runamokprods 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.

Rob Angus OK I get how this is supposed to be anti entertainment. I get how this is supposed to be an artsy thought provoking watch. I get that this is supposed to be a dark and uncomfortable portrayal of one mans slow descent into vague mental illness. I just don't get it. It simply doesn't work. The acting is good, the film contains believable seedy characters and the setting is appropriate. Just the whole thing is sooo slow and, frankly, boring. Endless montages of the anti hero sitting mute on a bed. Endless slow shots of characters looking at each other. Mute. As a viewer you are left to infer and fill in the blanks to ascertain what is going on. The trouble is you can't be bothered to. The film and the protagonist is so unlikeable and proceedings are so slow and boring you just have no interest. True, I watched till the end. But that says more about me as a viewer than it does the film. I just wanted some form of closure, or at least some sort of justification for actually watching. I was sadly disappointed. Just more of the same slow pointless tut till proceedings crawl to an end. Even worse than Terence Malik's awful Tree of Life film. And that really is saying something. I would avoid.

ferdinand1932 There is a very deliberate style of anti-mainstream art, whether its prose or movies. It's all very knowing about subverting the norms. This film wears its style as a sort of propaganda in the way that Lynch announced himself in the mid 1970s. It chooses a style and an eroded narrative without the standard motifs and story lines that usually provide entry for an audience.The major problem with this approach is that without a good idea it's pointless or rather it's inept as everything has been borrowed from someone else from another time and only the viewer's awareness of the various stylistic thefts will make it work, or not, as the case may be.If ever a film implied its own narcissism this one succeeds excellently: it is both unoriginal while striving to appear so, and it is smug in that self-embrace. As a film school piece it might have achieved a minor praise from a tutor but that is all it might expect.

cfwc I saw Entertainment at the Sundance Film Festival yesterday and this is my first ever review.This is hands down the most incoherent, nonsensical, abhorrent piece of trash I've ever seen. I'm pretty sure the director was trying to set a standard for how to create a film that not only assaults the eyes, intellect, and sanity of the viewers, but to educate future filmmakers on how to ruin the audiences day.From the seemingly endless minutiae of wondering about, aimlessly, through life with a stupid look on his face to the series of comedy acts that are as inane as they are uncomfortable, the main character may be the most hopeless and awful person ever written. Each scene is unrelated to the former, resulting in a chain of thoughtless, boring, absurd moments that makes the viewer wish they were dead. Frankly, it's not even the loss of my time and my brain cells that bothers me, it's the poorest allocation of capital I've ever seen. What in the world were the financiers of this film thinking? Unless you hate yourself, go do anything else with your time. Hope this helps