Cinema: True Fakery

REAL LIFE

Directed by Albert Brooks Screenplay by Albert Brooks, Monica Johnson and Harry Shearer

When a comedian makes a film, audiences come to the theater planning to laugh their heads off. Such expectations are best set aside by moviegoers who venture to see Real Life. Comic Albert Brooks' first feature is not as dark as Interiors, but neither is it designed as a hoot. What Brooks has wrought is a scrupulously honest satire: a film that sacrifices compulsive jokiness in the effort to reveal the nasty truth about its subject, TV's slice-of-life documentaries. Real Life is funny when it wants to be...

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