Real Life (Criterion) 08/24 Blu-ray (Rental)

Decades before reality television reigned supreme, there was Albert Brooks’s debut feature, Real Life, a brilliantly deadpan, stylistically innovative satire about the perils and pitfalls of trying to capture the truth on film. The writer-director plays “Albert Brooks,” a narcissistic Hollywood filmmaker who plans to spend the year in Phoenix embedded with Warren and Jeanette Yeager (Charles Grodin and Frances Lee McCain) and their two children, deploying an arsenal of cutting-edge equipment (including the over-the-head Ettinauer 226XL camera) to capture an American family’s ordinary day-to-day. Chronicling the project’s disastrous fallout, as the meddlesome Albert can’t help getting too close to his subjects, this pioneering mockumentary is more relevant than ever amid today’s media landscape. DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director Albert Brooks, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack New interview with Brooks New interview with actor Frances Lee McCain 3D trailer directed by Brooks English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing PLUS: An essay by film critic A. S. Hamrah