Defending Your Life (1991)
Directed by Albert Brooks
Is there love after death? After he dies suddenly, the hapless advertising executive Daniel Miller finds himself in Judgment City, a gleaming way station where the newly deceased must prove they lived a life of sufficient courage to advance in their journey through the universe. As the self-doubting Daniel struggles to make his case, a budding relationship with the uninhibited Julia offers him a chance to finally feel alive.
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What critics compared Defending Your Life to
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 .
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.
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.
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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.
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.