Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Konterr Brilliant and touching

StyleSk8r 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.

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

ALauff One of my major discoveries of this year is Albert Brooks. His comedy develops in a unique way from his queasiness regarding contemporary mores and he always plays the male symbol of self-absorption that his films affectionately target. Part of the joke is that his affluent characters myopically find misery in often mundane setbacks. Brooks takes their lives and concerns seriously (refreshingly, Brooks doesn't hold their wealth against them), but there's an implicit rebuke in their pettiness, and their journeys are carefully littered with clear-eyed supporting characters that illuminate their lack of suffering.His character this time is more disturbed than most, a film editor working on a suitably bad George Kennedy sci-fi picture (Kennedy appears as himself at the director's house party), involved in an on-again/off-again relationship with a pretty banker named Mary (Kathryn Harrold). As the film opens, he breaks off their relationship yet again. Immediately regretting the decision, he seeks solace from his assistant editor (Bruno Kirby), who sends him home with a few Quaaludes. The ensuing chemical high leads to an extended scene of astonishing observation in which Brooks stumbles around talking to himself, his parakeet, his rolodex, and his record player ("I love my album collection. Look, I have so many great records!"), drunk-dialing a date with a woman he won't remember in the morning, and promising to embark on a new, Mary-free life. (The blind date is one of Brooks's wisdom-imparters, a lovelorn aging woman who clearly idolizes his character; their night together consists of a one-take drive around the block and back to her home again, the camera fixed on the hood capturing them both through the windshield, a sad Michael Jackson ballad on the radio.)This resolution doesn't last long and soon enough they're back together. The story then takes a darkly funny turn into intense sexual jealousy and his character's controlling, near-sociopathic behavior. The film absolutely nails that feeling of sexual obsession-cum-inadequacy, in which you know the woman that you love is too good for you, so you compensate by holding her under your thumb, guarding her from the other guys drooling all over her low-cut blouse. By presenting this side of the male ego as bald reality, the film rightly renders such behavior insane but also symptomatic of the skewed state of monogamy in modern culture. Brooks doesn't quite go all the way with his character's increasingly mad behavior; if he has one flaw as writer-director, it's that he loves his characters too much to end their stories sourly, so the film has a rather warmed over, unsatisfying non-conclusion. But it's a very good film nonetheless, full of the kind of penetrating social observations at which Brooks is uncommonly adept.

Vaginarian Mr.Popularity Petey.Virtually every line out of his mouth in this movie is a gem, and a good amount of everyone else's. The old man at the phone, "he's there now isn't he, oh please I wasn't born yesterday!" Or Al's brother Dave in the sport shop, "What are you 5'11?", "I misjudged you, go with the box"And the song lyrics on the radio when he's driving around, "She's out of my life", "God only knows what I'd be without you" "And then along comes Mary"And just the true angst that men put themselves through, when the blood rushes to their genitals and they can't think straight, and come up with unfounded jealousy. I just copped the DVD from ebay for 11.98 door to door.....An unsung classic of American cinema and his best work by far......

caa821 To me, placing the phrase "great work" with the name "Albert Brooks," when citing one of his films, is redundant. I can say I liked this film a bit more than "Lost in America," which I liked slightly more than "The Muse," which I would place slightly ahead of "Defending Your Life," but starting with a rating of 100 out of 100 - I'd have to go to about 8 decimal places to differentiate among them. If Woody Allen is the "Stephen Hawking" of making movies with neuroses as a main theme, and usually portrayed by characters he plays as well as directs, then Albert Brooks is the "Albert Einstein" of the same. (I actually thought of this comparison before recalling that, ironically, Mr. Brooks birth name is the same as that of the renowned scientist.) Wathching Brooks' Robert Cole character cope with one neurotic experience after another in this film, and his interaction with an outstanding supporting cast, provides 93 minutes of non-stop entertainment in a manner available in few other films (or entertainment offerings in any other media).

krumski This film is not for everyone. If you do not already like Albert Brooks, or are only lukewarm on him, by all means stay away from it. I happen to love Brooks and, hence, this film. But I can understand people getting fed up with it because it's not structured or scripted like a normal movie. The biggest complaint I've heard about it is that all the other characters in it besides Brooks, especially the girlfriend, are mere props for him. That's absolutely true. It's as if Brooks would have preferred to do a long monologue (or a stand-up routine) but then decided at the last minute that he did need people to be present every now and again to bounce things off of. Just so you know what to expect: this is not an "interaction" movie - this is undiluted Albert Brooks coming straight at you for nearly two hours, with all his smarminess, vanity and doggedness firmly in place.What I love about Brooks, at least in his early movies (i.e. everything before Defending Your Life) is that he is not afraid to totally take upon himself the traits which he means to ridicule. He's often been compared to Woody Allen but I think the differences are important. In all his films, Woody Allen takes himself to task, relentlessly analyzes and criticizes himself, shows us his weaknesses and flaws, etc. - but then undercuts it all by playing for our affection with his cutesy physicality and his meant-to-be-adorable one-liners. Brooks doesn't *want* you to love him, he delights in heaping one annoying trait after another upon himself and portraying it to its full, uncensored extent. He doesn't do one-liners or gags - instead, he embodies the personality of someone who would be the butt of such gags or one-liners, and the embodiment is what is meant to be funny.For example, in this movie, there is an amazing 15 minute sequence near the beginning where Brooks, having just dumped his girlfriend, putters around his apartment pep talking himself into feeling good and succeeding only in becoming more and more miserable. The delusion and self-absorption on display is monumental, and it's given a kind of grandeur by the amount of time focused upon it - you could almost label the scene "The Narcissist's Aria." It's annoying as hell, and I couldn't blame anyone for being totally turned off by it. And yet, that annoyingness is exactly the point, and what makes the scene so hysterical. Brooks' performance here is nothing short of brilliant - the kind which would surely take home an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Comedy if such a category existed at the Oscars.Think of Albert Brooks here as George Costanza on "Seinfeld" - only with his monomania squared simply from having no close friends to interact with and bring him down to size. If that seems like torture to you, keep right on moving when you see this one in the video store aisle. However, if you always secretly wondered what George would be like if he got his very own show - well, here's the closest approximation of a pilot episode that you're ever likely to find.