Listen to Me Marlon
Listen to Me Marlon
| 29 July 2015 (USA)

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With exclusive access to his extraordinary unseen and unheard personal archive including hundreds of hours of audio recorded over the course of his life, this is the definitive Marlon Brando cinema documentary. Charting his exceptional career as an actor and his extraordinary life away from the stage and screen with Brando himself as your guide, the film will fully explore the complexities of the man by telling the story uniquely from Marlon's perspective, entirely in his own voice. No talking heads, no interviewees, just Brando on Brando and life.

Reviews
GamerTab That was an excellent one.
Lucybespro It is a performances centric movie
Murphy Howard I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.
Suman Roberson It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.
Prismark10 Marlon Brando who died in 2004 left behind hundreds of hours of audio recordings on tape where he discusses various aspects of his life, the highs, the lows and his acting career. Some of it is incoherent as he rambles and mumbles in a bewildering manner.The film is topped and tailed by a digitised head of Brando created for some unspecified movie. Brando revolutionised screen acting by popularising techniques he learned from Stella Adler, the Method which wowed the stage and he then brought it on screen. You can hear him tell us how exhilarating it felt was to finish a performance of A Streetcar Named Desire, getting on a motorbike, riding around New York in the early hours, then heading to a club in Harlem and party the rest of the night.We see interview footage, documentary clips and clips from films like On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Godfather, Mutiny of the Bounty, The Formula, Apocalypse Now, Last Tango in Paris.It is insightful to see him playing Don Corleone and hear the man how he prepared for the role, his motivation. In a sense an acting masterclass when he tells how easy it is to slap Johnny Fontaine on the screen but to stay still, silent when he hears the news that his son Sonny is killed, that was difficult.Brando was also a political activist, he had strong views of race, the shoddy treatment of native Indians. Less interesting to me was his haphazard and in some sense tragic personal life, especially as his son was accused of murder.This is not a complete picture though. As an actor Brando started the 1950s as a trailblazer but also acquired a reputation of being difficult and lazy. The 1960s were dogged by movies that were critical and commercial failures until he won his second Oscar for The Godfather.Then apart from Last Tango, he made cameos vast amounts of money such as Superman and The Formula. By which time he was obese, not bothering to learn his lines but get fed them via an earpiece.I wanted to know more about this, we get little. It is left to Francis Coppola in his own documentary footage to tell us about the frustrations of working with Brando for Apocalypse Now.His final acting years where he would make fitful appearances are glossed over. I would like to have heard him talk about his significant role in A Dry White Season, a film he worked for almost no pay and for which he got his final Oscar nomination.I was never too enthused by this film. I still felt I got to know very little about Brando but it was nice to hear from him even though some of what he said was less than compelling.
Michael_Elliott Listen to Me Marlon (2015)**** (out of 4) We are told that when Marlon Brando died in 2004 he left behind hundreds of hours worth of audio recordings that he made throughout his life. This rather unique documentary has Brando telling us his life story by using these audio recordings as well as some older interview footage.Writer, director and editor Stevan Riley really did an amazing job here because it couldn't have been easy to take all of these audio recordings and put them into a "story" that it's clear and makes sense. The documentary covers Brando's early years with his parents and then gets into his movie career where it's clear the actor wasn't his fondest fan. Films like ON THE WATERFRONT, A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, THE GODFATHER and LAST TANGO IN Paris get some great talk but there's also some great audio footage dealing with Brando's "lost" period in the 60s when he was basically just doing films for the money.Brando's life had all sorts of bad things happen including the various issues with is son and daughter. Those sad topics are covered here as well as other issues including his battle over the treatment of Indians. If you're a fan of Brando then you're certainly going to love this documentary because, well, the actor was a rather private person and didn't give too many interviews so it was great getting to hear his thoughts on life, himself and of course the movies.
mikevonbach This film deals with conquering fear the fear we all have within us . We Can live Free in our own way is what i received from this documentary . Without Money we live in fear. Fear of not having it ---It being money makes us all bend into a shape that changes what we are . Brando was fortunate to find a place in this world where he didn't have to bend And that is what he gave to his audience . Humans crave,clammier,cling, to those that can transport us to another place a Happier,dangerous,sexier, More beautiful Place threw music or movies the arts . Brando made me wonder are we all Connected . I believe we are all connected not with blood but by our collective thoughts .Humans that can create art in what ever form bring us together Naked and pure . Brando won't be forgotten He gave us a vision of freedom both on and off the stage . The truth is we are all on the stage . Acknowledge this We at this very moment are at the edge of a 100 foot cliff . Some of us will jump and land safely many of us will not land safely ...The most beautiful part is we all must jump and find out . BRANDO JUMPED AND JUMPED AND JUMPED He conquered his fear .
Johann_Cat 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.