Modern Romance (1981)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

the audience applauded

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Albert Brooks wrote, directed, and stars in this comedic/tragic tale of Kathryn Harrold's on and off romance with a man who just could not make up his mind. To the neurotic and semi-paranoid Brooks, the world looks like an optical illusion, a social Necker cube, in which someone's well-intentioned remark can turn with a flash into a put down. The overt can instantly seem covert.The irony is that all of this difficulty is internal. It's Brooks' own insecurity, his self doubt and self reassurance that's causing the anguish. His girl friend loves him but is exasperated by his possessivness and distrust. Is she seeing some other guy on the side? Who did she call at three in the morning? His girl friend is Kathryn Harrold. She swallows the screen whole whenever she appears. She could gang bang every man in the city of Dubuque, Iowa, as long as she came home to me once in a while.Taken as a whole, the movie has its longueurs. It's fun to see Brooks stone on Ludes and calling up old friends to tell them he loves them, but it does go on. The direction, though, is in no way amateurish. Still stoned, Brooks stumbles out of his house, gets into his Porsche, determined to visit Harrold, wrestles with the ignition, and then falls dead asleep. And Brooks the director never takes us for one second inside the Porsche. We can't even see Brooks through the window, just his mumbling and the silence that follows, until night turns to day -- all in one shot. Nicely done. Put succinctly, my feeling was that if you like Woody Allen, you'll like this film. Not that Brooks deliberately imitates Allen but just that they draw their water from the same cultural well.

The Broadway musical, "Aspects of Love", proclaimed "Love Changes Everything", explaining that it makes fools of everyone, and boy, was that dong right. Without music, Albert Brooks does exactly that, having a midlife crisis when he breaks up with girlfriend Kathryn Harrold, then do desperately trying to get her back, expressing jealousy, screwing up at work, pursuing other romantic conquests he immediately regrets, then changing everything when he gets her back. The genius in Brooks' films is that he is able to express the quirky and embarrassing sides of our life we couldn't write about if our final grade depended on it. He's like the L.A. version of Woody Allen, changing the trite style of dialog to real world conversation that almost makes the viewer feel that they are intruding in on private conversation.I should mention that one sequence where Brooks goes into an athletic store to buy sneakers was repeated, practically in its entirety, in an episode of "The Golden Girls". A very funny sequence has Brooks trying to end a conversation with his mother and her attempt (unseen) to keep it going even though its obvious that he doesn't want to continue on the particular subject.Cameos by George Kennedy and Meadowlark Lemon add to Brooks' career as a film editor, with Bruce Kirby as his assistant. Not all of the script covers the main plot, but it works, especially in detailing the life of a busy film editor. This is what is called a comedy of intellect, not meant for huge laughs, but providing bits of "I relate to that" smiles.

Early effort by writer-director-star Albert Brooks is a slimly-budgeted, tiresomely 'with-it' Hollywood comedy about a movie editor unable to get on with his life after a romance with glamorous but aloof Kathryn Harrold falls apart. It would be too easy to label this another "Annie Hall" knock-off, especially as Brooks has some smart ideas in lampooning the business of B-movies; however, an honest comparison between Woody Allen and Brooks does show how one filmmaker can reap timeless comedy and pathos from a failed-affair situation and how another writer-director cannot. There are too few jokes, too much whining, nudity from Harrold that appears to be used for shock value (not for titillation or for humor, which is useless in a comedy), but plenty of Brooks himself--which makes the film a love-it-or-leave-it venture for most mainstream audiences. ** from ****

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).