Perhaps Kubrick was looking in a mirror while doing so. Then, determinated to win Mary back, his possessiveness once again gets in the way. Albert Brooks, born Albert Lawrence Einstein, also cast his brother, Bob Einstein, in a brief, but very funny role as an aggressive sporting goods store salesman who loads the insecure narcissist down with armfuls of expensive junk. Modern Romance 1981 Robert Cole, a film editor, is constantly breaking up with and reconciling with long-suffering girl friend Mary Harvard, who works at a bank. I'm sure Brooks' intention was to shine a white hot spotlight on the affair and, in a way, deconstruct it; but if you're going to do that the writing and acting needs to be far far better than what it is here. His vehicle of choice is a sleek silver roadster he floors enroute through L.
Which of course leaves him nowhere. La vita continua tristemente tra le mura casalinghe, con Dodo che assiste alle sconcezze del padre con Fausta, che lo provoca e lo sprona…. That he could achieve bittersweet poignancy as well became clear in Annie Hall 1977 , Manhattan 1979 and Hannah and Her Sisters 1986. It's not Brooks's editor who gets a workout in his overpriced running togs. Companies : Columbia Pictures Corporation Country : United States of America Language : English Genre : Comedy, Romance Stars : Albert Brooks, Kathryn Harrold, Bruno Kirby, James L. . Edoardo, detto Dodo, è un professore universitario in erba che vive nella stessa casa con la dolce moglie Silvia e il padre Alberto, vecchio invalido ma ancora voglioso e attratto dalla civettuola e procace infermiera Fausta.
It's that kind of movie. The movie he's working on is a Star Wars knockoff featuring George Kennedy in a silver lame robe, clutching a ray gun while prowling the corridors of a cheesy spacecraft. The sigh of collective relief that wafted from Hollywood to Manhattan's Carnegie Deli was palpable. The movie also provides insight into film editing as Robert and co-worker Jay work on their current project, a cheesy sci-fi movie. Modern Romance is Brooks's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mess. Modern Romance 1981 When Albert Brooks made his first film, Real Life 1979 , you could sense a torpid Hollywood thinking it might rise up from its mat of comedic formula. With Brooks, there's nothing placating, or even mitigating.
Brooks worked without a net, once appearing on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, delivering a five-minute monologue, not getting a single laugh, then at the end declaring he had been doing standup for five years and had run out of material. Synopsis Robert and Mary's relationship has survived many break-ups. Ordinarily you'd worry about him crashing, except that you know he can't, partly because the picture would end too soon, partly because it's out of keeping with his nonstop replenishing of his own Sisyphus myth. In his film, he plays a guy who, to paraphrase the immortal Jimmy Durante, has the feeling that he wants to go, but still has the feeling that he wants to stay. Essentially, his character in Modern Romance spends a lot of time literally going around in circles in hyper-drive, turning the circles into a rut, Road-Runner-style, then turning the rut into a moat. Hollywood had its own West Coast Woody Allen. In Modern Romance, his alter ego film editor, Robert Cole, makes us laugh at his blindness to his own self-destructive obsessiveness, getting it so gratingly right that you can't stand being in the same room with him for more than a few beats before wanting to flee, screaming.
There he disses his answering machine, adores his record collection, and collapses, only to rise up, contact an old girlfriend, impulsively make a date with her, then, after picking her up, deposit her on her curb after driving around the block and deciding he really had better try to re-ignite the relationship with the woman he just declared himself glad he was free of. Like much of modern life, he's funny and horrible at the same time. Producers: Andrew Scheinman, Martin Shafer Director: Albert Brooks Screenplay: Albert Brooks, Monica Johnson Cinematography: Eric Saarinen Film Editing: David Finfer Cast: Albert Brooks Robert Cole , Kathryn Harrold Mary Harvard , Tyann Means waitress , Bruno Kirby Jay , Jane Hallaren Ellen , Karen Chandler neighbor , Dennis Kort health food salesman , Bob Einstein sporting goods salesman , Virginia Feingold bank receptionist , Thelma Bernstein Albert Brooks' mother , Candy Castillo drugstore manager , James L. His scenes at work at his editing job are funny, even envelope-pushing. After breaking up again with Mary, Robert is torn between freedom and love. This is a depressingly shallow, naive and mostly unfunny look at a wildly improbable relationship between Brooks' psychotic film editor and Harold, his vapid girlfriend.
Brooks, Jane Hallaren, Bob Einstein Overview : A film editor breaks up with his girlfriend, unsure if he is in love. In their glory days, Allen was funnier, Brooks was riskier. Here, too, cramped work spaces add to the walls-closing-in feeling. Albert Brooks directed, cowrote, and stars in this brilliantly funny and at times uncomfortably perceptive comedy. There is hardly anything going on on the periphery of their relationship to give the appearance that these people exist in a real world. He's whiny and impossible, refusing to use his cuddly appearance to ingratiate himself, deliberately filming his scenes in small spaces to underline the narrowness of his self-circumscribed life, adding ever-impending claustrophobia to our reasons for wanting to be anywhere he isn't. His self-reflexiveness somehow seems more at home in L.
But there was always something placating in Allen's persona. Brooks's second film, Modern Romance 1981 , clinched it. Teresa, per caso, trova la chiave, apre il cassetto e si impossessa del diario. Brooks , Bob Einstein , Albert Henderson , Meadowlark Lemon , George Kennedy , Thelma Leeds , Andrew Scheinman , Martin Shafer , Eric Saarinen , David Finfer , Eric Saarinen , Barbara Claman , Deborah Kurtz , Edward Richardson , James L. The audience, Carson included, was convulsed with laughter, partly due, no doubt, to the simple release of what had to have been the accumulating tension.
Un giorno il marito lascia di proposito sul pavimento del suo studio la chiave che apre il cassetto in cui tiene nascosto il diario ove egli narra le sue lussuriose fantasie. He encompasses comedy's three Ns neurosis, narcissism and neediness. Modern Romance 1981 Title : Modern Romance Release : 1981-03-13 Rating : 6. He is irrationally jealous and self-centered, while Mary has been too willing to let him get away with his disruptive antics. Can they learn to live without each other? But the number the clerk does on him is nothing compared to the number he does on himself and can't stop doing. Brooks David , George Kennedy himself and Zeron , Rick Beckner Zeon C-93m. And yes, Brooks uses his character's job to slip in a few digs at movies.
He later more than repaid the favor, giving Brooks perhaps his best screen role as the smart but nervous and camera-shy reporter in Broadcast News 1987. Modern Romance Modern Romance is a 1981 English Film stars Albert Brooks , Albert Brooks , Albert Brooks , Monica Mcgowan Johnson , Kathryn Harrold , Bruno Kirby , Tyann Means , Jane Hallaren , James L. In a sound editing studio, there's a glancing remark about having to finish up and clear out because the next time slot has been assigned to the legendarily lengthy Heaven's Gate 1980. Attempting to forget her, he invests hundreds of dollars. The obsessive and jealous Robert miserably attempts to make it through their current separation by throwing himself into his work as a film editor, using drugs, and making an unfortunate blind date. Which of course is the point of the unsparing, yet ruefully funny hyper-noodge and his off-the-charts behavior. Allen in his standup days was quicker with a punchline.
There are 15 static, excruciating minutes at the beginning where Brooks, having just broke up with Harold, stumbles about his apartment in a depressed, drugged out state - unbearable. Silvia, stanca della monocromicità di Dodo, lo molla per un altro. It's perversity itself, in this film Stanley Kubrick himself no stranger to the obsessive-compulsive famously praised. He annoys the hell out of his stoic colleague Bruno Kirby by showing up bummed out over his latest breakup and then going back and forth endlessly about whether he should stay and work or go home because he can't concentrate. Brooks plays Robert, a film editor trapped in an on-again, off-again relationship with Mary Kathryn Harrold. But the equating of Allen and Brooks, which still persists, conveniently overlooks some significant differences. They do as well in the apartment to which he retreats, drunk and stuffed with Quaaludes.