Listen to Me Marlon (2015) Reviews

• Listen to him guys...

  afallguns2015-11-15

  Not just a bio-documentary. Far beyond that... Listen to Me Marlon is the presentation of a legend... AS A MAN... By the own legend... To younger people, such as myself, Marlon Brando was Don Vito Corleone (The Godfather), Colonel Kurtz (Apocalypse Now), Stanley (A Streetcar Named Desire), among many other great performances. But who was the man behind those iconic characters? In Listen to Me Marlon, is delivered a compilation of many recordings by the actor to the actor himself. I don't think that he would be very pleased to have such tapes out there! Troubled, charming, talented, politically engaged, passionate... The many faces of the man. Of the liar. When would I imagine that the man who played Don Vito Corleone and Colonel Kurtz, had problems with Francis Ford Coppola? And the tragedies of his personal life? How could I think about Brando as a ordinary guy? He was no ordinary. And his tapes show it very clearly. Marlon was one unique human being. NO! Not one, two or even more... Marlon talks to himself. But himself is not Marlon... He was no ordinary... As an art, the movie is beautiful. Not a typical boring documentary, with some footage, a couple interviews, and so and so. The director Stevan Riley was able to capture so many beautiful shots alongside with the music and the very voice of the actor. Flawless... I know now many more than I ever imagined about Marlon Brando. And now it's like the experience of watching his work means to open so many other doors... Flawless bio-doc. It's a must see if you are interest in the motion picture industry as a whole.

  More

• Amazing and haunting experience

  8512222015-11-15

  Greetings from Lithuania. I was dying to see "Listen to Me Marlon" (2015) from the first moment i heard about it. I won't lie - i'm a huge Marlon Brando fan so i was really looking forward to see a good documentary about the man himself. "Listen to Me Marlon" is a superb experience. Experience, because it is not a traditional straightforward biopic documentary. It is told by Brando himself, using audiotapes that he was recording during his life. We do get so see glimpses and most important aspects from his life from a childhood till the end. It shows a bit about the infamous movies he made. But more it is about listening to his thoughts, and they are haunting. It is like listening to extended version of Kurtz himself. Overall, i highly enjoyed "Listen to Me Marlon". It is informative, superbly paced and very self confident and fascinating documentary. It is a haunting experience, not for everyone i guess, but if you liked the acting of this screen legend and would like to go a bit beyond the face of a man, "Listen to Me Marlon" is a must see.

  More

• Superb documentary about a super actor in his own words and images.

  jdesando2015-08-26

  I am not the first to suggest that Marlon Brando was more interesting than the characters he played, including Stanley Kowalski and Terry Malloy. The new documentary, Listen to Me Marlon, takes three directors to do the acting legend justice. They do it well by searching hundreds of Brando's recordings and interviews to piece together a fascinating, unbiased look at his life. They even have digitized versions of his head that they fit his voice to in a novel and slightly creepy fashion. The suggestion that he has come back from the grave is not far-fetched as the voice is authentic and the verbals those of a consummate actor who morphs into different voices given the circumstance. Beyond Brando's observations about his roles such as in Lady from Shanghai, which he is ashamed of, are painful recounting about his daughter and son. His son murders her husband, serves 10 years while she subsequently commits suicide after several attempts. Brando's public reactions are sincerely remorseful that he couldn't have done more, especially for his troubled son. But then, who's to know if the great actor is not acting? Such is the magic of his art that I would even suggest the artifice of his public persona. One thing is for certain, the great method acting teacher, Stella Adler, foresaw a world-class actor in her young student. The glory and gloom of this famous man are all there. The clips from his performances are as fresh and exciting as ever. Those from his later successes such as Last Tango, Godfather, and Apocalypse Now are testimony to his inherent genius that as a fat man (think Orson Welles) he still leads the field (a comfort, no doubt, to such current geniuses as Daniel Day-Lewis). Listen to Me Marlon is a seamless song to arguably the greatest actor who ever lived. He paid dearly for his successes and profligacies in equal measure. Regardless of its occasionally tawdry subjects, this doc is for anyone interested in one of the few titans of the stage and screen.

  More

• Brando on Brando

  Michael_Elliott2016-05-06

  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.

  More

• Fascinating Tapes; Music, less so

  Johann_Cat2015-11-19

  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.

  More