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A Raymond Durgnat Bibliography (Tuesday, 13 February, 2007) A Robin Wood Bibliography (Wednesday, 21 September, 2005) The Last Update? (Wednesday, 13 April, 2005) The Last Don (Friday, 2 July, 2004) But I brushed aside such a thought. Heroes don't die. You never think of them as dying. Especially from so mundane a cause as overweight or heart or liver or lung failure or whatever the spur for Brando's death this morning turns out to be (currently the information is withheld). And Brando was a hero to me. I had always liked him, but for some reason during my senior year in high school I became a Brando fanatic. He was the first actor, the first screen personality I diligently researched, combing through library stacks and photocopying article after article. There was a simple reason for my adulation. I thought he was I. Based on his wonderfully evocative if inarticulate characters, I thought that he understood me in my own evocative inarticulacy. As an actor he was searching for the truth of character, and as a viewer I was looking for representation on the screen, for a performer who would help me understand myself, express myself to me and to others (it was a decade later that I realized that I am more Jack Lemmon in The Apartment than Brando in On The Waterfront). His fragile love for Eva Marie Saint; his dedication to Dad's daughter in One-Eyed Jacks; his mismatched attraction to the town beauty in The Wild One; his later brooding on the loss of a love in Last Tango. His performances were not just surrogates for my and other kids' feelings, but dry runs for audiences on how to behave in situations, just as James Dean was a surrogate and primary rehearser. Brando taught us how to be. As Norman Mailer said of Brando back in the Last Tango days, "It is that tragic angelic mask of incommunicable anguish which has spoken to us across the years of his uncharted heroic depths." As he got old and sloppy and crazy and more interested in eating than acting, so did we, unintentionally. I never bought into his hatred of acting, however. I don't think that he truly hated it. Rather, I think that it took so much out of him, and that as a visionary actor he aspired to a truth of behavior few peers could attempt or even understand, leaving him isolated and frustrated and leading to a "turning" on acting as some kind of a defense mechanism. In any case, we don't like our artists to be self-satisfied. It's unseemly. Still, Brando would go off in the opposite direction decrying the trade like a Mickey Rourke or a James Caan. My obsession with Brando in that low phase of his career was soon matched by the world's, especially after The Godfather and Tango. I was very pleased with Molly Haskell's sensitive and insightful multi-part appraisal of Brando in several running issues of the Village Voice, still the best thing on the actor, and as far as I know never reprinted. And though it was highly critical I later gobbled up Peter Manso's bio of the actor, a massive book that goes into extreme detail on such things usually ignored by biographies, such as how Brando's businesses worked.
But that is the real person. Usually, I prefer the reel person. And on DVD, or the big screen we still have, and shall always have Brando to teach us how to behave. Brando didn't inspire me to want to become an actor. He inspired me to want to be a better person. Dispatches from Occupied Hollywood, No. 4 (Tuesday, 18 May, 2004) On the back of one of those Portuguese dive magazines I found a website for a company called Oregon Blindados which, from what I can tell, outfits consumer cars with bullet-proof armor and shields and other various security measures. Here is the Google translation tool. Who in the world thinks the word "Oregon" is synonymous with high-tech protection and security? For godsakes, I think half the people out there think we still live in log cabins. At the very least, I hope the state of Oregon is at least collecting name royalties on this. New Diary (Monday, 17 May, 2004) Welcome to the Cinemonkey home page Cinemonkey is dedicated to film, literature, and the media ... but then, what else is there? This web site is a continuation of Cinemonkey : A Serious Film Journal, the short lived magazine that burned brightly if briefly in the late '70s. Edited by D K Holm and Carl Bennett, and designed by Carl Bennett, Cinemonkeywas auteurist in orientation and muckraking in tone. So is this web site. We invite you to peruse the opinions of our reviewers, and respond to them in our film chat forum, where you can discuss auxiliary elements such as Sid Falco's media reviews, and our "Directors Project," which will expand with time to include a critical ranking of filmmakers who have made their debut since 1971.
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've also now decided, after working on the Wood bibliography for two years, to add another much needed resource, a bibliography to the work of 
s you can tell by the dates in this diary it has been hard to maintain this website. I am not abandoning it, but I do wish to direct your attention to the sites that have preoccupied most of my creative and writing time. First there are my weekly columns at Kevin Smith's MoviePoopShoot.com, the most important of which is 
he funny thing is that I had just been thinking about Brando. It was late last week, sometime. He hadn't been in the news or anything; I hadn't seen one of his movies again in a while. But suddenly it occurred to me, "Say, Brando is getting pretty old [he was born in 1924]. He could actually die soon."
ur friend Megan Denny, who works as a dive society coordinator when she is not writing screenplays and entering them in contests and submitting them producers, writes to us from Los Angeles with this observation:
eaders interested in the June 2003 through March 2004 diary may click