Under The Radar
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| UNDER THE RADAR - Daren Foster talks about his recent column -- The career of Albert Brooks and how he might be the poor man's Woody Allen. |
UNDER THE RADAR
By Daren Foster
**Didn't you used to be that guy in that movie?**
Being a celebrity is not a monolithic condition. Like in the heavens above, our terrestrial stars come in all shapes and sizes. Some burn white hot threatening to go supernova at any moment. Others are dim and distant, barely registering so much as a flicker to the naked eye.
Either end of the spectrum seems like a highly undesirable place to be. Every move an A-lister makes from who they’re having dinner with to where their most recent baby came from is fodder for the relentless infotainment industry. It’s life under a microscope and no amount of money can possibly make it worthwhile if you have to endure small, idle chit-chat with the likes of the vacuous Ben Mulroney to earn it.
Life on the D-list can’t be any bed of roses either even if it means you don’t have to flip burgers or telemarket to pay the rent. There’s a hint of desperation to it, of having to work that hard to garner the necessary publicity to keep the whole demeaning process rolling. Toiling away in the obscure shadows of normal life, regardless of how mundane and how little glamour it generates, seems preferable to the public hawking of one’s dignity.
It’s in that middle ground between the extremes that seems like the place to conduct your business. You can walk the streets, largely unmolested by the stares and finger pointing from passers-by. The worst it can get must be at the hands of the pushiest of pedestrians who will stop and ask if you were that guy in that movie.. ? Otherwise, you can simply go about living your life as quietly as any ordinary civilian, doing the work you want to do, free from the pressures of hitting astronomical box office numbers or selling millions upon millions of CDs.
I think of David Strathairn. Chris Cooper. Kathy Bates. Helen Mirren. It must be much better being REM these days than it was when they were under that monster contract with Warner Brothers Records and were the perceived saviours of rock’n’roll. The freedom Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers must have to pursue whatever musical direction they choose has to be preferable to what Sting endures when he picks up the lute. (And frankly, the only surprise in that is how long it took after he recorded 10 Summoner’s Tales.)
When all is said and done, who wouldn’t rather have had the career of a Harry Dean Stanton or Dean Stockwell over, say, the bloated, mercurial ups-and-downs of a Marlon Brando? 
Bringing me, rather roundaboutly, to the curious career of Albert Brooks.
Filmmaker and comedian, Brooks has been around for pretty much my entire life. One of the earliest practitioners of anti-stand-up stand-up comedy a decade or so before the likes of Steve Martin and Andy Kaufman, Brooks was a mainstay of TV talk and variety shows throughout the 1960s and 70s, constantly defying setup, setup, punch line comedic expectations and blasting holes in show biz self-importance. A coveted Johnny Carson Show appearance consisted of 5 minutes of unfunny jokes leading to a frank confession that having worked as a comedian for 5 years, he’d run out of material. 
As the world’s worst ventriloquist, his dummy would gurgle while Brooks drank a glass of water as he tried talking. Intending to smoke a cigarette for another bit, he’d drop the dummy flat on its face to the floor to search his pockets for the pack of smokes.
Abandoning stand-up before it exploded into the big business enterprise it became, Brooks took up filmmaking, directing a handful of shorts for the first season of Saturday Night Live and making his first feature film, Real Life, in 1979. In the nearly 30 years since then, he has directed a grand total of 6 movies, spending much more time acting in other people’s projects and lending his voice to high profile animated concerns like The Simpsons and Finding Nemo.
All in all, a very solid, reputable career but as I recently sat watching Brooks perform valiantly in the eminently forgettable 2001 movie, My First Mister, I wondered if he was happy with how things had turned out professionally. Many who know him and have worked with him swear Brooks is the funniest person they’ve ever met. He has long been dubbed the West Coast Woody Allen which, as hard as it might be to believe these days, was once a compliment if more than a little fatuous in its simplicity. Yet, Woody Allen is a household name while Albert Brooks, well, wasn’t he the voice of Nemo’s dad?
As a writer-director, Brooks doesn’t have an Annie Hall or a Manhattan in his canon. On the flipside, he need not hang his head in shame at having wasted audiences’ time with such films as Small Time Crooks, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Melinda and Melinda or a Match Point that have marred Allen’s sunset years. Lost in America and Defending Your Life are Brooks’ finest, funniest efforts and both hold up well two decades after the fact. They showcase Brooks the performer at his quintessential best; equal parts bluster and neurosis, prone to publicly peeling off emotional scabs in spectacularly choreographed meltdowns. The Albert Brooks persona is a whip-smart know-it-all who can’t help pointing out everyone’s flaws including his own.
Like Allen, Brooks the performer is not to everyone’s taste. He is the forebear to Larry David’s Larry David. Prickly and socially inept, they are intelligent enough to realize the chaos they cause but are incapable of stopping it. If you don’t find that kind of humour funny, it can get pretty grating pretty quickly.
This may explain why Brooks has achieved more notice acting in other people’s films than in his own. In movies as disparate as Taxi Driver, Broadcast News and Finding Nemo, Brooks’ rougher edges are smoothed out ever so slightly, revealing vulnerability rather than neediness, self-deprecation instead of self-laceration. In Broadcast News William Hurt’s wildly successfully and highly unethical reporter, Tom Grunnick, asks almost rhetorically, What do you do when your real life exceeds your dreams?, Brooks’ upright but struggling newsman, Aaron Altman, responds in an almost endearingly caustic fashion. Keep it to your self.
To all but the most narcissistic and least humble, having real life exceed your dreams is the very definition of a success. Did Albert Brooks dream of bigger things? Not knowing the man, it’d be presumptuous of me to hazard a guess. But to be free of vying for blockbuster status with every movie he makes (even if that means not being able to make every movie he would like to make) while acting in projects that catch his fancy certainly meets my definition of success. Maybe not the A-list. Certainly not the D. More in the comfortable B-list, where you’re recognized occasionally on the street as that guy in that movie and you can get a table at your favourite restaurant almost whenever you’d like.
READ MORE COLUMNS BY DAREN FOSTER
November 24 2008 - PULP FICTION FOREVER - Once exciting filmmaker now never fails to disappoint.
November 17 2008 - CHARLIE KAUFMAN UNLEASHED - Brainy scriptwriter goes for broke in directorial debut.
November 10 2008 - A GOLDEN AGE - TV's renaissance amidst the ruins.
November 3 2008 - POLITICS AS UNUSUAL - Media tales fail to take flight.
October 27 2008 - EYES HAVE IT 2 - Joe the Plumber 4 President!
October 20 2008 - EYES HAVE IT - You say pollster. I say huckster.
October 13 2008 - MUSLIM COMEDY REVIEW - Ahmed's now your wacky next door neighbour!
October 6 2008 - BVLGARI VVLGARIS - Celebrity overseas whoring.
September 29 2008 - COMEDY TODAY
September 22 2008 - FALLEN SEASON EXPECTATIONS
September 15 2008 - CONVENTIONAL WISDOM
September 8 2008 - KILL THE BATMAN - Seriously. Put him out of his misery.
September 1 2008 - MY SUMMER VACATION
August 25 2008 - PHONING IT IN
August 18 2008 - GUNGA GULUNGA
August 11 2008 - EMMY DAZE - Where is The Wire
August 4 2008 - ME TALK GOOD
July 28 2008 - TAKE THE CANNOLI
July 21 2008 - TECHNO BEAT 2
July 14 2008 - TECHNO BEAT 1
July 7 2008 - THE INDIGESTIBLE HULK
June 30 2008 - KING GEORGE
June 23 2008 - PLAYING ONE ON TV
June 16 2008 - NEW MONDAY MORNING COLUMN - LIFE IS TOO SHORT - Finally, I saw the last episode of The Wire.
June 4 2008 - FLIP THIS CHANNEL - Buying first house leads to having many things on the mind.
May 29 2008 - BE AFRAID VERY AFRAID - The Canadian military is no longer some namby-pamby, truce-brokering, do-gooding, adventure-seeking, peacekeeping bunch of pacifiers
May 22 2008 - STONE COLD BORING ANGEL - All about The Stone Angel
May 15 2008 - HARD TO SWALLOW CANDY - Madonna is back!
