Albert Brooks
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Elsewhere, Aster’s references are just as obvious: the entire first episode plays like a more aggro retread of Eraserhead (complete with noisily defective elevator), and the film’s denouement, with its atmosphere of hypermediated surveillance and cosmic judgment, is directly cribbed from Albert Brooks’s Defending Your Life .
In addition to the themes in Aster’s first two films (“Hereditary’s” plotting mother, decapitation and horrors in the attic; “Midsommar’s” horrible parental death relayed by a phone call from a stranger, rural rituals and drug use), one can see the influence of such films as “A Serious Man,” “The Truman Show,” “Defending Your Life” and numerous monstrous mother movies.
Certainly, an adult’s enjoyment of this extremely existential odyssey might depend on their experience (or lack thereof) with similarly themed films like Albert Brooks’ classic Defending Your Life or contemporary TV series like The Good Place or Upload .
Some are irreverent like Defending Your Life .
The style and focus of the film reminds me of Albert Brooks‘ 1981 film Modern Romance .
The Phoenician Scheme (2025)
Directed by Wes Anderson
influenced by Defending Your Life (1991)
Themes Plot
Imagine The Seventh Seal meets Defending Your Life and you’re there.
Likewise the businessman’s near-death visions of a grayscale afterlife, which play like Defending Your Life (1991) as co-directed by Ingmar Bergman and Bob Clampett.
Y lo que quería era proyectar la desesperación de Modern Romance (1981), con todo el trauma de codependencia, frente a la sensación de encierro de Scener ur ett äktenskap (1973) (Secretos de un Matrimonio) de Ingmar Bergman (sin todo el lujo de diálogos perfectos del mítico director sueco).
Think Modern Romance, only with mushrooms and body horror.
The result is undeniably grim and wounding and blackly funny and may well be the most terrifyingly incisive portrait of a relationship that has gone on way past its sell-by date since Albert Brooks’s 1981 masterpiece “Modern Romance.”
Here’s a slice of the eclectic roll call of influences Aster cites for his piss-elegant procession: artist Joel-Peter Witkin, Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage,” works by Sergei Parajanov, Lars von Trier, and Gaspar Noé and Albert Brooks’ “Modern Romance,” which Aster calls his “favorite breakup movie ever.”
The gag – as it was as far back as Albert Brooks’ Real Life – is that the process is inherently intrusive and contrived, leading to decidedly “unreal” complications for all involved.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)
Directed by Nicholas Stoller
influenced by Modern Romance (1981)
Plot
Which is not to undervalue the good and plentiful jokes in Segel's script, a mash-up of "10," "Modern Romance" and "Better Off Dead...," no doubt enlivened by spontaneous invention on the set.
When The Flash goes back in time, it is represented as if he is in the center of a ‘Defending Your Life”-like arena, memories ‘seated’ in the stadium.
It's one of the smartest uses of a cameo appearance I've seen since Shirley MacLaine popped up in the Past Lives Pavilion of "Defending Your Life" 20 years ago.
As well as the principal actors, this is a movie rich in bench strength: Anthony Edwards as Toschi's more sensitive partner; Brian Cox as the celebrity lawyer Melvin Belli; Chloë Sevigny as Graysmith's frightened wife; and Elias Koteas, Dermot Mulroney and Donal Logue as county cops; Philip Baker Hall as a dipsomaniac handwriting expert; and, notably, John Carroll Lynch, a portly, bald comic actor (seen in Albert Brooks's Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World) cast here as the prime suspect.
The Darjeeling Limited (2007)
Directed by Wes Anderson
influenced by Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (2006)
Themes
This is the ungiving, benign neo-colonialism that Albert Brooks mocked (and was inescapably a part of) in Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World .
If you've seen other movies in the genre, such as "Defending Your Life" and "Bruce Almighty," you know that Life Lessons loom for the increasingly tubby and schlubby hubby.
There are callbacks to films as various as " Defending Your Life ," " Never Let Me Go ," " One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest ," and " Safe ," an institutionalized environment devoted to controlling the chaos of human emotions.
Like last year's "Mother" by Albert Brooks, "As Good as It Gets" is both funny and poignant, sarcastic and tender.
Having a back story implies that achieving peace of mind entails coming to terms with one's past, as Simon eventually does--the therapeutic model for dealing with neurosis in most conventional Freudian or post-Freudian Hollywood movies, from Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound to Albert Brooks's Mother.