Ten postmodern takeaways from Modern Romance:

1. This film would make a great double feature with Jon Favreau's Swingers.

2. Both films, Swingers & Modern Romance, use answering machines to comedic gold. This film really maximizes the motif of phones to perfection. Long-distance calls, phone booths, and even calling cards make a great cameo. But Swingers ends with perhaps the greatest answering machine message of all time.

3. I almost bought that Albert Brooks's Robert could have courted Kathryn Harrold's Mary until he took of his shirt and revealed the mounds of gorilla-hair on his shoulders, chest, and torso.

4. The athletic-gear shopping scene was too over-the-top. It was funny at first, with the customer sales rep talking him out of…

94/100

Albert Brooks as an artist burrows so far into scenarios of neurosis that it goes beyond a personal feel and instead takes on a darker, universal image. Robert is a jealous, unstable individual in spite of his delusions of understanding, but he's engrossing and relatable nonetheless. We'd all be lying, or at least, *I'd* be lying, if we said we didn't identify in any way with this man. He is an exaggerated amalgamation of our fears, insecurities, and anxieties, but there's a great deal of truth in his life and in his relationship, and Modern Romance glides through a concentrated section of honest emotional weight while still making you laugh. Comedy and heartbreak go hand in hand, with sly…

90/100

[originally written on my blog]

Switch the Quaaludes to soju and have Robert pursue a different-but-similar woman in the second half and this could be a Hong Sang-soo picture, though its depiction of masculine anxiety is much more overtly comedic. It also uncannily prefigures the Onion's classic story "Romantic-Comedy Behavior Gets Real-Life Man Arrested," except that Brooks understands how sheer relentlessness can in fact create a folie à deux that ensnares otherwise sensible women; the movie's greatest triumph is the sheer horror inspired by what would constitute a traditional, clichéd happy ending in a Hollywood romcom. (I do wish he'd omitted the closing title crawl, which is funny enough but detracts from the perverse power of that final "romantic"…

The truly amazing thing about Albert Brooks's "Modern Romance" is how subtle its depths truly are. At one point, Mary (Kathryn Harrold) offhandedly wonders aloud to Robert (Brooks) whether his conception of romance is based more on movie fantasy than reality—but this rhetorical observation doesn't really resonate until, later on in the film, we see Robert's clingy obsessiveness pitted against Mary's careerist leanings first at that business dinner he interrupts, then in the cabin-in-the-woods finale. Maybe it's not so much that Robert lives in a fantasy world, but that his over-idealized conception of romance simply can't help but seem almost quaint in modern society. But, of course, Brooks's comic intelligence is too sharp to settle for such facile nostalgia; he's…

So it's like a Woody Allen, but good?

Albert Brooks totally nails the hypocrisy, anxiety and neurotic-nature of modern live, which resonates just as much almost 40 years later (minus the Quaaludes I suppose). His performance here hits so many notes correctly, even if the film kind of staggers in the middle third.

Still, the opening couple of minutes, from the breakup to the myriad of phone calls and conversations had in a most vulnerable and drug-induced state, are quite a treat. It's interesting to see a male protagonist portrayed the way he is here, what with his bare-chested honesty combined with deeply misogynistic feelings about women and love. His desire for a perfect love that fits his parameters seems…