Word: brando
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...dark recesses of an Italian "social club" in lower Manhattan, Carmine Sabatini (Marlon Brando), an elderly mafioso, peers across a small table at Clark Kellogg (Matthew Broderick), a rosy-faced NYU film student fresh from Vermont. Sabatini orders Kellogg some Italian coffee and proceeds to pour four or five heaping spoonfuls of sugar into the small demitasse. The taste of the stuff is enough to make Kellogg grimace...
...Freshman, written and directed by Andrew Bergman, is likely to leave the viewer with the same bittersweet taste as the coffee. This film is a well-scripted comedy overwhelmed--flawed, even--by the commanding and disconcerting presence of veteran actor Marlon Brando. Despite its failings, though, this is not a movie to leave the viewer grimacing...
Life imitating art? Not exactly. More like art imitating art, or artist imitating artist. For Marlon Brando is, of course, the man in the mafioso mask in both instances. It might perhaps be said the makeup man was kinder in aging him for the earlier role than the past 18 years have been in bringing him to his present hefty appearance. On the other hand, The Freshman is a comedy, and his roly-poly form and cherubic countenance defuse his menace and suit his self-satirizing purposes...
...jokes for a living -- dirty jokes, stag-party jokes, jokes designed to singe a churchgoer's soul and turn a feminist's stomach -- but he attracts crowds whose size and ardor would thrill a rock star. In sold-out Madison Square Garden, he looks like a samurai biker, with Brando's pout, Elvis' sideburns and a sequined jacket, its back stitched with the phrase DICE RULES. And he does too. He is America's rajah of comic raunch, ready to beguile fans who dress like him and talk like him and who have memorized his earlier routines from hit records...
...always been the role of art: to shock, not just to ratify the prejudices of the generation in power. And no jolt is greater than the shock of the new. Original styles almost always look crude and excessive: Picasso's in painting ("My three-year-old could draw better!"), Brando's in acting ("He's got marbles in his mouth!"), Elvis' in music ("Photograph him from the waist up!"), Bruce's in comedy ("Book him!"). In their first outrageousness, these artists seemed to signal the end of the world; instead, they were heralding a new one. "A creator...