Watch Real Life For Free

That was an excellent one.

Such a frustrating disappointment

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Albert Brooks' REAL LIFE maintains an eerie prescience, but the man simply took a PBS experiment from the '70s and smashed it into Hollywood artifice to profound comedic effect. His character's film experiment (you guessed it, to document real life as movie) seems novel, but the family's miserable and it only goes downhill from there. It's a well-chosen cast, full of funny personalities - Grodin is a highlight here and can't stop making contact with the camera - and then there's Brooks' used car salesman filmmaker, virtually devolving matters into absurdity by his own hand. And he's on fire here, playing a fictionalized dickish version of himself (and pulling no punches doing it).The man's a genius, if for no other reason than for introducing one of the funniest props in movie history: the Ettinauer 226XL! Very good stuff.8/10

In his most thorough feat of self-deprecation, Albert Brooks plays himself as a smarmy upstart Hollywood director charged with filming a real-life portrait of an "ordinary" Phoenix family to be financed by the Boulder Institute for Behavioral Science. Taking as its satirical subject the PBS series "An American Family", Real Life's opening text scroll includes an excerpt from a media critic that reads (paraphrasing), "This is a whole new method of anthropological research…as interpreted by the camera." It's the last part, "interpreted by the camera," that clearly interests Brooks. In detailing the crumbling of the family and the director's process of selecting what to shoot and how (it isn't long before he's staging scenes), Brooks shows how the mere presence of the camera shapes a new reality for spectator and subject. Their first dinner under camera (the technicians wear ridiculous astronaut-like helmet devices over the top halves of their bodies) has Charles Grodin trying to present his perfect family, but his stressed-out wife gives a hilariously blunt assessment of her feelings. (Meanwhile, Brooks wonders whether his leading man is coming across as unsympathetic.) The institute's naïve statisticians don't see the folly of their pursuit until Brooks makes the film his blatant vanity project; the comic highpoint is a montage of happy, slow-motion family moments that Brooks narrates ("I'll show the French what a montage really is!"). In this project, all are delusional, from the quixotic scientists who fatuously hired Hollywood talent for a film about reality to the unseen producer who makes money the inappropriate subject of every conversation. And film-making, like all profit-driven endeavors, is subject to self-interest, rendering futile the entire notion of the camera as objective recorder. But try telling that to a Hollywood producer.

Albert Brooks tries so hard in this fake documentary about American family life that you find yourself willing to wade through the movie's many slow moments and gags that just don't succeed. Plus, the movie can be quite funny from time to time. But, in general, I look at this like a fake documentary that was a noble experiment that ultimately failed--but is still worth seeing. After all, if it hadn't been for films like this, maybe they never would have made films like BEST IN SHOW as well as AND GOD SPOKE.Although the purpose of this documentary is to show American family life in an unobtrusive manner, ultimately, the family becomes like a lot of modern "reality TV" families and the action becomes more and more suggested by the producer, Brooks. And, ultimately, the filming takes on a dramatic impact on the family.Funny, insightful but far from perfect.

Any Albert Brooks fan who has not seen his first glorious feature is truly missing out. As anyone can attest, Brooks has the rare gift of turning ordinary human moments into riotously funny scenes, and this film is full of such moments, plus much more subversive material, like the way Grodin's character repeatedly comes perilously close to committing a felony against his family.Perhaps the greatest joke of all is that while the character "Albert Brooks" continuously states how he is documenting real life, we all know that this is really a star vehicle for him. He is more concerned with how much everything costs, like the head-held cameras (for those who haven't seen it, imagine the result of torrid affair between Dave Bowman and the Hal-9000). This film, more that anything, is a satirical take on how Hollywood subverts what is really "real life," all this coming from a director with as great a grasp on how humans relate to one another than anyone.