En route to meet his estranged daughter and attempting to revive his dwindling career, a broken, aging comedian plays a string of dead-end shows in the Mojave desert.
This is one of those in-your-face, angry, confrontational movies. It wasn't just a chore to sit through, it was more like a homework assignment given to you by a teacher who hates your guts.
Though often slowly paced, Entertainment reveals itself as a remarkably dense, if not difficult film that rewards patience and a willingness to step into the anti-social mind.
The Comedian is an ugly man with an ugly soul, and an ugly sense of comedy that at one point literally includes making fart noises for 90 full seconds as he pretends to gun down his silent audience with a soccer trophy.
Like Hamburger's meta-hacky comedy routine, the film confronts and challenges in order to produce something increasingly rare in American cinema: an active, engaged experience.
There's a chic emptiness to "Entertainment," undoubtedly, and anti-comedy constructs that may rub the wrong way, but there's also a spiky intelligence at work too, one that engages through the artifice of disengagement and the illusion of "performance."
