Brando Dies

Marlon Brando apparently died yesterday. Its hard not to view him as something of a monument to the dangers of eccentric self-indulgence, particularly in his later years; but its also impossible not to respect a man who accomplished a rare emotional nakedness in a commercial medium like film. One of my favorite movies is Last Tango in Paris, and I fully believe his tale that the extraordinary pathos that role required was simply too much for him to reproduce again. He had a lot of guts as an artist, even if it did him a lot of damage in the process. Very few people in the movies posess an elementary artistic courage, if Brando is to have any testament, it would have to be that he most certainly did.