LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Albert Brooks
built 118 days ago
Albert Brooks is one of this culture's most revealing litmus tests. Some people don't find him the least bit funny. The fault was once believed to lie in Brooks's "understated, subtle-to-the-point-of-non-existent" humor. New findings... point to a flaw in the brain of the viewer. Specifically, the congenital underdevelopment of a region in the Occipital cortex known as "Schmegegy's Area", long thought responsibe for sense of humor. While it's not a serious brain disorder, the name of the syndrome is "Serious Brain Disorder".
Source:
Twas a time in the 1980s when Albert Brooks was lauded as the West Coast's answer to Woody Allen. Here was a writer-director-actor capable of giving neurotic Jewish humor an intelligently Californian spin. If his limited artistic output (a mere two films that decade) never followed through on the promise, he ... never subjected his fans to a series of painful cinematic misfires (or disturbing marital woes). Brooks always went for quality over quantity. Even as a performer, he's been highly selective so that audiences were lucky if he showed up in one film in any given year.
Source:
Here's a list of some of the parts Albert Brooks has turned down over the years. Richard Gere's role in ''Pretty Woman.'' Tom Hanks' in ''Big.'' Billy Crystal's in ''When Harry Met Sally''.... Lorne Michaels once offered him a job as the permanent host of ''Saturday Night Live,'' but Brooks passed on that, too. Not that he has any regrets. Not one. Not for a minute.
Source:
Albert Brooks has a constant longing for new and exciting adventures. Albert likes to be admired and he has a tendency to force admiration by fishing for compliments. His creative power ... is strong, and Brooks may have a desire to create some entirely new form of art.
Challenging the notion that film eroticizes whatever's in its frame, Albert Brooks presents a vision of love as a cycle of torture, abnegation, delusion, and denial. Other than a probable heightening of tensions, Brooks and co-writer Monica Johnson offer no suggestion that events transpiring in Modern Romance differ significantly from its protagonists' past breakups and reunions. Seemingly motivated by the need to fill some cavernous void in himself, Brooks destructively obsesses on Harrold at every stage of their romance. Without her, he's miserably unfulfilled. With her, he's a jealous wreck with no shortage of means to sabotage their relationship, which seems to have no substance apart from the endless cycle of breakups and reconciliation. It's such a telling portrait of love chasing its own tail that it's almost a wonder the film can scare up any laughs.
Source:
Called the West Coast Woody Allen for his cerebral brand of comedy, actor-writer-director Albert Brooks turned down the Billy Crystal role in "When Harry Met Sally..." (1989) precisely because "it read to me like a Woody Allen movie, verbatim. And I thought that was not something I should be in." Though both are tortured insecure geniuses of Hebraic descent who changed their names and abandoned brilliant stand-up careers to make movies, Brooks is by far the slower worker, helming on average only one movie every 3.5 years (six in 21 years), compared to Allen who cranks out at least one picture per annum. Yet, Brooks wouldn't have it any other way. As an actor, he's rejected countless projects from "Dragnet" (1987) and "Midnight Run" (1988) to "Sgt. Bilko" (1996). After pitching a sitcom ("Our Man in Rattan") to Michael Eisner at ABC in 1976, calling for him to play a lowly TV correspondent in the armpit of Africa, he was just about to sign on the dotted line when Eisner's "Albert, where do you see the character in seven years?"
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Albert Brooks