"I'm in the Marlon Brando business." -- Marlon Brando

A nearly three-hour retrospective of the mercurial actor's life, Brando proceeds chronologically from his unrequited attachment to his distant drunk of a Nebraska mother to a post-war rise through the ranks of New York theater and fortuitous pairings with Stella Adler and Elia Kazan, to unexpected movie stardom, to has-been movie stardom, to political activism, to a measured critical rebirth and finally to an increasingly sad elderly life marked by erratic jaunts onto shows like Larry King Live and an elaborate prankishness that poorly camouflages an exhausted lothario's boredom with old age. "The first two-thirds of Marlon's life was in his body and the last third was in his mind," someone tells us, the implication being that Brando felt cheated by that trade-off and spent his final years playing with the only toy he had left, his celebrity. We hear about him summoning one well-known actor to his house on the pretense of collaborating on a film, only to tell them when they arrive that he's discovered a way to power his house with electric eels.

Since much of his life is old hat to the target audience, the pleasures of Brando mostly derive from the little moments snuck in here and there -- new memories from a fellow actor or new takes on one of his films, and so on. One the most interesting sequences, for my money, is a somewhat negative reassessment of Brando's role in Apocalypse Now. Robert Duvall, in his interview, feels obliged to point out that the performance is something of a non-starter because Kurtz was obviously supposed to be a military type, whippet-slim and muscled-up, while Brando practically had to be wheelbarrowed onto the set. It's also made clear that Coppola confided to the cast that Brando showed up for the film without having done any kind of mental preparation either. Dennis Hopper gets in a good jab, noting that "Marlon didn't care about your money" and digging up the old story about Brando demanding $75K for a five-minute close-up that was needed immediately after the point that he was no longer contractually bound to be there.

Those who go to Lucky You expecting a Drew Barrymore performance that is, at long last, devoid of her half human/half sunflower kitsch will be disappointed. The role is more or less straight drama, but much like Bruce Willis has a writer on standby whose job is to inject "Bruceness" into the scripts he likes, someone seems to have shoehorned in a number of cutesy Shirley Temple-style comedy moments for Drew, and downgraded the maturity level of her character to late teens, as opposed to thirty-something. At one point, sitting beside her boyfriend Huck (Eric Bana) at the poker table, she tells him that it was only right that he lost a hand, since he won the last one -- the other guy should have a turn to win. Huck is a semi-pro whose lifelong attempt to chisel a living out of cards has left him broke, and the film opens with him pawning a family heirloom for a couple hundred bucks. You get a feeling from the start that Matt Damon and Ed Norton dream of this guy.

Hopes rise early on with a funny cameo from Robert Downey Jr. as a friend of Huck who runs some kind of one-man telephone scam. He keeps several cell-phones in front of him on a table and is continually picking them up and putting them back down like three-card monte. Once he makes it clear that he has no money to lend, Huck moves on and we meet some of his less colorful friends, including a compulsive (male) gambler who agreed to get breast implants if he lost a bet, and did just that. Charles Martin Smith is an interesting choice for a mobbed-up loan shark, but the film sort of lets his character die on the vine after one sharply-written early scene with Huck. It also becomes weirdly obvious early on that the film was intended to be titled Lucky Town, since that title makes more sense and since we hear an extended sampling of Bruce Springsteen's Lucky Town. Lucky You sounds more like a lost Matthau-Lemmon comedy from the early 70s.

Over his long film career, Robert Duvall has played just about everything. After nabbing one hell of a debut as Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, he's been in the army, played with a Godfather and portrayed a number of real-life people from Joseph Pulitzer to Robert E. Lee. With of all his range and great roles, there's one thing I would never imagine him as -- a motivational self-help author. However, in the upcoming comedy, Glad All Over (like the song), Duvall will star as one -- although he is a bit different than the likes of other cinematic motivators such as Tappy Tibbons and the failing Richard.

Duvall's character is an ex-football coach recluse, and Glad details a group of people who are connected to the self-help book that he has written. (While I'd love the irony of the writer motivating the masses while avoiding the world, I bet this will be some sort of comedic journey flick where his fans have to inspire him to re-invest in society, or they go to hunt down the man who doesn't want fame.) So far, Ving Rhames has also joined the cast, and although Production Weekly has no word on his role, I'm sure he's either one of the followers or perhaps an ex-player of Duvall's.

Rhames previously worked with John Herzfeld, who's heading the film, on Don King: Only in America, one of the man's many made-for-TV biopics. If you don't pay attention to that sort of fare, you might remember him as the man who wrote and directed the delightfully cheesy Two of a Kind or the crime thriller, 2 Days in the Valley. If you're anxious to experience some Duvall-branded help, the film's principal photography begins in April, so the film will likely be released next year.