my god marlon, where'll we be without you?

in memoriem, last night i watched "a streetcar named desire," and chased it with "on the waterfront" tonight. brando. brando. brando. fuck, what can be said? he was more than amazing. he was beautiful. an artist such as the craft has never seen before or since. performances so nuanced and subtle that it doesn't even seem like acting. if you hadn't seen him do it with so many different types of roles, you would think he was just good at picking roles that were like him, and so didn't need to act at all. that's how good he was. the contender scene. my god. the majesty of a man making the kinds of choices that no actor would have made. a scene that trascends the script, which is more rare than you might think. the scene could have been like a hundred other scenes about brothers or best friends arguing, but it wasn't. it was gut-wrenching, heartbreaking. quite possibly the finest scene ever put on film and the director (elia kazan) swears it wasn't him. it was brando.

a tortured soul. a broken man who died, in all probability believing as he always did: that he didn't have a talented bone in his body, but he was more than talented. he was greatness itself. he was tender and invincible at once, with all the power of a god and all the gentleness of kiss. more than a man. more than a man. more than the finest of his generation, he was the finest of his art. ever.

what happens to a world where a man like that dies? what deserves to happen?

2004-07-12 | 8:07 p.m.
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