Real Life

Albert Brooks may be the Woody Allen of the 1980s. His extraordinary first feature, Real Life, demonstrates a potential genius for movie comedy and is animated by a peculiarly fertile and subtle imagination.

The ending of Real Life is the most uproarious of a good many inspired moments.

It’s astonishing, and a bit sad really, how prescient Real Life was in retrospect. In 1979, Albert Brooks had already predicted and skewered the contrived inauthenticity of reality television with this biting mockumentary, yet we’ve gone ahead and given over much of our entertainment hours to the format anyway.

If not new and significant, it's at least a funny attempt to pull off the trick of holding a mirror to our hall of mirrors. [1 June 1979, p.22]

Real Life delivers a pointed critique of the influence of media on our lives; it is also one of the funniest looks at filmmaking ever put on screen.

Brooks' bravery is spiriting; in his debut he has written an unlikeable character doing unlikeable things to likeable people. One wishes his talent as a director matched his chutzpah. [17 Mar 1979]

An idea is not enough for a movie. Characters have to be developed, comic situations have to be set up before they can pay off and the story should have a conclusion instead of a dead stop. Real Life fails in all of those areas -- fails so miserably that it lets its audiences down.