S/D: Albert Brooks, the neurotic American Ozu

x-posting ROFFLZ

What's wrong with it, Morb?

Forgot Mother, definitely on the plus side, especially all the Debbie-Albert scenes.

(cmon Tracer, you know Albert from James L.)

Alfred, I meant MR is intentionally, bullseye-painful!! You'll see. Great car radio scene.

I really like Modern Romance a lot. In contrast to The Muse, which is also set in Hollywood, the late 70s L.A. period-specific aspects enhance the humor. The scene where Brooks gets talked into buying tons of jogging paraphenalia by the actor who also plays Super Dave Osbourne is classic.

I forget that scene, but he's Albert's brother, Bob Einstein. (Yeah, AB's dad, a radio comedian, named him Albert Einstein.)

to be fair that movie was pretty much unavoidable for about a year

RIP Monica Johnson, frequent Brooks cowriter (Real Life, Lost in America, Modern Romance).

Is there anybody worse than Albert Brooks, all things considered?

Like an uptight Henry Jaglom riffling through jokeless Woody Allen scenes

lovelovelove albert brooks. haven't seen lost in america or modern romance in years, since i was a kid, but had both on vhs, taped off tv, back when i was a precocious teen. there's a great scene w/albert having taken a quaalude in the latter, right?

i have his comedy albums somewhere... they're clever, but they don't quite work - i struggle to sit through them, anyway. his films for SNL were often great, and he's been quite magnanimous about that whole experience whenever i've read him on it. and as hank scorpio, he was my favourite simpsons guest star.

lost in america is one of my favourite films! "the CORE of the nest-egg!?!"

he was in finding nemo too!!

tracer go suck an egg!!

"We were going to touch Indians"

yeah, lost in america is all time!

Is there anybody worse than a suggest ban, all things considered?

Albert's godlike for Lost in America, Taxi Driver, and Broadcast News alone; there are good things in most of the other films he directed too, especially Modern Romance. (I don't think I've ever watched all of Real Life for some reason.)

I like Albert the dramatic actor a lot - he's perfect in "Out of Sight," "Broadcast News," "Taxi Driver." Albert the filmmaker, though, since "Defending Your Life," has been pretty tone deaf. "Mother" I thought was pretty insufferable. "The Muse" was terrible. "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World," I honestly could never make it past the title, but I assume it's terrible.

he's perfect in Drive.

"Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World," I honestly could never make it past the title, but I assume it's terrible.

It's brilliant. Easily his best since Defending Your Life.

Pretty divergent 53 at Metacritic, 43% at Rotten Tomatoes ... but maybe time has been kind?

Well, I liked Mother a lot (except for the ending), and I found The Muse tolerable (except for the ending). But Looking... is far more rewarding than both of those combined. Not sure where the negative reviews came from, other than maybe people who weren't familiar with/versed in/just didn't get Brooks' older routines (like the crappy ventriloquist bit), which he reprises here.

I'm actually closer to Josh--after Defending Your Life, which I think is underrated, there's real drop-off for me. Didn't care for Mother, didn't like The Muse at all, and Looking for Comedy just meandered along (I liked it a bit better than the other two, though). If memory serves, Mother was treated as something of a major film at the time; don't think anybody talks about it much anymore.

I still haven't seen Defending Your Life but I'll agree that Mother has some problems: a sluggish pace and the lack of chemistry between Reynolds and Brooks. I know some will say, "Well, that's the point," but Reynolds' passivity places too much of a burden on Brooks' zings, which aren't as funny this time (I like the cheese scene though).

"Defending features Streep at her most effervescent, FWIW. Sort of brilliant to cast her vs. some random blonde (or, say, Sharon Stone, who is terrible in "the Muse").

I rarely use the word radiant, but I will here: Streep is radiant in Defending Your Life. She carries all this baggage as being so humdrum and serious--I was so surprised at the time at how well she pulled that role off.

Nothing like people looking at Metacritic scores to make me wish I'd been born 30 years earlier.

i don't think real life's very good. a good concept, but he doesn't do enough with it. it feels very static, like a 5 minute sketch stretched out to 90mins of entropy.

exactly. it also feels very dated, insofar as w/ reality TV all these ideas have been harvested for jokes over and over. brooks can't help that, obviously, but i think it still diminishes the film.

i'll check out lost in america again. haven't seen it since high school (and that was a long time ago).

agree that Real Life was a wobbly first feature, but I still love that exec on the speaker phone saying "James Caan!"

Besides the Hollywood honcho on the speakerphone- "They're not gonna care about the guy with the cup, they're gonna say Where's Newman? Where's Redford?"- there is a good bit on the steps of some institute of higher learning: "If I had worked harder or had been graded more fairly, I would have been a scientist."

^ That last quote is Brooks in a nutshell. The naivete, the egotism, the grudge-bearing, the hint of social dysfunction. It's the line of his I like to quote the most - you can replace the word "scientist" with anything.

I think the speakerphone honcho is Brooks. Similar to how he talked to himself as the Mercedes salesman in Lost In America ("It's a very thick vinyl.")

I did not know that.

That's a good description, Josefa. Think maybe AB is a missing link or at least a stepping stone between the likeable coward comedic archetype of a Bob Hope to the full on make-you-squirm flop sweat of Andy Kaufman or Ricky Gervais. Although Albert is only two years older than Andy so maybe not.

"You've heard of a no-win situation?"

Also, what is the movie with Julie Kavner where he says "We're gonna look like JERKS if people think we can't get a table at the hot hour?"

(Yeah, AB's dad, a radio comedian, named him Albert Einstein.)
The dad's stage name was Parkayakarkus, I believe. Hard to spell, that one.

According to Wikipedia, he was famous enough to be the subject of a Porky Pig parody.

"If I had worked harder or had been graded more fairly, I would have been a scientist."

― Pollabo Bryson (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, September 29, 2011 9:41 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

yeah there are lots of good zingers like that, but as a whole the film is tedious. again, need to see lost in america again.

Tedious, I don't see. With Charles Grodin as the straight man?

Real Life is one of Jon Stewart's favorite movies, fwiw.

maybe not tedious, more... neither here nor there? anyway.

I do find that sometimes Albert Brooks plays is so straight it's practically ... straight. That is, it's not always the kind of humor you laugh at, which is a pretty odd kind of humor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntxyw834MA4

Like an uptight Henry Jaglom riffling through jokeless Woody Allen scenes

Unlike Albert Brooks, but very much like Woody Allen, this person knows nothing about the art of cinema.

I think of Brooks as one of the new wave of "meta" stand-up comics that came out of the 1970s, along with Steve Martin and Andy Kaufman. Each had his own angle, with for example Kaufman being the most mischievous, audience-bating, and intentionally confusing. Martin played around with identities, coming across as a hipster and goofball simultaneously (like a Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis in one). Albert Brooks' angle was a kind of complete earnestness that does play almost straight a lot of the time, but there's always a kind of tension where you suspect that his character is not all there. In films like Real Life and Lost in America he clearly loses his mind; maybe in the more recent films he plays it straighter, I'm not sure.

Garry Shandling walks a similar line. I saw that comedian roundtable with him, Marc Maron and a few others, where Shandling keeps going into his study of Buddhism, and for the life of me I couldn't tell if he was being funny.

"I opened for Sly and the Family Stone in '73," Albert Brooks once recalled of his early days as a stand-up comedian. "At that time, Sly was known to snort large cities... We were in Tacoma, Washington, and it was 7 p.m. and the show was supposed to start at 7:30. His manager came to my dressing room and said, 'How long [a routine] do you do?' I said, 'With this crowd, maybe 15 minutes.' He said, 'What's the longest you can do?' I said, 'Why?' He said, 'Sly is in Ohio.'"

"I was off in eight minutes," Brooks recalled. "I swear to God, somebody threw the top of a beer can and it cut me. I was so upset, right before I left the stage, I actually said to the crowd, 'I'm going on Johnny Carson and telling everybody how bad you are.' As if all these people would immediately stop and go, Uh-oh."

wait, is that funkhauser (re: princess tam tam & the shoestore)

yeah, he's albert's irl brother

it's not always the kind of humor you laugh at, which is a pretty odd kind of humor.

often my favorite kind

Yeah, I seem to recall a post by Jeffrey Wells (before I stopped reading him, because he's a douche, at least on the page) where he extolled the virtues of so called no-laugh comedies. I seem to recall him describing these sorts of movies as able to coast along on a sort of electric charge that informs every scene.

AlbertBrooks#
Since the U.S. will eventually have to be sold off in little pieces, maybe Romney is the best guy.

Albert Brooks is an awesome tweeter. Following him gets you a lot of free comedy.

i may have posted this on ilx in the past but this has to be one of the funniest bits ever
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J43bcbIzfI

@AlbertBrooks
Lost in America was just on TCM. I honestly had not seen it in 18 years. If I didn't know me I would love me.

Anyone read his novel?

Oddly enough I saw the book in a thrift store yesterday, but didn't buy it. That's the one about a post-disaster Los Angeles in 2030, right? Is it any good?

25th anniversary of Defending Your Life:
http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/defending-your-life-at-25-albert-brooks-on-making-a-comedy-classic-20160322

incredibly painful rom-com Modern Romance

spot on. this is one of the most rigorously uncomfortable and un-cathartic american films i can think of. so much so that i can't say i really like it. but i admire it.

it's also incredibly modest as a film. it's really just, what, six or seven extended scenes, two of which are really just extended comic bits with little connection to the main plot. it feels like a stage play in many respects, except that the decor of midcentury west los angeles is kind of essential to the vibe.

brooks's body hair is a little horrifying, though.

Rewatched Mother the other night (with my mother-in-law!) as a belated tribute to Reynolds. Some awkward patches that I don't think I had really noticed before--and Simon & Garfunkel spoof...ugh!--but still mostly great. Reynolds' performance is indeed the gem it was hailed as at the time--subtle, tricky, and all the more hilarious for it. If the film as a whole isn't as consistently hilarious as Lost in America (and few films are), the whole kitchen sequence upon Brooks' arrival home is as funny as anything in any other Brooks film.

A bit of trivia/further connection to the 2016 death toll: Brooks originally offered the role to Nancy Reagan, who claimed that she thought the script was funny, but declined so she could stay home an take care of the ailing Ronnie.

Even at the time I thought Reagan could do it. It's like imagining Claudette Colbert as Margo Channing: a different but no less fascinating Margo.

I found it very disappointing at the time. Will see if I can order a copy.

oh good he didn't die.

"i love you, dear" "i know you think you do" goes through my head pretty regularly year in and year out.

A couple more stray observations:

1. This is the first viewing where I realized what an asshole the Brooks character is. Reading Ebert's review just now, I see that he kind of picks up on this too. Not a flaw; it actually gives the film some rich thematic continuity: sure, his mother is subtly maddening, but his need to use the women in his life as affirmation of his self-esteem is way more dickish than offering lamb to a vegetarian ("I didn't know if it was the cow you were siding with, or the whole thing").

2. The younger brother, played by Rob Morrow, still creeps me the fuck out. The entirely non-comic scene of he and his wife bickering over his mommy issues is beautifully handled.

I also rewatched Mother and agree with several of the caveats above. Reynolds is canny and never winks at the character, and even her throwaway lines are pricelessly delivered ("You know I enjoy my Grape-Nuts"). I also wonder if AB knew how much of a dick his character is... also, his parents' surnames were Henderson and Bartlett? Rather goyish. And he's a little too old for the role (15 years younger than Debbie).

Mostly aligned with this David Edelstein review from Jan '97:

The brother episode dribbles away, and the conclusion of John's journey--his epiphany--is so easy that I wondered if it were meant to be fatuous, a satire of all those Freudian psychodramas where secrets are unearthed and the now-psychologically unfettered characters emerge into the sunlight. Brooks must know that such revelations, even when valid, rarely translate into changes in behavior--mustn't he? He doesn't lay any blame at John's own doorstep: The man's only fault seems to have been choosing mates who would hate him as much as his mother does. The movie suggests that domestic bliss begins and ends with blaming Mom.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/1997/01/sons_and_lovers.html

I find Defending Yr Life mostly flat but I'd still like to see Mother. It's hard to believe, based on previous films, that AB doesn't understand what a dick he is.

My favourite thing of Brooks's might be this Real Life trailer

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6KtAzt9LGsI

Or even

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KtAzt9LGsI

Criterion Lost in America out now

https://www.criterion.com/films/29022-lost-in-america

I always wished he'd done commentaries on his DVDs. Has he expressed any reasons for not doing them, or explained his apparent aversion to them?

Albert Brooks, c. 1988, gets it. pic.twitter.com/tS0aqSzH7O

— 𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖚𝖇𝖑𝖊 𝕰𝖛𝖊𝖗𝖞 𝕯𝖆𝖞 (@NickPinkerton) May 5, 2018

More Albert Brooks wisdom literature, this from a 1987 Village Voice profile. pic.twitter.com/Clk2wQwBfY

— 𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖚𝖇𝖑𝖊 𝕰𝖛𝖊𝖗𝖞 𝕯𝖆𝖞 (@NickPinkerton) May 5, 2018

The new Albert Brooks doc “Defending My Life” (dir by Reiner) is steaming on Max

It’s really lovely & the old standup clips are pure gold (also great stuff about his Dad)

Yeah, thoroughly enjoyed it, and made me want to rewatch all his old movies.

https://www.criterion.com/films/30974-real-life

https://www.criterion.com/films/29661-mother

Mother's way underrated

oh, it's such lovely cheese!