Entertainment
Description
Beautifully photographed and rife with equal amounts pitch black-humor and deep sadness, Rick Alverson’s follow up to The Comedy features a repellent performer (alternative stand-up comedian, Neil Hamburger) earnestly searching for connection but repulsed by the soulless culture he perceives around him. Touring the Mojave Desert area, The Comedian plays tiny rooms during the evenings and contemplates the ruinous western landscape during the days, along the way falling into achingly awkward and frighteningly alien situations. On stage, The Comedian masquerades as a terrible comic, his costume a shabby tuxedo and greasy comb-over hairdo. While balancing several cocktails and fumbling with a microphone, The Comedian blurts unfunny and disgustingly rude riddles that he growls between obnoxious clearings of his throat, “Why did Madonna feed her infant child Alpo brand dog food?” But, once the show is over, he remains equally bristly and detached, blundering in his personal relationships—daily he calls an estranged daughter and leaves her plaintive and depressing messages—and career. Reminiscent of road movies of the 1970s, in its landscapes and the revelation that we are all unmoored, Alverson’s film bores its way into the American male psyche finding at bottom an unquenchable well of sadness, despair and the occasional terrible joke. —Sean Uyehara
Rick Alverson is a filmmaker and musician from Richmond, Virginia. Entertainment is his fourth feature-length film. His first, The Builder (2010), is an existential character study of an Irish immigrant at odds with the promise of America. New Jerusalem (2011), his second feature, starring Colm O’Leary and Will Oldham again considered the immigrant experience, but this time through the lens of religious ideology. New Jerusalem premiered at the 40th Rotterdam International Film Festival and SxSW in 2011. His third feature, The Comedy, premiered in competition at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, and is a tale of the perils of entitlement set in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with Tim Heidecker in his first major dramatic role.
Film Details
Language English
Year 2015
Runtime 98
Country USA
Director Rick Alverson
Producer George Rush, Ryan Zacarias, Ryan Lough, Brooke Bernard, Alex Lipschultz, Rick Alverson, Patrick Hibler
Writer Rick Alverson, Tim Heidecker, Gregg Turkington
Editor Michael Taylor, Rick Alverson
Cinematographer Lorenzo Hagerman
Music Robert Donne
Cast Gregg Turkington, John C. Reilly, Tye Sheridan, Michael Cera, Amy Seimetz, Lotte Verbeek