S/D: Albert Brooks, the neurotic American Ozu

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!