Entertainment

A terrible stand up comic performs a series of depressing gigs and travels around the Mojave desert. It's long, boring scenes of of cringe inducing awkwardness punctuated by intentionally wretched jokes. Scores 10 points for a few nice landscape shots of the wasteland that is the American Southwest, however, this is essentially the director masturbating on screen for 90 minutes, daring you to turn it off. Ironically, there is nothing approaching any type of "entertainment" in this feature.

This drains you. Maybe it's not as immediately provocative or exciting as The Comedy but then again, I didn't really get that movie until the second time I saw it anyway. Here, Alverson crafts an Americana wasteland, a vision of the entertainer's apocalypse, a series of dead ends and dead dreams. It's like Antonioni, filtered through irony and pop culture detritus. Neil Hamburger's exasperated "Why...?" becomes an honest, painful cry for help. Nobody ever really cares to listen.

This movie is about the shit taste of your idiot friends.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-HVCVhhwYw

Absolutely awful!

Five bags of popcorn and one big hug for Gregg Turkington.

Almost worth all the tedium for Turkington’s pronunciation of ‘legendary’.

This is one of those movies that works as a piece of art but falls absolutely flat on its face as a piece of entertainment. Depressing, pointless, but as I suspect the exact type of masturbatory film Alverson (who I'm not all that familiar with) wanted to make. Nothing remotely close to enjoyable but you have to give him credit for making a movie that conveys a singular emotion so effectively. Strangely beautiful in a way that I totally hate.

Wow, this was really upsetting. Even more purposefully vague and pointless than The Comedy, this is a dark hole of a film looking at what may be the most distraught man on earth. Turkington's Neil Hamburger moments in this film offer up some dark laughs, and it's especially fun to watch his stand-up descend more and more into awful crowd work and Dada nonsense (the closest we'll get to seeing Paul McCarthy in the movies).

painful and boring

Alverson most strongly succeeds in recalling Antonioni's ability to turn the environment into a mirror of its characters' psychology: Turkington's existential crisis is externalized through barren deserts, empty hotel rooms, and seedy bars, while splashes of rainbow-coloured lighting imbue his odyssey with a sense of the surreal. While some may contend the film is aimless, it is this single quality that highlights the very lost, very uncertain mindset of Turkington's sad clown figure.

The beginning of something but more than likely the end of everything. Hugely inspirational.

alverson is increasingly becoming the darkest, most provocative, tonally subversive american filmmaker working today. i will watch every single thing he ever makes, and you should too. i can't honestly say this worked for me though, and i'm really struggling to pinpoint why, but i have my battles with antonioni & s. coppola also and i reckon you guys have got pretty close with those comparisons, so that makes sense. i'll keep trying, anyhow, to either like it more or explain why i can't.

Second film by Rick Alverson I've seen. I appreciate what he does in terms of unique movies but I honestly think I will only like a very small few of them. The subject matter of this one interested me greatly which very much got me through the parts that were a bit too out there or surreal for my tastes.

A part of me was eager to see this, while another suspected that The Comedy was an incredible fluke that was unlikely to be repeated. It's more Quentin Dupieux than David Lynch, a series of hallucinatory sequences that sometimes work but mostly come across as unbearably pretentious. It's either an ambitious failure or a success that took me too far outside of my comfort zone; I have no idea which. Oh, and there's no meaningful difference between Neil Hamburger and Tony Clifton.

Hard to watch on multiple levels and practically daring you to hate it but does what it wants to do quite well. Basically the ultimate crying clown painting.

The pitch blackest comedy ever made? This film speaks entirely its own language. I can't think of another American film that even remotely resembles this one. Despite the presence of John C Reilly and Michael Cera (surely the creepiest he has ever been), you may walk away from this needing a long hot shower. Enthralling in its misery and despair.

"Instead of getting to something, he's trying to get away from something." http://illusionpodcast.blogspot.com/2016/01/episode-86-rick-alverson-arrives-2010.html

Makes THE COMEDY look like MARY POPPINS.

A landscape of misery.

This is bleak as hell

I guess what The Comedy did for mumblecore, this does for slow static master shot minimalism (or if the previous film was hipster Cassavetes, this would be hipster Antonioni, replete with L'Eclisse airplane rides and Zabriskie Point desert drives)? It feels vaguer and less purposeful than it's predecessor, but Alverson is still evolving into a formidable talent, and this is never less than really well done for what it is (which is to say it often plays like darker, abrasive Sofia Coppola).

i was led to believe michael cera was in this and instead all the beige made me suicidal.

Painful.

A little too abstract for me to enjoy. Cera cameo was beyond creepy lol

Am I a bad person for actually laughing at some of his jokes....?

It's not that these films despair of their existence; their despair is that they *must* exist, and it's this peculiar moral urgency that is rare and interesting. Eight years on I still feel THE COMEDY in my bones. This is more cerebral, almost an essay on artifice and its exhaustion (in both the used-up and worn-out senses), a queasy accumulation of questions around the ironical-antisocial impulses, less 'horseshoe theory' than snakes eating each other's ends. Or, footnotes to Andy Kaufman.