Entertainment (2015)

• Year: 2015
• Released: 13 Nov 2015
• Country: United States
• Adwords: 1 win & 3 nominations
• IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3343784/
• Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/entertainment
• Metacritics: https://www.metacritic.com/movie/entertainment
• Available in: 720p, 1080p,
• Language: English, Spanish
• MPA Rating: R
• Genre: Drama
• Runtime: 103 min
• Writer: Rick Alverson, Gregg Turkington, Tim Heidecker
• Director: Rick Alverson
• Cast: Gregg Turkington, John C. Reilly, Tye Sheridan

	5.7/10
	65/100
	82% – Critics
	45% – Audience

Entertainment Storyline

En route to meet his estranged daughter and attempting to revive his dwindling career, a broken, middle-aged comedian plays a string of dead-end shows in the Mojave desert.

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Entertainment Movie Reviews

Fascinating and ambitious, if not always successful

A fascinating and ambitious mess, with echoes of David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch and Stanley Kubrick among others. Beautifully shot and full of careful and striking lighting and compositions, this tragic-comic character study of an abrasive, sad, utterly unsuccessful stand up comic has a number of surreal scenes and images that are deeply affecting and/or quite funny.

There are also a number of scenes that seem needlessly repetitive, or working way too hard to be self-consciously weird. And the film definitely feels long.

Back on the plus side, it’s made more complex and interesting by the fact that the stand up character in his off-stage real life is outwardly nothing like the hyper-annoying, aggressively unfunny and gross person he plays on stage. He’s quiet and introverted and seems more terribly and dangerously depressed than angry. However, under the surface the comic and his on-stage alter ego share a desperate sense of alienation from other human beings, and it’s that terrible modern isolation that’s at the heart of the film.

Extending that exploration, ‘Entertainment’ plays with an interesting meta idea. What if an arty, self-referential surrealist comic like Andy Kaufman (or this film’s lead Gregg Turkington) spent their career playing their most difficult and abrasive alter-ego like Kaufman’s Tony Clifton (or star Turkington’s Neil Hamburger, who is the basis of the on stage persona here), but instead of playing for crowds of hip and ‘knowing’ urban young people ‘in on the joke’, they only got to do that act in sad, barely populated working class dive bars out in the middle of the California desert, where the inside joke is totally lost for the audience. It raises interesting questions about perception and comedy, and how much of our enjoyment of hip ironic distance in modern entertainment is a cover for something wounded and broken inside us.

It’s a difficult film I’d be hesitant in recommending to most other people, and that I have my own reservations about. Yet I find that since I’ve seen it, moments, images and performances are aggressively haunting me in a powerful way, and make me look forward to seeing it again.

Good Try, But No Cigar – Entertainment

This film tries too hard to be a really bad Ingmar Bergman imitation set to supposed comedy, satire, black comedy, or some other comedy that I am absolutely not aware of. It was well-photographed, but had little meaningful dialogue or subplots. Yes, we are aware the man has absolutely no talent; and that is funny for about five minutes or so. But trying to stretch that one-trick pony idea into over an hour is cinematic suicide. What activities might be more entertaining than watching this film? Cutting your toenails, doing the dishes, doing the laundry, walking the dog, watching grass grow. Any of these would be more entertaining. What I found really funny about this film is that someone was dumb enough to bankroll it.

Tedious art film

“Entertainment” is almost as hard to watch as Turkington is hard to look at. Why does his hair always appear wet?

It’s one of those sparse art movies where nothing happens and the movie barely seems to notice the main character, which I suppose is the point. Turkington found fame as Neil Hamburger, an “anti-comedian” who is funny because he isn’t funny. That’s the joke.

In “Entertainment”, he plays a comedian – nameless – who isn’t funny because he isn’t funny. His shows are bad at first, and continue to get worse until he gets on stage and blows a continuous raspberry – repulsive to view and listen to – and in a final performance, collapses.

It wouldn’t be one of these weird art movies without two things – unexplained celebrity walk-ons and equally unexplained disturbing scenarios. For the walk-on, we get Michael Cera in one scene where he asks the comedian to “hang out” with him in the men’s room. For the disturbing material, we get him approaching a woman in labor on a public bathroom floor, and then a cut to him with a newborn baby in his arms while he sits on the floor, looking as bored as he has throughout the entire movie.

The stand up performances are the only part of the movie that have any kind of drama to them. Yes, they’re bad, but there is some kind of character arc present in the way they devolve. Nothing else in the movie is of any value, none of it makes sense, and it’s not even interesting enough to frustrate you when you realise that.