Real Life Is the Pick of the Week

The great Albert Brooks (one of my filmmaking heroes) is perhaps cinema’s most influential proprietor of angry, uncomfortable comedy, one that makes fun of how weird contemporary life can be. And with his stellar 1979 directorial debut Real Life, he expertly satirizes the nuclear family, way before Reality TV came into existence.

Brooks plays “Albert Brooks” (mocking his own persona), a smarmy, narcissistic Hollywood filmmaker who comes into the life of an all-American couple (Charles Grodin and Frances Lee McCain) and their two children with all sorts of modern equipment (including a bizarre, space-like Ettinauer 226XL camera) and films their common everyday lives. The project gets too much for the couple as Albert gets more annoying and a little too close for comfort which leads to hilarious, and disastrous, consequences for everyone involved.

The film may be a mockumentary, but it definitely hits close to home because it reveals the cracks of the so called “normal society” and how flawed we truly are. Personally, I think that Brooks does that better than any other filmmaker. Real Life may not be his greatest film, but it’s the one that started it all.

Criterion’s new 4K UHD & Blu-ray releases aren’t packed with supplements, but I still look forward to seeing them. They include new interviews with Brooks and McCain, and a 3D directed trailer by Brooks. There’s also a new essay by film critic A. S. Hamrah.

So, if you love Brooks as much as I do, then Criterion has you covered with this release.

Other releases:

Mother (Criterion): Another Brooks gem where he stars as a neurotic, twice-divorced sci-fi writer who moves back in with his mom (the late, great Debbie Reynolds) to solve his personal hangups.

Alphaville 4K UHD/Blu-ray (Kino): A 1965 bleak Jean-Luc Godard classic set in the not-so distant future where a U.S. secret agent goes to a distant space city where he’s hired to find a missing person and free the city from its tyrannical ruler.

Last Year at Marienbad 4K UHD/Blu-ray (Kino): Alain Resnais’ 1961 elliptical masterpiece where a stranger (Giorgio Albertazzi) tries to convince a married woman (Delphine Seyrig) that they had an affair, one that she may not remember at a posh chateau called Marienbad.

Thieves Like Us 4K UHD Mediabook (Vinegar Syndrome): Robert Altman’s underrated 1974 Depression-era classic where convicts (Keith Carradine, Bert Remsen, and John Schuck) rob banks to try escape poverty and the law. Also starring the late but amazing Shelley Duvall as Keechie, the young woman Carradine meets and falls for.