Marlon Brando
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One-Eyed Jacks and Dreams: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Picks for Friday, December 2, 2016
One of the major film restoration events of 2016 was Universal’s digital overhaul of Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks (1961), an important bridge between the classical Westerns of John Ford and the genre-busting revisionism of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone, not to mention Arthur Penn, who would work with Brando on another great iconoclastic Western, The Missouri Breaks, around 15 years later. Like The Missouri Breaks, One-Eyed Jacks is an unruly passion project filled with idiosyncratic touches and auteurist preoccupations. Yet since Brando never directed another movie before or after, the motifs connect not to his other work behind the camera […]
by Jim Hemphill on Dec 2, 2016 -
“A Freudian Tale of the Boy, the Adult and the Old Man”: Stevan Riley on Listen to Me Marlon
Since his death, Marlon Brando has become a legend, but the actor and the man himself have gotten lost. British director Stevan Riley’s documentary Listen to Me, Marlon attempts to restore the person underneath the myth. To some extent, that’s an impossible task; even Brando himself, heard on self-recorded audio tape, talks about how movie audiences project themselves into actors. Drawing on hundreds of hours of tape recorded by Brando, as well as other audio and video sources, Riley assembles the autobiography the actor never gotten around to writing. Instead of interviewing other actors and directors about the Method, Elia […]
by Steven Erickson on Jul 29, 2015 -
COMING OF AGE IN CANNES
Cannes No.64. Côte d’Azur. Film, film, film and more films. As a matter of fact, more films than you can even imagine are made. That was my first impression last year as I popped my cherry at the Palais, bringing my 30-minute short film, The Sea Is All I Know, starring Oscar winner Melissa Leo (above), to the festival. It was overwhelming. How could so many films be made? Where are they seen? Where does the funding come from? How does one sell them? Who were these people selling the films? What are pre-sells? How is that different than distribution? […]
by Jordan Bayne on May 25, 2012 -
Francis Ford Coppola Talks to Toronto at TIFF
Last Sunday, a sold-out audience awarded Francis Ford Coppola a standing ovation when he strolled into the 548-seat Cinema 1 at TIFF’s Bell Lightbox, the new multiplex at the center of the world’s largest film festival after Cannes. To the adoring audience, Coppola smiled warmly and cracked, “I’m very embarrassed I left my black shoes on the plane,” as he sat down at center stage in tan shoes and a dark suit with TIFF Festival Director Cameron Bailey. This event was a rare 85-minute chat directly with his audience and enjoyed all the hype of a red-carpet premiere. In fact, […]
by Allan Tong on Sep 14, 2011
