Leah's Movie Lowdown
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Entertainment

Rated: R

        People like to test their endurance. Be it running a marathon, a child seeing how long they can stay awake, David Blaine or Chris Angel’s most recent stunts holding their breath or whatever, or even just people driving straight from somewhere to somewhere else without stopping; it seems people’s competitive nature, even with themselves, knows no bounds. The fact that there’s a whole book of endurance (and other) feats (the Guinness Book of World Records) is a testament to that!
 
        The endurance test I find I most often put myself and my husband through is inadvertent. I never mean to start such tests, but it happens more often than I like to admit. It starts out innocently enough: I find an obscure film that looks at least mildly interesting and bring it home. My hopes are always high for such films, because I’ve found so many gems that way. Moon, Running with Scissors, Mary and Max, Bernie, Robot and Frank, and countless others have provided me with hours of happiness and delight all because I took a chance on them.
 
        Sometimes though, what I choose to bring home ends up being just the test of endurance I mentioned before. A movie so awful that the choice becomes whether to suffer through it, hoping it will get better, or to give up as soon as possible. Unfortunately that was the case when I decided to put myself and my husband through the recent film Entertainment.
 
        I knew from the start this film would be a toss-up. The summary goes something like: “A middle-aged comedian, trying to get in touch with his daughter, performs at a number of small gigs.” I know that certainly doesn’t sound like gold, but my hope for the film was in that John C. Reilly and Michael Cera were in it, and that John C. Reilly was one of the writers. Apparently I need to work on what and who I base my cinematic hopes on.
 
        As I mentioned before, this film became the ultimate endurance test. It started out slow, but had a few pretty good (and very crude) jokes right away, which I’d hoped would redeem it. Unfortunately those few decent jokes were the only redeemable quality in this travesty of a film.
 
        To say that it dragged would be a vast understatement. It felt more like time standing still. As is the case in these situations, I had a decision to make: stick it out and hope for the best, or give up. I decided to stick it out, which is why it became an inadvertent endurance test. I just kept thinking that by the end there has to be some sort of point to the whole thing, but alas I was mistaken.
 
        I try not to get myself into these kinds of tests often, and usually I do give up after 20 minutes or so, but not this time. When it was finally over my husband and I were thinking the same thing: Entertainment is the crappy equivalent of A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence. Both films are boring beyond belief, seem to drag on forever and have no point to them whatsoever. Once we agreed that both films are equally terrible, my husband made me promise that from now on I’ll only put him through the first 15 minutes or so of a film before giving up and moving on. I can’t say that I’ll definitely keep that promise, but after wasting another hour and 43 minutes of my life that I’ll never get back, I’m certainly going to try.

        Entertainment is rated R, was directed by Rick Alverson and stars Greg Turkington and Tye Sheridan.  It’s available now on Blu Ray, DVD and streaming.