Blonde: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An ambitious mess of an arthouse movie that misfires on all cylinders.

If you’ve always wanted to see an artistically decadent, narratively and dramatically impotent, nearly three-hour-long slog that recounts the endless abuse Marilyn Monroe endured during her tumultuous life, starring an actress with an absurdly pronounced Cuban accent playing the American icon…have I got the movie for you!

Blonde, the new NC-17 rated Netflix film based on the novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates, which stars Ana de Armas and is directed by Andrew Dominik, is a most puzzling movie.

The film, like the novel upon which it is based, takes dramatic license with the facts of Monroe’s tragic and turbulent life, and is a fictional biography despite chronicling some true events.

The only way I can make sense of this baffling film is to look at it not as a bio-pic, but as a horror movie with Monroe reduced to being the pretty victim trying to survive the devil stalking her. The film does nothing but portray Marilyn as she endures the continuous nightmare of her existence. There’s no reprieve for Marilyn, or the audience, as she drags the heavy cross of her exploitable beauty on the death march to the New Golgotha known as Hollywood. There’s also no growth or salvation for Marilyn…or the audience…just the repetitious banging of the drum of despair.

On this journey Marilyn is subjected to a cavalcade of either vicious, or cruel, or viciously cruel men, all of whom are icons or icon adjacent, who use and abuse her like Roman centurions at a crucifixion, the only difference being the centurions assigned to torture Jesus knew not what they did, while Marilyn’s abusers know exactly what they were doing.

My thesis that this is a horror film, which to be clear - still doesn’t make it a good film, requires the audience to understand and accept the fact that Hollywood is a death cult, fame is an evil demon, and that Monroe’s beauty and powerful sexual energy were not blessings but curses inflicted upon her.

In real life, Marilyn Monroe was captured by an energy and archetype that absolutely devoured her. Like two other of her contemporaries, Elvis and Marlon Brando, who became avatars for explosive sexual energy during the sexually repressed 1950’s, Marilyn was ultimately destroyed under the weight of her archetypal burden. Think of it as Dionysus’s revenge.

Unfortunately, director Andrew Dominik is incapable of exploring his subject matter with any such depth, and instead simply turns Blonde into abuse porn, and in so doing turns other American icons, like JFK and Joe DiMaggio, into vacuous props meant to convey the obvious point about the nefariousness of the American patriarchy.

Dominik is a visual stylist, of that there is no doubt, and I genuinely enjoyed his film The Assassination of the Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, but on Blonde, Dominik is all style and no substance.

Dominik and cinematographer Chayse Irvin use a plethora of interesting stylistic choices, like going from black and white to color and back again, and changing aspect ratios, but these choices lack coherence and dramatic intent.

As I pondered the film and Dominik’s distinct visual choices, I wondered if he was attempting to make a larger statement about the disposable nature of Monroe’s life and career, something along the lines of things being ‘pretty but meaning-less’. Or maybe Dominik was trying to make a movie about the exploitation of Marilyn Monroe by actually exploiting the image of Marilyn Monroe, and the actress playing her. Those potential intentions are astonishingly vapid, but Blonde is so bad I’m left grasping at straws to decipher it.  

Even the film’s politics are incomprehensible and at cross-purposes as the movie is both making a statement against the patriarchy but then also presenting a rabidly pro-life argument in regards to abortion. And the abortion stuff is not some throw away scene, it’s a recurring theme and one that is actually the most disturbing and most effective part of the film, but it will no doubt infuriate the movie’s feminist target audience.

Blonde has gotten quite a bit of attention because it’s the first Netflix film to be rated NC-17. I’m sure that rating will attract a few perverts hoping to see my two favorite things, nudity and gratuitous sex, but I found the NC-17 rating to be, pardon the pun, overblown. While the movie does feature a bevy of boobs, all of which belong to Ana de Armas, which are both real and spectacular, the sex is extraordinarily subdued and the nudity confined to the waist up. And while there is some adult subject matter dramatized, it’s nothing that an R rating wouldn’t comfortably cover.

Speaking of Ana de Armas, she is undoubtedly a beauty, but she is no Marilyn Monroe. De Armas is not well cast as she doesn’t particularly look like Marilyn and she most definitely doesn’t sound like her. De Armas’ Cuban accent, which manifests in the cadence of her speech and in pronunciation of certain letters and words, is egregiously incessant and a constant distraction. De Armas playing Marilyn Monroe is like having Desi Arnaz play JFK, or Matthew McConaughey play Fidel Castro.

To her credit though, de Armas does give her all in the very demanding role, but that said she is still terribly miscast.

There are really no other performances of note in the film. Bobby Cannavale plays Joe DiMaggio and Adrien Brody plays Arthur Miller and there’s not anything of interest there. Julianne Nicholson plays Marilyn’s crazy mom and she does crazy mom things.

Blonde felt to me like an arthouse bio-pic gone wrong. It’s somewhat reminiscent of Jackie(2016), which is a much better film, and Spencer(2021), which is not as bad as Blonde but still isn’t a good film (both are by director Pablo Larrain). I also thought of David Lynch’s masterpiece Mulholland Drive, which does a substantially better job at depicting the corrosive and corrupt nature of Hollywood on women and the devil’s bargain that is fame.

Ultimately, Blonde is, unlike Marilyn Monroe, entirely forgettable. If I’m being generous, I’d call it an ambitious failure of a film. If I’m being blunt, I’d call it a rancid shit sandwich. Either way, Blonde is not something you should ever trouble yourself to watch even though it’s ‘free’ on Netflix. The time spent watching this misfire of a movie could be much better spent literally doing anything else…like seeing Marilyn Monroe’s performance in a small, breakout role in The Asphalt Jungle. When you see her on-screen for the first time you instantly get why Marilyn became the most famous woman of the 20th century.

©2022

The Last Movie Stars (HBO Max): A Documentary Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. An insightful and thoughtful examination of two Hollywood icons and their long marriage.

The Last Movie Stars is a six-episode documentary mini-series which examines the lives, careers and marriage of acting icons Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman. The series was directed by actor Ethan Hawke and is currently streaming on HBO Max.

Since well before I was ever born, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward were the standard for the perfect marriage. Newman was the impossibly handsome, gracious, generous and grounded movie star, and Woodward was his down-to-earth, doting wife, mother to his kids and a powerful, Academy Award winning actress in her own right.

I once had the surreal experience of sitting directly behind them at a play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music about twenty years ago, and was struck by two things…how ridiculously beautiful they both were and how unnervingly normal they were as a couple. If it weren’t for their impeccable bone structure and piercing eyes, they could have been any other old couple out for a night at the theatre.

The Last Movie Stars attempts to go beyond the sterling façade of Newman and Woodward’s marriage and reveal their personal complexities and their deeply complicated relationship to one-another, their kids and their art.

Hawke obviously respects, admires and adores his subjects, and the series is much closer to hagiography than hit piece, but to his credit, he doesn’t dismiss or ignore the messier aspects of both Woodward and Newman’s lives. For instance, though it is done with a loving touch and no sense of animosity, Newman and Woodward’s children speak frankly and freely about their father’s alcoholism and their mother’s somewhat indifference to raising children. The rather uncomfortable topic of how the two met and started dating is also thoroughly explored and it isn’t the least bit flattering to Newman…or Woodward.

Hawke bases his documentary on a discarded memoir that Newman had intended to write with the help of a co-writer. Newman gave that writer permission to interview everyone in Paul’s life, which the writer did. But the tapes of those interviews were burned when Newman decided against the book…but thankfully the transcripts of those recordings have now been found and are the roadmap for The Last Movie Stars.

To bring those transcripts to life Hawke enlists a bunch of famous actor friends to voice the people from the transcripts. For example, George Clooney voices Paul Newman, Laura Linney is Joanne Woodward, Zoe Kazan is Paul’s first wife Jackie, Bobby Cannavale is Elia Kazan and so on and so forth.

It is somewhat ironic that George Clooney voices Paul Newman as his casting proves the title’s point. Newman was a mega-movie star with an Actor’s Studio background who dominated movies for forty years. Clooney was supposed to be as big of a star but he lacked, first and foremost, the craft and skill of Newman, but also his charisma and his artistic prowess.

There’s a very strong argument that Newman really was the last movie star because he was a “method actor” raised in the studio system who transitioned through the artistic/business revolution of the 60’s and 70’s without losing any of his star power.

George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and all the rest of the recent era wannabes have certainly had success, but their cinematic, cultural and artistic power is minuscule compared to Paul Newman.

Much to my surprise, Hawke’s decision to voice cast the film with well-known actors works astonishingly well. In addition, Hawke’s rapport with his cast in side discussions is endearing and brings a familial feel to the festivities.

 As for Newman and Woodward, their individual journeys and their journey together, are simply remarkable.

Newman came up during the Method Acting revolution of the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. He attended the Actor’s Studio in New York with luminaries such as Marlon Brando and James Dean.

Newman was born ten months after Brando, but he was no Brando. He wasn’t James Dean, either. But thanks to an undying work ethic and an astonishingly persistent relationship with luck he carved out a career path that outlasted (but not outshone) them both.

As an actor Newman was different than Brando and Dean in that he wasn’t about emoting but withholding. Everything happening in a Newman character is happening beneath the surface, in a cauldron boiling deep in his famous blue eyes. That somewhat reserved approach at first left him overshadowed by his supernova contemporaries, Brando and Dean.

But then luck intervened and James Dean’s untimely death opened the door to Newman’s ascension and directly led to his being cast in Somebody Up There Likes Me.

Brando’s erraticism and combustibility eventually led him to burn out and self-destruct, while Newman’s tightly contained personality kept his career from ever falling apart. And so, Paul Newman, by sheer force of will, perseverance and luck, became the actor of his generation.

Joanne Woodward was a great actress in her own right. She was the bigger star when the two met, and early in their relationship she won a Best Actress Oscar (Three Faces of Eve). But patriarchal demands forced parenthood to replace career ambitions for her just as Paul’s career went meteoric. That would be a thorn in her side for the rest of their time together.

Woodward’s filmography is often overlooked, and even Zoe Kazan, a terrific young actress who’s a talking head in the documentary – and who happens to be Elia Kazan’s granddaughter, shockingly admits she has never seen a Joanne Woodward film. That’s a shame as in her heyday she was as good as anyone on screen. Her work in Three Faces of Eve and Rachel, Rachel is impressive and worth a watch to get a taste of her talent.

Newman’s filmography needs no introduction, and his work in The Hustler, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Cool Hand Luke, Hud, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Verdict and The Color of Money is must-see for any aspiring actor.

Watching The Last Move Stars is enjoyable because it gives Woodward and Newman’s work a new perspective that reveals even deeper meaning to their artistry. And that’s the thing about this supposed Hollywood glamour couple that is so compelling and impressive, and that is their commitment to two things, their art and each other.

Through thick and thin they stuck it out. They didn’t bail when things got tough, and things often got very tough. They endured, and that is a lesson for every couple out there, even the ones who aren’t glamourous movie stars.

Yes, Woodward and Newman stumbled a lot, both artistically and as people. For instance, Newman was a terribly flawed man and a failed father, but he was ever on the search for forgiveness and/or redemption. His staggeringly impressive charitable work, including his camp for seriously ill children and his Newman’s Own food lines, speak to that yearning.

Despite the slings and arrows of life, or maybe because of them, Woodward and Newman never lost their humanity. It’s their flaws and failings and their steadfast refusal to give up in the face of them that make them relatable and even more captivating as a couple.

The Last Movie Stars is as insightful a documentary about movie stars as you’ll find because it focuses less on the myth and more on the humans embodying the myth. Ultimately, this documentary is, like the stars it attempts to explore, most notable for its humanity, and that’s a credit not only to the extraordinary Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, but to Ethan Hawke.

©2022

Chris Evans goes full Captain America, assembling a cavalcade of warmongering Washington avengers to discuss the Middle East

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 47 seconds

The gullible Hollywood star exposes himself to be a useful idiot for the military/intelligence industrial complex by producing a blindly orthodox new six-part discussion series on Yemen, Iran, Palestine, Syria and Saudi Arabia.

As the U.S. limps out of Afghanistan with its tail between its legs, and millions suffer and die under the most brutal of American-induced maladies from Syria to Palestine to Yemen and across the Middle East, I implore you to fear not as Captain America is now on the case.

Chris Evans, the movie star best known for playing the patriotic leader of the Avengers, Steve Rogers, in the multi-billion-dollar Marvel Cinematic Universe, is out to solve the world’s problems and has set his dazzling blue eyes and decidedly empty-head on the mess that is the Middle East.

In 2017, the dreamy Evans founded a civic media organization titled “A Starting Point” which he unironically claims is “non-partisan”. Thankfully for humanity, on August 31st, A Starting Point will air a new six-part series titled “Influence and Power in the Middle East” where “experts” discuss Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran and Palestine.

I was hoping that this series would feature such Captain America adjacent luminaries as Iron Man, Spider-Man, Thor and The Hulk, but unfortunately the line-up of speakers is considerably less impressive.

“Influence and Power in the Middle East” features a cavalcade of archaic establishment asses like George W. Bush’s National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass, former Secretary of Defense and CIA director Leon Panetta, and everybody’s favorite raving lunatic and former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton.

This is literally a murderer’s row of Washington warmongers, nefarious neo-cons and CIA criminals who have raped and pillaged the Middle East for the entirety of their kiss up-kick down careers. This is the equivalent of having Ted Bundy on a dating podcast to share his insights about women.

In addition, apparently former CIA operative Will Hurd is going to “host” these discussions, one could only hope that his experience “hosting” detainees during torture sessions in Afghanistan and Pakistan would be replicated with these vile villains.

If I wanted to see Hadley, Haass, Panetta, Bolton and a cavalcade of National Security lackeys and CIA shills spout their obscene and absurd military/intelligence industrial propaganda, I’d just turn on cable news, as CNN, MSNBC and Fox seem to exist solely to platform and/or employ these types of repugnant reprobates.

Speaking of the mainstream media, it’s nice to see Chris Evans, one of those hopeless Hollywood fools who endlessly espouses diversity in movie casting, emulate media business-as-usual with his A Starting Point charade by casting only people slavishly addicted to establishment orthodoxy for these discussions…no diversity of opinion here!

For example, Richard Haas and Dr. Jon Alterman, two pro-Israel shills, will discuss Palestine. I’m sure that will be immensely enlightening.

Another example is having Leon Panetta and John Bolton tackle Iran. Bolton is the John Bonham of banging the drum for war with Iran. You know what won’t get mentioned in that stultifying, establishment-friendly discussion? The U.S. shooting down of Iran Air flight 655, a civilian airliner, over Iranian airspace in 1988, killing all 290 men, women and children aboard.

What would be considerably more useful, noble and interesting would be if Chris Evans had used his oversized public stature to actually feature diverse opinions from diverse people, like…I don’t know…maybe have actual Palestinians discuss Palestine, and Iranians discuss Iran, and Syrians discuss Syria and Yemenis discuss Yemen. You know, platform people who never ever get a platform in American media.

And if Captain America really had a pair, he’d have Jamal Khashoggi’s widow and 9-11 victims’ family members come and discuss Saudi Arabia.

But we all know that Chris Evans is entirely devoid of not only testicular fortitude, but of brains.

Evans is such a moron that in 2016 he actually flew into a rage because he believed that Marlon Brando had literally anally raped his co-star Maria Schneider on camera at the behest of director Bernardo Bertolucci while filming Last Tango in Paris in 1971. Think about how breathtakingly ridiculous that is for a moment.

To be clear, Brando did not actually rape Schneider or have any genital/sexual contact with her while filming Last of Tango in Paris, any more than Clint Eastwood really shot people while filming The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. The sex between Brando and Schneider was entirely simulated, but when the egregiously gullible Evans read about a mis-informed rumor that the Brando story was true, he donned his white knight savior costume and valiantly tweeted.

“Wow. I will never look at this film, Bertolucci or Brando the same way again. This is beyond disgusting. I feel rage."

He followed that gem up by tweeting, “They should be in jail." The punchline being that Evans was unaware that Marlon Brando had been dead for a decade by the time Captain America courageously hit send on that tweet.

The reality is that Evans isn’t just an empty-headed imbecile but also a shameless establishment shill. This buff buffoon is no doubt great at doing pull-ups, but he has the intellect of a toddler in pull-ups.

Chris “Captain America” Evans obviously set out to prove with his ‘serious’ A Starting Point venture that he wasn’t just another vacuous but impossibly handsome Hollywood pretty boy, but by the looks of the “Influence and Power in the Middle East” guest list, I can confidently declare “Mission Not Accomplished!”, as he’s only proven himself to be just another useful idiot for the money-hungry and bloodthirsty military/industrial complex and corrupt Washington establishment.

Captain America famously said: “I don’t like bullies. I don’t care where they’re from. “ However, it would appear Chris does like bullies, especially if they’re from Washington.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Bush, Bertolucci and a Requiem for Truth

Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes 66 seconds

There is a common belief among the hoi polloi that famous deaths happen in threes. While I can’t prove that to be true, it certainly seems to be true. For instance, just this last week, former President George HW Bush died along with famed Oscar winning director Bernardo Bertolucci. Who was the third death you may ask? My answer to that is, the third death this week was Truth.

Bernardo Bertolucci died on November 26th, 2018, but the truth regarding Bertolucci died two years ago when the media ran with a story about the man and his work that was so ludicrous and odious as to be absurd. The gist of that story was that while filming one of his great works, Last Tango in Paris (1972), Bertolucci directed his star, Marlon Brando, to use butter as lubricant and rape his lead actress Maria Schnieder, on camera.

The story, on its face, is absolutely ludicrous and only an imbecile would believe it, and yet, the media ran headlines misinterpreting a Bertolucci quote and Hollywood celebrities went into overdrive virtue signalling to condemn Bertolucci and Brando. Some, like the genius Chris Evans of Captain America fame, actually called for the two men to be in prison. No one had the heart to break to the dim-witted Mr. Evans that digging up the long dead Brando to stuff his body into a jail cell was not really worth the time and effort.

I wrote a piece about this Last Tango/butter rape story back when it happened, and that piece got quite a lot of attention. Even though I was prescient enough to write in that 2016 story about actual, real sexual abuse taking place in Hollywood a full year before the Weinstein scandal broke, many people attacked me for my article claiming that I was somehow condoning rape. Of course, my counter argument was pretty simple…no rape had occurred so I couldn’t be condoning rape. In fact, not only did no rape occur, but no sexual contact of any kind occurred, but that didn’t appease the future #MeToo-ers from getting hysterically hysterical.

With Bertolucci’s death last week came a whole new wave of stories highlighting the fallacious butter/rape nonsense, with a great number of columnists, in as serious a tone as possible, condemning the man and saying that the butter/rape story overshadowed his artistic genius and must be in the first paragraph of his obituary. I nearly gave myself seizures from rolling my eyes so much and sighing so heavily at the moronic group think and political correctness consistently on display by these intellectually impotent, flaccidly unoriginal, know-nothing writers, but somehow I survived.

The one bright spot was that nearly every piece I read, especially the hard news pieces as opposed to the editorials and columnists, made clear this time around what they failed to make clear two years ago, namely that all of the sex in Last Tango in general, and in the “butter scene” in particular, was simulated. It is a sign of the idiotic times that the bar is set so low in regards to Truth that I took that bit of raging obviousness to be a small concession and a partial victory. My thinking was that, at least my article from two years had some impact…and that has to count for something (much like my Chris Kyle piece made a minor ripple in the culture four years ago). While I am certainly not a hero in the war for Truth, I can at least claim to have fired a shot….whether it hit or not is another thing entirely.

Which brings us to former President George HW Bush, who died over the weekend. Bush was preceded in his death not only by his wife of 73 years, Barbara, but also by the Truth. For proof of that one need look no further than the glowing media coverage of the elder Bush that spontaneously erupted even before rigor mortis had even set in after he shuffled off his mortal coil.

In America we have no official state religion, and that is because our de facto state religion is the religion of state. The deaths of former presidents and first ladies trigger an instantaneous high holy days in America where critical thinking is replaced with maudlin displays of faux patriotism that is more akin to a cult than a country. This flag-waving nostalgia spreads like a pandemic in post-presidential death America, and it infects both establishment political parties equally.

The establishment and its duplicitous corporate media wing kick into high gear when a venal American aristocrat like HW Bush dies. Michael Beschloss, Jon Meacham and Doris Kearns Goodwin are, like wax figures at Madame Tussaud’s, dug up out of the basement, dolled up and rolled out for the mindless to gawk at as they, ironically, wax eloquently about what a kind man Bush was and how he put country before self. It is all so soft and nice and is nothing but a pandering, manipulative fairy tale. Added to the mix now is how Bush the Elder was so different from the usurper currently sitting on the throne…the scandalous Donald Trumpenstien. Of course, the reality is that the media is only interested in style over substance and form over function, and thus their distaste for Trump and lavish adoration of HW Bush.

Bush’s death has notched the establishment’s hatred of Trump well past 11 and into the stratosphere…even more so than when St. John McCain died earlier this year, leaving behind his grieving common-law wife Lindsay Graham, who no doubt still suffers from the vapors. Mainstream media talking heads poetically pontificating about Bush’s and McCain’s “civility” and their “unquestionable patriotism” is like a never ending and gratuitous funeral dirge meant to signal the end of one noble life (and reprehensible lie) and the continuation of the greater tradition (and bigger lie) of the great American city brightly shining on the hill in all its moral superiority. This is all just smoke and mirrors to tap into emotion over reason and distract from the Truth.

What really comes across to me in watching the vacuous and vapid coverage of HW Bush’s demise, is that it is really just one more echo of a scream from the vicious and brutal killing of Truth in American life.

For example, whenever MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace rhapsodizes on Bush’s compassion but fails to mention his belligerent refusal to apologize to the Iranian people when in 1988 the U.S. military shot down Iranian Air Flight 655, a passenger jet that was flying in Iranian airspace, killing 274 innocent civilians, including 66 children, Truth dies. Truth dies further when the fact that Bush awarded the commander of the ship (U.S.S. Vincennes) that shot down that civilian aircraft a medal for his actions, is ignored.

Whenever Rachel Maddow declares that Bush is so dramatically different from Trump, but fails to mention that both men were born with silver spoons in their mouth that were so big they still shit bullion, Truth dies.

Whenever CNN’s Anderson Cooper talks of Bush’s beautiful 73 year marriage to Barbara and holds it up as a symbol of true love and devotion but fails to mention Bush’s long-term affair with his aide Jennifer Fitzgerald, Truth dies.

Whenever some pundit calls Bush a “self-made man” but fails to mention that he was born into one of the most powerful families in the country and his father was one of the most powerful bankers in the country who later became a U.S. Senator, Truth dies.

When the fact that HW Bush came from one of the most powerful blue blooded families in the country and then married into another wealthy and politically connected family, the Pierces, is not mentioned in regards to his life, Truth dies.

Whenever some historian speaks of Bush being unlike Trump because he put “country before self” and fails to mention his deplorable treason of the October Surprise, where Bush conspired to keep Americans hostage in Iran until after the 1980 election, Truth dies.

Whenever Bush is held up as a paragon of civic virtue as opposed to Trump, but his pardoning of his compatriots in the Iran-Contra scandal, many of whom could have ratted him out for his own criminal involvement in the scandal is omitted, Truth dies.

Whenever media members decry Trump’s treatment of illegal immigrants but fail to mention Bush’s Operation Condor, which was a covert operation in effect while Bush was head of the CIA, where the U.S. funded, trained and directed assassination and death squads in Central and South America who hunted, tortured and killed thousands of political dissenters and dissidents in order to keep right-wing dictatorships in power, Truth dies.

Whenever Bush is revered as a dignified statesman, but his illegal invasion of Panama, where he arrested Manuel Noriega, who was one of Bush’s partners in the Central American portion of Iran-Contra, and who under CIA supervision and protection, facilitated drug and gun smuggling throughout Central America and major U.S. cities such as Los Angeles and Miami that ravaged minority communities here in America and entire countries in Central America, which now fuels our immigration crisis, Truth dies.

Whenever talking heads speak of Bush’s impeccability in contrast to the corruption of the Trump administration but fail to mention the Bush family’s connection to the S&L scandal, in particular HW’s son Neil Bush, who was neck deep in that mess, Truth dies. Or when HW Bush’s father and his connections to the Nazi’s is conveniently lost down the memory hole, or the Bush family connections to the Bin Laden’s, or the House of Saud, or even…wait for it…the Hinckley family, whose son John Jr. shot President Reagan just months after he became president, and if Reagan had died, then Vice President George HW Bush would have been eligible to be president for the next 11 years…when all of those connections are ignored…Truth dies. (And Truth dies before I even mention the memory-holed information like HW Bush’s compelling connections to the Kennedy assassination, including his being a CIA operative at the time, the use of off-shore companies he is connected with as a money laundering vehicle for the Kennedy operation, and his allegedly being in Dealey Plaza on that day. )

Whenever historians, with misty eyes, eulogize Bush and bemoan Trump, but fail to directly connect the failures of Bush and his ilk to the collapse of trust in institutions which led to Trump, Truth dies. For instance, Bush’s CIA led Operation Condor and Iran-Contra, both de-stablized Central America and have directly led to the immigration crisis of today, which led to Trump. The same is true of Bush’s handling of the S&L scandal, which directly led to the Wall Street crisis of 2008, the anger over which led to Trump. The same is true of Bush’s (and Reagan’s) meddling in the Middle East, from putting Marines in Lebanon, which empowered Hezbollah, to dealing with Iran in both the October Surprise and the Iran-Contra scandal, as well as the head fake to get us into Iraq War I, and the devastating effect that had on regular Iraqis who were killed in the war and starved in the sanctions in the war’s aftermath, not to mention the debacle that was Iraq War II, all of which led to Trump.

Bush was not only a failure as a president, but as a father and a human being. He is responsible for the deaths of millions of people and for the misery of millions more. He has the blood of thousands killed in Central America on his hands and is morally responsible for the countless others he condemned to life in misery here in America with the easy flow of drugs and guns into inner cities under the Iran-Contra flag.

Bush’s son, the execrable George W. Bush, the 43 president, was an even worse president and presided over the killing of millions across the globe, most specifically in Iraq. Besides lying us into a war, Dubya also shredded the constitution with his expansive surveillance programs and his rendition and torture programs, and that doesn’t even scratch the surface of his awfulness since I haven’t mentioned his failure (or complicity) on 9-11, and his use of that tragedy for personal political gain. Dubya’s moral and political corruption and failure led to Trump.

Bush’s other sons are no walk in the park either, as his previously mentioned son Neil was deeply involved in the S&L scandal, and who also had a dinner scheduled with John Hinckley Jr.’s older brother the night after the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan…how uncomfortable that phone call to cancel must have been. And I’m not even going to get into “Low Energy” Jeb Bush because, ironically, I just don’t have the energy, but trust me when i tell you that Neil Bush and Jeb Bush make Don Jr. and Eric Trump look like pikers at the entitlement and corruption table.

The bottom line is this, the establishment rants and raves about Trump and his destruction of American institutions and his attacks on Truth, but the reality is that the establishment destroyed their own institutions through flagrant corruption and fragrant mismanagement (“Heckuva job Brownie!”), and George HW Bush is the epitome of the depravity, nepotism, fraud, malfeasance, unscrupulousness and above all the entitlement that has turned many Americans against the establishment and which led directly to Trump.

The media has failed right along with the rest of the establishment, and their glaring and self-serving hypocrisy and mendacity only furthers to erode any remaining credibility they hope to hold on to. HW Bush’s failures shouldn’t be papered over by the press in the wake of his death, they should be shouted from the mountain tops in an attempt to regain the credibility that they so frivolously squandered with their cheerleading for war in Iraq (both I and II), their boot-licking of Dubya Bush on torture and surveillance (like the New York Times not using the word torture and holding a story on illegal surveillance until after the 2004 election) and for being lackeys to power in both Washington and Wall Street (such as media asshats like Jim Cramer yelling “BUY, BUY, BUY!” for Bear Stearns as it collapsed).

The media continues to degrade itself and its credibility when it bends over backwards to condemn Trump but simultaneously rehabilitates George W. Bush and his ilk. The same neo-con crew that lied us into the Iraq catastrophe and slept walked through 9-11, are still held in the highest regard by the overlords of American mass media. The allegedly liberal MSNBC is a festering cesspool of Bush apologia that actively rehabilitates Bush along with his nefarious intelligence agency henchmen like General Michael Hayden, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey and Robert Muller. An example of MSNBC’s Bush sycophancy is that the network lets Bush administration alum Nicole Wallace have her own daily show and regularly allows such worm-tongued troglodytes as Bill Kristol and Max Boot on their programs with never a mention of their Iraq War villainy or any of their other egregious sins.

The problem with the lack of Truth in regards to HW Bush or Bertolucci is that the lies we tell ourselves only end up fooling ourselves. The lies the media tells itself and attempts to spread far and wide now ring hollow across large swaths of the the culture, and thus we have President Trump.

Telling ourselves lies, or believing in lies in order to make ourselves feel morally superior, like Chris Evans and the rest of the anti-Bertolucci, butter rape believing crowd, only ends up creating more shadows dancing on our cave walls meant to distract us from the harsher reality we prefer to ignore. So Chris Evans, Anna Kendrick, Jessica Chastain et al, used the Bertolucci butter rape story to make themselves feel better, like they were strong and taking a stand, but it also conveniently distracted them from their silent complicity with Woody Allen, Harvey Weinstein and other sexual predators hunting young women and men in Hollywood. The reason they raged against Bertolucci and not against Woody Allen or Weinstein, is because it was easy…it was a form of cheap grace. Calling out Woody Allen or Weinstein (at the time before the story broke) would have cost them something…but attacking Bertolucci was free…free from repercussions and also free from fact.

The same is true of the media in regards to their hagiography of George HW Bush and family. Instead of speaking Truth, they pass on polite platitudes about service and nobility rather than highlight the family’s and man’s utter moral depravity, because it is easier to lie than seek or speak the Truth. To be fair to the media though, they are just doing their job…which is to propagandize the population with lies and inoculate them against Truth.

In conclusion, George HW Bush is dead. He inflicted great harm and evil upon the world, that is not a partisan assessment (I think the same of Clinton and Obama), but one founded on a very clear rational, moral and ethical basis. By ignoring the truth about George HW Bush, or distorting the truth about Bernardo Bertolucci for that matter, the media, and we the people, are condemning ourselves to our own execution. For as some have only come to discover under Trump’s mendacious and malevolent presidency, if the Truth has no meaning, than life has no purpose, and we are left in a Nietzschean will to power death spiral where, like a narcissistic ourboros, we cannibalistically gorge ourselves on our own lies and bullshit, and therefore end up being annihilated by eating ourselves into oblivion.

©2018

Raping Truth : Brando, Butter and Last Tango in Paris

"A LIE WILL GO HALFWAY AROUND THE WORLD WHILE TRUTH IS PUTTING ITS BOOTS ON." - MARK TWAIN

Contrary to what is going around the media lately, Marlon Brando did not rape Maria Schneider while filming director Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, FULL STOP.  In addition, Bertolucci DID NOT admit in an interview that he and Brando conspired to rape Schneider on the film. Also, Maria Schneider herself DID NOT ever claim to be raped by Marlon Brando during the filming.

Now that we got that out of the way…I guess I should start at the beginning. Many of you may be wondering what the hell I am talking about? Well, this past weekend all hell broke loose when Elle magazine published an article with the headline, "Bertolucci Admits He Conspired to Shoot a Non-Consentual Rape Scene in 'Last Tango in Paris'. In the article Elle mis-reports that in 2013, Last Tango in Paris director Bernardo Bertolucci said in an interview that Maria Schneider never consented to the film's famous, butter-fueled, anal-rape scene. In response to that headline, and the poorly written and terribly misleading article below it, numerous celebrities like Jessica Chastain, Anna Kendrick, Chris Evans and Jenna Fischer have all tweeted their outrage about Marlon Brando and Bernardo Bertolucci actually raping Maria Schneider. In turn, numerous media outlets, from The Hollywood Reporter and Variety to, of all places, USA Today , have posted articles with similarly misleading headlines and equally poorly written articles with the same confusing content, except this time with the added spice of celebrity tweets. Thus, with those tweets about the original Elle article, and then follow up articles from other outlets about those tweets about the original article, a circular firing squad was formed, with the truth dead center in the middle. 

This story is a perfect example of the idiocy and feeble mindedness of our media and the gullibility of our populace. First Elle Magazine takes Bertolucci's quote entirely out of context and misunderstands the point he is making, then Jessica Chastain misreads the article and fails to think critically about the claims, and then Chris Evans and Anna Kendrick add their own lack of critical thinking with a sprinkle of moral preening and virtue signaling. Then the rest of the media sees celebrity tweets and scurries to add them to the already rancid shitstorm and clusterfuck of an excuse for journalism. This story is the epitome of the post-truth culture we live in that is governed by the king of Post-Truth, President-Elect Trump. Truth doesn't matter anymore, the only thing that matters are feelings and agendas. If a story is in line with how we feel or what we want to be true, then whether it is actually true or not is of no consequence.

Here is what actually, really, truly happened in regards to the rape scene in Last Tango in Paris. The scene was not in the original script, but was added later when Marlon Brando came up with it, which was not an unusual occurrence when Brando worked on a film. The scene was scripted and Bertolucci, Brando and Schneider talked about it before shooting. The most notable thing about the scene is the use of butter as a lubricant for anal sex. The use of butter was the only thing about the scene not revealed to Maria Schneider prior to shooting. In the 2013 interview referenced by Elle, that is what Bertolucci is referencing when he says that he wanted to keep Maria unaware of that element in order to get a real and genuine reaction from her. It is vital to understand this next part…Marlon Brando did not have actual sex with Maria Schneider during this scene. Marlon Brando did not penetrate Maria Schneider's anus or vagina with his fingers, penis or butter during this scene. At no point during this scene did Marlon Brando ever touch Maria Schneider's anus or vagina. It is also important to point out that Maria Schneider did indeed know ahead of time that this was an anal sex/rape scene and consented to shoot the scene. Maria Schneider obviously never consented to rape or sex of any kind, and no rape or sex of any kind took place during the filming of the scene. People claiming that Marlon Brando literally and physically raped Maria Schneider in this scene are wrong. People claiming that Marlon Brando literally and physically sexually assaulted Maria Schneider are wrong. All of the sex in the rape scene, and the rest of the entire film for that matter, is completely simulated, including the application of butter to Maria Schneider's anus. While Maria Schneider is shown naked in other parts of the film, in the rape scene there is only a glimpse of the upper and side part of her buttocks. Marlon Brando did not expose his penis in the rape scene and did not put his penis against Maria Schneider's flesh during the scene. These are the facts. Anyone claiming otherwise is either mistaken or lying. This media whirlwind and the accompanying outrage are the result of a terrible misunderstanding and nothing more. (Just this morning Bernardo Bertolucci came out and said exactly that. )

Now, to be fair, Maria Schneider, who died in 2011, did say in an interview in regards to shooting the butter-rape scene in Last Tango in Paris that she "felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci."  What Maria wasn't saying was that she was literally, physically raped by Marlon Brando, what she was saying was that she felt emotionally raped by the experience and by Bertolucci's directing style. Why do I say that is what she meant? Because Marlon Brando said the same thing about his experience making the film. Bertolucci stripped away all pretenses and defenses from his actors in order to get as true a performance from them as he could. You can argue in good faith that Bertolucci's approach is emotionally or artistically harmful, or damaging or counter-productive, but what you cannot do is say that anyone was literally or physically raped.

"THE MOST OUTRAGEOUS LIE THAT CAN BE INVENTED WILL FIND BELIEVERS IF A MAN ONLY TELLS THEM WITH ALL HIS MIGHT." - MARK TWAIN

The articles about this story, across the board, are simply atrocious and abominable pieces of journalism, or non-journalism in this case. Read this Hollywood Reporter story, it is incomprehensible. Someone was actually paid money to write that article. Read the other articles, which are mostly made up of the tweet reaction to the original story. I felt like I was going mad as I read these stories because if you actually read the words and use logic, reason and intelligence, you can see what is happening and the misunderstanding taking place. Moral outrage supplants logic pretty quickly in situations like this. This story became a thing because it gave people what they wanted…a victim, a villain and a sense of moral superiority and a desecration of their delicate sensibilities. Just because a story has those elements, doesn't mean it is true…in fact, if a story has those elements it becomes even more important for journalists to dig and find the actual truth…not what the public wants to be true. ( As an example, read my Chris Kyle piece.)

An example of the sort of cognitive dissonance going on in the media around this story can be found in The Guardian newspaper, which had a news article about the claims in Elle magazine and used a similarly misleading headline, "Last Tango in Paris director suggests Maria Schneider 'butter-rape' scene not consensual", note the weasel word "suggests", yet in the article itself it clearly states that there was no sexual contact between Brando and Schneider during the infamous rape scene. That Guardian story also points out the fact that the scene was not sprung on Schneider, or improvised on set, but was scripted. While the scene wasn't in the ORIGINAL script, it was scripted and prepared ahead of time and Schneider had read it before shooting. The dissonance isn't only between The Guardian headlines and articles, but between news divisions and editorial, as columnists at the Guardian apparently don't read their own newspaper, as there were no less than three columnists who wrote about the Last Tango story as if an actual rape occurred, which is contradicted in the papers own reporting. All of the Guardian columnists used the Last Tango rape story to grind their own axes about things like "rape culture" or "male domination" or the "broken promise of the 70's sexual revolution". Those columns all ignored the actual facts of the story because those facts are inconvenient to the arguments they wanted to make.

"I LIKE SIMPLE PLEASURES, LIKE BUTTER IN MY ASS, LOLLIPOPS IN MY MOUTH." - FLOYD GONDOLLI, BOOGIE NIGHTS

Chris Evans, who is best known for his portrayal of Captain America, may very well be the dumbest person to have ever walked the earth. If he isn't the dumbest, he is certainly in the top ten….here is damning proof of that claim. Evan's tweet regarding the Last Tango controversy says "Wow. I will never look at this film, Bertolucci or Brando the same way again. This is beyond disgusting. I feel rage." If you close your eyes and sit still enough, you can hear with wind whistling through the empty caverns of Chris Evans skull. Chris then follows that tweet up by responding to Anna Kendrick's claims that this story is old news with, ""Had no idea. Would felt rage then too. They should be in jail." Poor Chris Evans. Besides this nitwit being completely erroneous regarding the facts of the situation, does anyone out there have the heart to break it to Chris Evans that Marlon Brando has been dead for well over a decade? Poor, stupid bastard. Reading his tweets make me think that Chris Evans was the kind of guy who ate a lot of paste in school. But at least he got to get his virtue signaling in and join the moral hysteria club.

In her tweet, Anna Kendrick gets to not only be morally superior but prophetically prescient because she knew about this scandal a long time ago and it was "dudes" who didn't believe her when she'd tell them. Here's the tweet, "Ms. Schneider stated this several years ago. I used to get eye-rolls when I brought it up to people (aka dudes)". Poor, dopey, little Anna, apparently she doesn't know that a prophet is not without honor except in his (or her) hometown. Hey Anna, maybe those "dudes" didn't believe your story because it was so idiotic and obviously not true. Maybe "dudes" wouldn't roll their eyes at you if you didn't tell them horseshit stories that even the most simple of simpletons could tell was nonsense. Please be careful removing your head from your ass…you might want to try butter to help with the transition.

Jenna Fischer tweeted, "All copies of this film should be destroyed immediately. It contains an actual rape and sexual assault." Jesus Fucking Christ, you raving ignoramus. We just hit DefCon 1 of Moral Panic!! Get a grip woman. Are you that easily taken in by the most base of ludicrous statements. Are you that unsophisticated that you cannot see a shocking headline and then actually gather information about the subject and discover the truth about it? Apparently you are as brainless as Mr. Evans and Ms. Kendrick, which means you are in very, very dopey company. 

Jessica Chastain is an undeniably terrific actress, the best of this sad bunch no doubt, but her reading comprehension and critical thinking abilities are woeful. Chastain's tweet shrieks, "To all the people that love this film - you're watching a 19 yr old get raped by a 48 yr old man. The director planned her attack. I feel sick." I feel sick too Jessica, although my sickness is because I am a great admirer of your work and yet have to come to terms with the fact that you are a reactionary imbecile. Does Jessica Chastain really believe that Maria Schneider is being raped in that scene? Really? Truly? Raped? Rape being define as "unlawful sexual intercourse or any other sexual penetration of the vagina, anus, or mouth of another person"?  Is Jessica Chastain that much of a dipshit or did she just really want to get into a moral frenzy about something and didn't want details to get in the way? With her tweet, Jessica Chastain proves she is, like her other misguided compatriots, either a fool, a liar or both.

I admit the last section was very unkind to Chastain, Evans, Kendrick and Fischer, but I only did that to try and hit home the point that a failure to think critically about any story in our media, be it about a rape forty years ago, or the case for war over a decade ago, or the claims of heroism by a Navy SEAL, is no longer just an error, but is an act of self-serving myopia and moral masturbation. It is imperative that people think critically about everything they are fed by media outlets, regardless of those outlets ideological proclivities. We must start thinking critically and stop thinking emotionally. This Last Tango rape story is powerful evidence of what happens when we think emotionally and react, instead of thinking critically and respond.

If history is any guide, one thing is for sure, none of these celebrities, or media outlets, are going to back down from this falsehood. They will most assuredly double down on the emotional thinking because that is human nature. Never admit error, only increase your cognitive dissonance to make those uncomfortable facts either go away or have no meaning. Even in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence, Chastain, Evans, Kendrick and Fischer won't post apologies to Bertolucci or Brando. They won't say how foolish they were to believe such a rabid bit of foolhardy nonsense. No, these folks will prefer to rage against shadows dancing on the cave wall of their imaginations, or boogie men hiding under their beds. These people, Chastain, Evans, Kendrick, and Fischer and these media outlets, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Elle, USA Today to name but a few, are only interested in satiating their desire for outrage, and have zero desire for the Truth. It is they, and not Bernardo Bertolucci or Marlon Brando who should be ashamed of themselves and their behavior.

Actual, horrific rapes happen all the time, over a quarter of a million women are raped every year in the United States. Thousands upon thousands of woman go through the brutal trauma of being sexually assaulted and raped every year, we don't need to make up stories about phantom rapes occurring forty years ago. This hysteria and frenzy from the media and celebrities about Last Tango in Paris does rape survivors no service. When something so obviously dishonest and demonstrably false as the rape claims and accompanying witch hunt against Marlon Brando and Bernardo Bertolucci about the filming of Last Tango in Paris are used by people to advance an agenda, that agenda isn't strengthened by those lies but weakened. Woman who are actually raped or sexually assaulted, will not find solace in the faux courage shown by these nincompoops railing against Bertolucci and Brando, instead they will wonder why these people aren't fighting against real evils, not made up ones.

"MISTAKES ARE ALWAYS FORGIVABLE, IF ONE HAS THE COURAGE TO ADMIT THEM." - BRUCE LEE

If Chastain and co. are really interested in standing up against rape, why don't they speak out against Woody Allen? Or against Bryan Singer? Or stand up for Corey Feldman and encourage him to name names? Or encourage Thandie Newton to name her abuser? There is more actual evidence in those cases and against those men, including living people claiming to be their victims, than there is regarding the non-story of rape during filming of Last Tango in Paris. The reality is that Chastain et al won't make a stink about Allen or Singer or any other Hollywood heavy-hitter because it wouldn't be politically expedient or career enhancing to do so. Old man Bertolucci is irrelevant as a filmmaker now. Brando is long dead. They are innocent but they are easy targets for the mob of the indignant and uninformed. If you, Jessica Chastain, Chris Evans, Anna Kendrick or Jenna Fischer had any balls, you'd take a stand against people with real power who are hurting innocent people, some of them children, to this day. But we all know that would never happen. Courage is in short supply nowadays, no doubt replaced by the easy grace of public moral outrage.

Look at me, for instance. These famous actors are potential clients of mine, but I am calling them out on their bullshit because to me, Truth is more important than potentially advancing my career or padding my bank account. Do they have the same integrity as some lowly jackass like me? Maybe I am hopelessly naive, but I am hoping they do. As an act of good will I extend an offer to any of these actors, Jessica Chastain, Chris Evans, Anna Kendrick or Jenna Fischer, that if you publicly apologize to Bernardo Bertolucci and Marlon Brando, I will gladly give you two acting coaching sessions for free. That is a value of at least $250!! And that doesn't even include the cost of the butter!! I think that is a nice gesture on my part… a wee bit of goodwill toward the misguided. Now if only someone could read this article to Chris Evans, slowly, and explain the big words to him, we might be able to get the ball rolling on a magnificent working relationship. 

"GO ON, TELL ME…TELL ME SOMETHING SWEET. SMILE AT ME AND SAY I JUST MISUNDERSTOOD. GO ON, TELL ME. YOU PIG-FUCKER….YOU GODDAMN , FUCKING, PIG-FUCKING LIAR." - PAUL (MARLON BRANDO), LAST TANGO IN PARIS

In all seriousness, the real crime here is not the non-existent rape of Maria Schneider, it is the fact that Last Tango in Paris is a tremendous film and that will now be lost on people with the hullabaloo surrounding this non-scandal. Marlon Brando is the Godfather of modern acting, no pun intended, and Last Tango in Paris is maybe his greatest performance. In Last Tango, Bertolucci was able to strip Marlon of all his surface performance and left him vulnerable, exposed, and authentic. Brando has never been as honest in a film as he was in Last Tango in Paris. 

Maria Schneider was an unknown before Last Tango and her performance is staggeringly good. Her artistic courage resonates through every scene she inhabits. It is a terrible shame that Schneider was unable to handle the scalding glare of fame when it came for her. It was fame that destroyed her, not Bertolucci. The same can be said of Brando as well. Fame is a beast, and it eventually ate both Brando and Schneider alive.

Hopefully, when this whole episode recedes into the background, people can return and watch Last Tango in Paris and see it for what it really is, a delicate, intimate and exquisite dance between two robust, voracious, yet fragile talents who have left this world much too soon…Maria Schneider and Marlon Brando.

For Marlon and Maria, who remained friends until Brando's death in 2004.

Please read a follow-up post on this topic…BUSH, BERTOLUCCI AND A REQUIEM FOR TRUTH

©2016

Marlon Brando, The Big Bang and the Birth of Modern Acting

ESTIMATED READING TIME : 7 MINUTES

Marlon Brando was born on this day, April 3 in the year 1924. In turn, modern acting was born with Marlon Brando's revolutionary performance as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire in 1951. It is not an overstatement to say that every single acting performance we see on stage and screen today is an echo of Brando's Big Bang of modern acting in A Streetcar Named Desire. Some echoes of that performance are more faint than others, but they are echoes nonetheless.

The Big Bang and the birth of modern acting in the form of Brando's Streetcar performance was due to a perfect confluence of events. There were other actors before Brando who had turned away from the constricted theatricality of acting that had been the dominant style of the time and embraced Stanislavski's "Method" and the new realism, but none of those actors had Brando's movie star good looks, his innate talent and charisma, his vividly detailed imagination, his psychological and human instincts, his unrelenting commitment, and his unflinching artistic courage. The key to the perfect storm of Brando and his break out performance was that he had a director, Elia Kazan, who not only allowed him to embrace this new realism and discard the old-school theatricality, he openly encouraged him and collaborated with him. With Kazan, Brando was unchained and allowed to flourish, his talents unleashed upon an unsuspecting audience. The audience, and the acting world, would never be the same again.

Russian Konstantin Stanislavski, who developed "The Method", is the Patriarch of modern acting theory, with his three American prophets being acting teachers Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler and Sanford Meisner. With Stanislavski as the Patriarch of modern acting, Brando, via his work with his teacher Stella Adler, became its realized messiah. 

Brando was volatile, fragile, charming, dynamic, magnetic and always unpredictable. In Streetcar his raw power, vulnerability, sexual dynamism and delicate yet volcanic emotionality gave him a presence no one had seen before on film. Before Brando, acting was more theatrical, mannered and emotionally confined. Brando shattered those stilted conventions by mastering the new way and ignited an acting revolution. He was a raw nerve, an open wound exposed to the world. He could whimper one moment and growl the next. Brando was tactile, visceral and sexual in a way no other actor had ever been. Marlon Brando was a wounded bear riding a bull in the china shop of the acting world. He was simultaneously loved and loathed for it. At the Academy Awards in 1951 the Best Actor Oscar went to Humphrey Bogart for The African Queen and not to Marlon Brando for A Streetcar Named Desire. Bogart is as old school Hollywood, classical acting style as it gets, and the old guard in the Academy weren't willing to reward the revolutionary in their midst just yet. The Academy did reward Brando's cast mates, in fact all three of the other acting awards went to his compatriots, Vivien Leigh won Best Actress, Kim Hunter, Best Supporting actress and Karl Malden, Best Supporting Actor, making Brando's snub all the more apparent. 

Three years later in 1954, Brando did get his Best Actor Oscar for playing washed up palooka Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront, also directed by Elia Kazan. The acting world and Hollywood were trying to grab a hold of the tail of the artistic tiger that was Marlon Brando. Hollywood though, is interested in money, not art, and for an artist like Brando, that is death. Hollywood believed they needed to tame Brando's voracious artistic spirit in hopes of controlling him and breaking the bank. Brando wanted to experiment, to challenge himself, to investigate and explore, while Hollywood wanted him to go along to get along and not rock the money making boat. Brando didn't play the game and the studios grew tired of his increasingly difficult and costly behavior. He soon found himself on the outside of Hollywood looking in.  "Business before art, profit above all else" is the Hollywood mantra, and Brando was too wild to keep in the palace so they cast him out to wander in the desert.

It wasn't until Francis Ford Coppola cast him as Vito Corleone in The Godfather in 1971, over the objections of the studio, that Brando got back into the game. Brando won his much deserved second Best Actor Oscar for his work in The Godfather. There is a scene in the film which perfectly sums up Brando and his genius. With precious light fading and the clock ticking, Brando asked director Coppola if he could improvise Vito Corleone's death scene. Coppola agreed and rolled the cameras as Brando played a game with a child playing his grandson. Brando puts an orange peel in his mouth and makes a monster face to the little boy, who instantly cries in fear. Brando gently reassures the boy that he is harmless and just playing. The boy calms himself, and then Brando directs him to run through a row of tomato plants, with Brando chasing him like a big monster. The chase goes in and out of the garden rows until Corleone begins to cough and loses his breath and then collapses. This improvisation is so mythologically and psychologically perfect for the character of Vito Corleone that it is sublime brilliance. This is Brando at his finest, playful yet committed and ever the insightful truth teller.

He followed his Oscar win in The Godfather with his seventh Best Actor nomination for Last Tango in Paris in 1972, one of his best and most personal performances. Last Tango in Paris is one of his most brilliant performances because it is so brazenly honest in its display of dishonesty. Brando bares not only his wounded soul, but his broken spirit, his self-loathing appetites, his vicious weakness, his barbaric ugliness and his smirking shadow. It is a mesmerizing performance that reveals more about the actual man and artist than any other of his great works.

With his career re-born in middle age with The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris, Brando changed his approach to the studios. If they wanted to make it about money, he would make it about money. He used his newfound leverage to demand exorbitant pay for minimal work. While bringing his formidable gravitas and unforgiving intensity to Apocalypse Now (1979), he also brought his expanding girth and a time limit, he would only work for three weeks and with a price tag of $1 million. He did the same with Superman (1978), demanding and getting $3.7 million for two weeks work.

Shortly after he retired from acting, only to return a decade later with an intricately detailed and subtly charismatic performance in the 1989 apartheid film A Dry White Season for which he was nominated for yet another Best Supporting Actor Oscar. His career staggered along after that with a series of rather forgettable films and one personal family tragedy after another. Losing his son to prison for manslaughter and his daughter to suicide. As F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, "Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy", and so it was with the Godfather and hero of modern acting. 

In 1996 I had a conversation with a friend of mine (who happens to be a movie star and great actor) who had just worked with Brando on The Island of Dr. Moreau. The film was unrelentingly abysmal, and this star readily acknowledged that fact. The quality of the movie didn't matter though as the only thing the two of us really wanted to talk about was Brando. After a few minutes of us doing 'dueling Brandos', a natural occurrence whenever the topic of Marlon Brando comes up, I asked my friend, "what was Marlon Brando really like?" My friend said Brando was a good guy and a pleasure to be around for other actors, even if he was some sort of mad genius and drove the producers and director insane. I then asked my friend about an odd thing that happens in the film and is never addressed, namely, at one point, Brando's character, Dr. Moreau, shows up and is wearing white pancake makeup all over and a white wedding dress type of muumuu for no apparent reason at all, accompanied by a mini-me version of himself wearing the same get up. Nothing else about the character was different, he acted the same, he spoke the same, he was the same guy…except he was entirely covered in white makeup and a wedding dress (veil included). To add to the oddity, none of the other characters mention the get up or comment on it. My friend explained to me that Brando just showed up in that outfit one day, and walked on set and no one said anything to him about it. The director didn't know what to do and knew he couldn't dare question Brando about it. None of the other actors even cared at this point of the cursed production, so they just went with it, figuring, 'Hey, its Marlon Brando!' My friend explained that he knew it was a very strange thing to do, but that he understood what Brando was up to only after the filming was completed. Brando didn't care about what was expected of him or of what anyone thought, or about conventions, he just did what he felt like and no one was going to stop him or even say anything to him about it….just like the power-mad Dr. Moreau. Brando's ego, madness and irrationality matched Moreau's, and in hindsight it proved that Brando was not afraid to look the fool in order to prove a deeper, more human and artistic point. When, like Brando, you become a sort of living artist god, you must go to deeper and stranger lengths to prove to people that you are still human. Brando embraced the fool in order to try and elicit some sort of response from people, even if it was negative one, as long as it was honest. No one responded to the madness of Brando and Dr. Moreau, and the film is an indictment of the fear and lifelessness of those surrounding him, not to the mad-genius at the center of it.

The Island of Dr. Moreau is a long way from A Streetcar Named Desire, but that doesn't diminish the colossal impact of Brando's universe changing performance back in 1951. The Big Bang of his Streetcar performance unleashed a chain reaction in the acting world that reverberates to this day. Marlon Brando was quickly followed by James Dean, a younger, more feminine version of Brando, in Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden (directed by Elia Kazan). James Dean was followed by Paul Newman and the lineage goes from there up to Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep in the 70's and 80's, and onto Sean Penn, Daniel Day-Lewis, Cate Blanchett and Julianne Moore of today.

There were fine actors before Marlon Brando, there have been fine actors after him, and there will be more fine actors in the years to come, but there will never be another actor who will radically change the art and craft of acting like Marlon Brando did. As Babe Ruth is to baseball, as Sir Isaac Newton is to science, and as Shakespeare is to playwriting, so Marlon Brando is to the art and craft of acting.  As director Martin Scorsese said, "He is the marker. There is 'before Brando' and 'after Brando'." Sadly, we are in the 'After Brando' period, and all of us, actors and audience alike, owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the man who showed us the way. A toast to a revolutionary genius...Happy Birthday to Marlon Brando, the greatest actor to have ever walked the earth. Slàinte.

© 2015