#DEFENDING YOUR LIFE 300MB MOVIE MOVIE#
I’ve heard you say that “Defending Your Life” is the movie of yours that people talk to you about the most. When someone mentions “Defending Your Life,” what does it bring to mind for you? It’s notable that in his first and, for now, last films he played characters named Albert Brooks, exaggerated creatures of show business who reveled in revealing outsize ego and insecurity. “The Muse” in 1999 and “Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World” in 2005 continued his streak of idiosyncratic, deeply personal comedic filmmaking. What came next was a poignant and pointed series of films - “Modern Romance” in 1981, “Lost in America” in 1985, “Defending Your Life” in 1991 and “Mother” in 1996 - that were snapshots of comfortably insulated, white middle-class American life, full of foibles, anxiety, ambition and discontent. After making a series of short films for the first season of “Saturday Night Live,” he released his debut feature as a filmmaker in 1979 with “Real Life.” Brooks began performing on television variety shows in the late 1960s and had a successful stand-up comedy career in the 1970s. Dad died immediately after performing at the Friars Club induction of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in 1958, when Brooks was only 11. His father, Harry Einstein, was a popular radio comedian known as Parkyakarkus in the 1930s and ’40s. Filmmaker and actor Albert Brooks crafted portraits of contemporary life that are somehow ironic and earnest, affectionate and misanthropic, stretching their knowing authenticity to a point of skeptical absurdity.Ī Hollywood kid, Brooks’ life and career cover an astonishing span of show business history.