I think time has stripped a bit of power from Albert Brooks' Real Life, a spoof of An American Family, the first reality television show ever made. Nowadays Brooks' antics as the unscrupulous host/director/creative-supervisor of a similar show charting a year in the life of an Arizona family seem downright quaint. But I'll bet than in 1979 the film hit like a stick of dynamite. There isn't much laugh-out-loud funny in Real Life: we spend most of the film with our jaws dropping lower and lower in amazement and incredulity. There's an uncanny rhythm at play here; by the end I could only marvel at the film's modulation of chaos and absurdity. The scene of the horse dying on the operation table and a maddened Brooks setting the family's house on fire are two sequences that will forever be burned into my brain.
8/10
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