Quirky, clever comedy from Albert Brooks, and one ahead of its time in showing the possibility of a real family being filmed for entertainment, and how unreal such a depiction of "real life" would turn out to be. Brooks is great as the narcissistic director of the film, which is meant to capture the life of a family over a year, but he gets too personally involved with his subjects and they soon crumble under the pressure, part of which includes a media circus.
The technical needs of the project are high, so the film conjures up futuristic technology like the 'Graphicon 8000,' which does a primitive rendering of a 3D model of a person's face to determine their screen presence (after giving its technical report, its next screen "Thank you, pick up your shoes at the desk" was pretty funny). The Ettinauer 226XL cameras that fit over their operators' heads and record digitally onto integrated circuit chips and then upload later for processing were prescient technically, on top of being funny in use, the cameramen circling around their subjects.
Not all of the scenes which follow work completely, but there are enough good ones to keep it amusing, such as the black doctor (J. A. Preston) calling Brook's character out for his subtle racism and Charles Grodin, playing a veterinarian, making a serious gaffe while being filmed operating on a horse. The meetings with the studio, the executive calling in from his vacation, are quite funny too, because the situation seems so absurd and yet the dialogue and characterization so real.
The real satire is in Brooks's character and the concept of reality entertainment in the first place, the latter effectively mocking the content we would regularly only see decades later. Brooks shows us that such a film can't possibly capture "real life" because people feel the pressure of a camera, and so to observe is to disturb, as the maxim goes. Driven by someone always looking out for himself more than the well-being of the family, and by someone looking to entertain instead of the doctors who are ignored, the project is doomed in more ways than one. Funny, sometimes dark, intelligent stuff.
The technical needs of the project are high, so the film conjures up futuristic technology like the 'Graphicon 8000,' which does a primitive rendering of a 3D model of a person's face to determine their screen presence (after giving its technical report, its next screen "Thank you, pick up your shoes at the desk" was pretty funny). The Ettinauer 226XL cameras that fit over their operators' heads and record digitally onto integrated circuit chips and then upload later for processing were prescient technically, on top of being funny in use, the cameramen circling around their subjects.
Not all of the scenes which follow work completely, but there are enough good ones to keep it amusing, such as the black doctor (J. A. Preston) calling Brook's character out for his subtle racism and Charles Grodin, playing a veterinarian, making a serious gaffe while being filmed operating on a horse. The meetings with the studio, the executive calling in from his vacation, are quite funny too, because the situation seems so absurd and yet the dialogue and characterization so real.
The real satire is in Brooks's character and the concept of reality entertainment in the first place, the latter effectively mocking the content we would regularly only see decades later. Brooks shows us that such a film can't possibly capture "real life" because people feel the pressure of a camera, and so to observe is to disturb, as the maxim goes. Driven by someone always looking out for himself more than the well-being of the family, and by someone looking to entertain instead of the doctors who are ignored, the project is doomed in more ways than one. Funny, sometimes dark, intelligent stuff.