S/D: Albert Brooks, the neurotic American Ozu

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'm sure most of you have seen this, but in case anyone hasn't:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J43bcbIzfI&safety_mode=true&persist_safety_mode=1&safe=active

mother's watchable enough, but the muse is a disaster. havent seen looking for comedy...

Didn't care much for Mother & haven't seen any of his stuff since, but his initial quartet of films are all fab. Plus Taxi Driver, Broadcast News, "The Simpsons"...I basically kinda love the guy.

xpost I generally couldn't care less about metacritic, etc., but they do take into account pretty much all the major critics. Admittedly, that doesn't say very much, but as an aggregate surely it gives an indiction of a film's general reception. There will always be contrarian outliers who really love/hate anything, but I think even they factor into something like metacritic.

Morbs, are you a big fan of "Looking for Comedy..."?

It was OK.

So Metacritic would give your review around a ... 62?

"It was OK." - Morbs, ILX.

I use Metacritic to read reviews, for which it's quite handy; I never look at the score.

I came back from vacation on Sunday night realizing that, because I was barely on the Internet all week, I had no idea what the general reception of Moneyball was. So I checked out Metacritic and thought "hey wow!" and felt a bit more excited about seeing it.

looking for comedy in the muslim world had some funny stuff in it and had this guy's usual lovably weird and unamerican straightfaced quotidian mildness (critics called it... japanese) but i don't remember very much of it at all; it was so slight. lost in america is literally amazing -- the first time i saw it i was totally disoriented by how few scenes it seemed to have, but those i remember all of. defending your life is adorable: rip torn, buck henry, and yeah that glowing meryl streep performance; it's the only movie my dad likes meryl streep in.

The high score shouldn't be taken so seriously when fools like David Ansen will rise to any Oscar bait ever released.

Up in the Air fer instance got an 83.

But again, unless I'm mistaken, it takes into account all the copious naysayers and contrarians, too. It just gives a general good bead on how a film has been received, and "Up in the Air" for sure was received well, even if I didn't like it. Like I basically said above, there's always someone who loves/hates everything/anything, and I'm sure there is someone that loves "Looking for Comedy ...", too.

But if a human rights violations like UITA get an 83 and I see Ansen, Rex Reed, and some TIME Magazine loser fellating it, I'm going to say, "Hmmm...."

Well, I'm going to say at least 83% of critics don't think of "Up in the Air" as a human rights violation? Certainly there are some negatives incorporated into that arbitrary number.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4RZTNtuZvQ

once seen, never forgotten.

Mother isn't great but it's much better than the stuff that followed. The stuff before Mother is some of my favorite stuff, and I still think about little parts of Mother from time to time.

For example: pretty much every time I buy jam.

My second favourite scene in the movie, eclipsed only by:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0rS5Zusw4M&safety_mode=true&persist_safety_mode=1&safe=active

"it takes into account all the copious naysayers and contrarians"

no. hell, my pub is on there now, and the brayers who are de facto PR shills for the studios still dominate.

And they shall always dominate.

The interviewer's cardigan really makes that job interview scene work.

"A bird lives in a round stick!"

"Santy Clause."

Love Marshall's pronunciation.

btw, Brooks played a recurring character for the first season or two of "The Odd Couple" (produced by Marshall)

oddly, Defending Your Life is the only movie of his I've ever seen. SNL/Hank Scorpio are hilarious tho

btw, Brooks played a recurring character for the first season or two of "The Odd Couple"
"It's now! It's happening!"

i kind don't fully get the love for this guy. he seems kind of pedestrian. did not like "real life" much.

He's one of the few actors who can play smug and sweet in the same performance.

<3 albert brooks always but he def peaked with lost in america.

i posted a quote on the "DRIVE" thread where the director says lost in america scared the hell out of him as a kid, he thought that brooks' character would end up killing someone some day, and that is why he cast him in his movie

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."

Mother's way underrated

oh, it's such lovely cheese!