Listen to me, Marlon. 2015. A look at Marlon Brando's life and thoughts through his hundreds of self made hours of audio tapes. Also many interviews of his friends and put on a time line of his life and career history.*Special Stars- Marlon Brando, his family, news & interview footage of friends of Brando. *Theme- Brando was a complex actor with many thoughts and action of strange & wonderful nature. *Trivia/location/goofs- B & W European, documentary, nominated for Bafta award. Shot at his Beverly Hills mansion.*Emotion- if you're a Brando fan, a fascinating look into this man's life and career. I am and I enjoyed hearing him and seeing his life. *Based On- Brando's daily diary from his audio tapes.

Marlon Brando's most frustrating life recorded on tapes. Those eerie pictures of him with that frozen head;in certain pictures he even looks like Thomas Jefferson with that pony tail.No question about it, Brando proves that there is a fine line between sanity as compared to insanity. Growing up in a household dysfunctional by its alcoholic parents, is it any wonder why Brando's frustrations grew way into adulthood.He was a brilliant actor by studying Stella Adler's method of acting,which had a great impact on his life.While we see him in clips of "Streetcar Named Desire," we see the clips with Viven Leigh; we see acting by both at its brilliant best. Acting to Brando was a way out to vent his frustrations and inability to cope.The black and white cinematography creates an eerie setting, as Brando frustrated and often off-the-wall seeks clarification and justification for his life.

This makes largely creative use of Brando's career-long tendency to create diaries on audio tape. He also made self-hypnosis or relaxation tapes that are used here to very interesting effect; these are poignant, funny, and profound at once. Brando was shrewd and insightful, but the tapes also demonstrate the difficulty of healing private wounds through introspection alone. He resisted anyone who tried to be close to him; if they succeeded, as Bertolucci seemed to, he felt betrayed. These monologues are occasionally the stuff of Sophocles or Samuel Becket--but overall like some involuted, existentialist novel. I am less enthusiastic about the editing, which is often abrupt and involves oscillatory panning or camera movements that suggest a rough ferry ride. His words are often dynamic enough. A holographic computer image of Brando's head, seeming to date from around 1998, is made to animate many of his words, about once every ten minutes or so. This is at once spooky and quaint (if the 1990s are now quaint) but it recurs so much that it's like a child in a mask over-doing a joke at a party. The photographic choices from Brando's career are often good, but Brando's childhood home (suggested in a fantasy sequence) is furnished like some impoverished house from 1980, among a few such anachronisms. My strongest criticism of this still engaging movie is for its use of music. It is needlessly chronic--it never shuts up-- serving as a constant, indicative background, when Brando's voice would often suffice. And this soundtrack music itself is not great--at its best, it is Philip Glassy stuff, but often it sounds like a melodramatic "dark" variety of 1980s "new age" music. The music is extremely high in the soundtrack mix, and strangest of all, the director/ sound editors chose to let this new-agey soundtrack compete obnoxiously with any original music that may have been part of any film clip. So when we see famous clips from his major movies, like "Streetcar," the original music mixes dissonantly with the faux-Glass music. I found the sound editing a real distraction that shouldn't have passed the draft stage.