Modern Romance

Starring: Albert Brooks, Rick Beckner Director: Albert Brooks

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This item: Modern Romance DVD ~ Albert Brooks
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Lost in America (Widescreen) DVD ~ Albert Brooks
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Product Details

Actors: Albert Brooks, Rick Beckner, Joe Bratcher, Candy Castillo, Bob Einstein
Directors: Albert Brooks
Format: NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Language: English
Subtitles: English
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
DVD Release Date: May 2 2006
Average Customer Review: No customer reviews yet. Be the first.
ASIN: B000C20VTQ
Amazon.ca Sales Rank: #29,114 in DVD (See Bestsellers in DVD)
Popular in these categories:
#11 in DVD > Comedy > Comedy Stars > Albert Brooks
#17 in DVD > Comedy > Comedy Directors > James L. Brooks
#45 in DVD > Comedy > Urban

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Product Description

From Amazon.com

It's just your typical boy-dumps-girl, boy-has-change-of-heart, boy-alienates-girl-anew love story. This romantic comedy, the last word on obsessive, can't-live-with-'em, can't-live-without-'em relationships, holds a special place in the hearts of Albert Brooks fans.

Brooks stars as film editor Robert Cole, who breaks up--again, apparently--with Mary (Kathryn Harrold). They are in a no-win situation, he tells her, like Vietnam. The sequence that follows is an excruciating, intimately observed tour de force: Robert's long night's journey into day. Miserable, spaced out on Quaaludes, he stumbles around his apartment, admiring his record collection ("I love my albums"), rifling through his Rolodex, making a blind date call he will instantly regret.

He becomes determined to win Mary back, but again falls prey to his possessiveness and paranoia, as when he happens to find Mary's phone bill and becomes obsessed over a long-distance number.

Modern Romance is characteristically deadpan in its depiction of one man behaving badly. The dialogue is vintage Brooks, as when he tells a colleague (Bruno Kirby) that he and Mary always enjoyed great sex but could never really talk. "Do you need to talk?" his friend asks, which would be the topper in anyone else's comedy. But Brooks dismisses this cheap joke with, "We're men. Can we have a bond?"

A hilarious subplot concerns Robert's work on a cheesy science fiction film that stars George Kennedy. James L. Brooks (no relation), who would direct Brooks to an Oscar nomination in Broadcast News, is hysterical as the deluded director who resists Robert's best, painstaking efforts to improve the film.

For some, Modern Romance is a comedy, for others, a horror film (Robert is as relentless as Michael Myers and as much a nightmare as Freddy). See it and squirm with someone you love. --Donald Liebenson

Review

Challenging the notion that film eroticizes whatever's in its frame, Albert Brooks presents a vision of love as a cycle of torture, abnegation, delusion, and denial. Other than a probable heightening of tensions, Brooks and co-writer Monica Johnson offer no suggestion that events transpiring in Modern Romance differ significantly from its protagonists' past breakups and reunions. Seemingly motivated by the need to fill some cavernous void in himself, Brooks destructively obsesses on Harrold at every stage of their romance. Without her, he's miserably unfulfilled. With her, he's a jealous wreck with no shortage of means to sabotage their relationship, which seems to have no substance apart from the endless cycle of breakups and reconciliation. It's such a telling portrait of love chasing its own tail that it's almost a wonder the film can scare up any laughs. As usual, however, Brooks' talent for inventive gags -- verbal, visual, and otherwise -- pervades the film. Brooks even knows how to run with a questionable idea: One early scene finds him alone in his apartment and deep under the influence of Quaaludes. What starts as a pretty familiar piece of drug humor builds, through a series of long takes, to a brilliant comic set piece that at one point finds Brooks conducting a three-way conversation between himself, his record collection, and his pet bird. ~ Keith Phipps, All Movie Guide

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