Real Life

Comedian-filmmaker Albert Brooks established himself as a major force in film comedy with this devastating satire on the interplay between the media and "real life." Brooks plays someone not unlike himself, an obnoxious documentary filmmaker who sets out to find a "typical American family" and then film their lives for a year. He chooses an Arizona clan headed by Charles Grodin and Frances Lee McCain, who are at first enchanted with their sudden fame. But things turn sour. Normal family problems are blown up by filmmaker Brooks into crises of disastrous proportions--McCain's trip to the gynecologist, for example, becomes an expose on her doctor. Eventually the fami...