‘Entertainment’ (2015)

Rick Alverson’s “Entertainment” is a film that subverts all connotations surrounding its title, and rather than directly entertaining us, actually challenges us by inspiring these questions: “What is ‘entertainment,’ why do those who seek to entertain do so, and what do we, the ‘entertained,’ expect from our entertainers?”

“Entertainment” follows an aging comedian (Gregg Turkington) as he travels across the California desert, performing at seedy clubs and prisons, all the while making his way toward some big Hollywood gig, and perhaps an estranged daughter.

As the film progresses, the comedian struggles to communicate with others, both through his belligerent stage character (based on “Neil Hamburger,” a character that Turkington performs as in real life),  whose act is made up of subversive, carefully constructed hacky jokes of misogyny, homophobia and overall distaste, and in his life off-stage. That inability to communicate builds, driving the always restrained and subtly affecting story into increasingly surreal territory that paints the American Southwest as somewhat of a wasteland of washed up opportunity and spent talent.

When viewed shallowly, from a distance and with slightly squinted eyes, the very premise of Alverson’s film, which he co-wrote with Turkington and Heidecker, is not an unfamiliar one. The idea here is that Alverson and company are taking something we have seen before in more conventional films about aging entertainers, and deconstructing it in order to get a fuller grasp, not on the story arc itself exactly, but more on what about this kind of story makes sense in a naturalistic sort of way, one that is not blurred or sweetened saccharine by clean resolutions or sentimental revelations.

Consider one scene where, after a typically lousy show, the comedian tries to explain to his cousin, John (John C Reilly), how he doesn’t really have an audience anymore that “gets it.” Meanwhile, John clearly doesn’t get it either, and offers the comedian some advice, that he should just try to be less weird, and maybe more people will get it.

This is a funny scene, but it also plays realistically with these opposite character types while again subverting expectations of some kind of cathartic moment between them. In this scene and many others, we witness the breakdown of direct communication and sense that no one is really on the same level of understanding. The comedian calls his estranged daughter frequently throughout the film, and always ends up having to leave a message — unable to reach her, unable to reach his audience, unable to reach himself. There is a lot of humor, but none of it comes without a little bit of a sting. That’s the kind of film Alverson is interested in making.

“Entertainment” doesn’t contain a single disposable scene, or a scene out of place. It is refreshingly efficient in its storytelling, and proves Alverson to be one of the most focused, confident and uncompromising directors working today. He makes confrontational movies about confrontational people, and there’s something both unsettling and somehow completely brilliant and refreshing about his approach. Alverson previously made “The Comedy,” a staggeringly unflinching foray into an aging yuppie-hipster played by Tim Heidecker, whose boredom and apathetic amusement with playing pranks on strangers in and around Brooklyn leaves him somewhat of a shell of a man. “Entertainment” can be viewed as a companion piece to that.

Turkington as a truly strange and fascinating to watch as he re-interprets his own real-life character for the film, which has been digested and reinterpreted by Heidecker, Alverson and himself, and then switches it off and becomes the hollow shell of a man (à la Heidecker’s character in “The Comedy”). As he journeys forward, the comedian wanders through the desert in search of something intangible, and visits various tourist attractions, including an airplane graveyard full of hollowed out shells of once were magnificent machines, an oil field where the derricks continuously drill and drill without repose, and an old West ghost town, all of which are better at indicating what is going on with the comedian than he himself is able to express to others. It also could be that Alverson is poking fun at metaphors — that also would be the kind of film that he is interested in making.

“Entertainment” is one of the best pictures of the year.

★★★★ (out of 4)

‘This is the End’

What do you end up with when you put Seth Rogan, James Franco, Danny McBride, Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill and Craig Robinson under one roof while the Rapture is going on outside, turning the Hollywood Hills and (presumably) the rest of the world into ashes and hellfire? Fortunately, you get what is undoubtedly one of the funniest movies of the year, nay, of the past decade.

“This is the End” features a truly ingenious cast in an equally ingenious premise: All of the above mentioned celebrities play obnoxious, cantankerous, whiney versions of themselves trapped inside James Franco’s luxurious Hollywood home — definitely not the worst place you could hold up during the apocalypse.

All of them are there to begin with because they are partying with all of their famous friends, including, but not limited to: a perverted, coked-up Michael Cera who is hitting on Rihanna, Jason Segel, who laments the predictability of working on a network show like “How I Met Your Mother,” Emma “Hermoine Granger” Watson, who scores some of the biggest laughs in the film, and Paul Rudd, who accidentally steps on and crushes a girl’s skull once the chaos begins.

And once it begins, things get very bad and uproariously funny very quickly, with a bunch of hilarious actors lampooning their own careers, and their ineptitude and spoiled lifestyles in the face of such apocalyptic challenges as food and water shortages, lack of masturbation privacy, demonic possession, and loss of humanity.

That last one is important in this film, because the very reason why none of these guys has been Raptured, or saved, is because they are not worthy. So of course, throughout the movie they figure out they need to correct that and do good things in order to be allowed into the light. Doing good things, selfless things: that ends up being the most daunting task, especially for McBride, who revels in the darkness of his devilish end-of-the-world persona.

“This is the End” is the directorial debut of writing partners Rogan and Evan Goldberg (“Superbad,” “Pineapple Express”), and they nail it. From scene to scene, the film never slows an inch and is incredibly consistent in its timing and laughs. I laughed so hard so many times that I’m sure I missed a number of jokes slipped in there in the dynamite script, which must have left a lot of room, too, for improv — I dare anyone not to lose it when Franco and McBride argue passionately about the overabundance of a particular bodily fluid that Franco has noticed around the house.

In a way, “This is the End” represents everything that last year’s “The Watch,” also co-written by Rogan and Goldberg, should and could have been. Fortunately, now we have a thoroughly funny and successfully mediation on similar ideas, featuring one of the best comedy ensembles I’ve seen and a surprisingly effective and emotional penultimate sequence featuring a certain famous Whitney Houston song I won’t mention by name, but I’m sure you know what it is already.

★★★ 1/2 (out of 4)