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Movies & TV

Weird Science: Will Neil Hamburger be a Borat or a Ladies Man?

ENTERTAINMENT written and directed by Rick Alverson, with Gregg Turkington, Amy Seimetz, Tye Sheridan and John C. Reilly. A VSC release. 110 minutes. Opens Friday (November 13). See listings.


Gregg Turkington has spent 20 years fighting off a Neil Hamburger movie.

“When people approached me, they always saw it as a Borat type of character,” he says about the offers to build a movie around the venal stand-up comic he’s been playing since the early 90s.

“I had people say, ‘Let’s go on the road, and you can be Neil Hamburger and go into truck stops and diners and we’ll just film what happens.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, nothing’s gonna happen. You’re just gonna see a depressed man ordering coffee.'”

That idea is what makes Rick Alverson’s Entertainment so compelling. It’s a refutation of every other movie of its kind Entertainment isn’t a comedy – it’s a sort of dark-night-of-the-soul drama built around the worst possible version of the Hamburger character.

I have no idea whether audiences will embrace Entertainment or run screaming from the theatre, but in the category of movies spun out of existing characters, it’s something special.

More often than not, when a beloved sketch character gets a chance at a feature, the result is just a longer version of the sketch everyone loves, giving us plenty of time to find that what works for nine minutes usually becomes grating and exhausting at 90. (I’m looking at you, Mr. Bean.) 

Sometimes, though, the extra length enables a concept to realize its full potential. Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan is both hysterically funny and revelatory documentary work, turning Baron Cohen’s satirical lens on the whole of the United States. The first Wayne’s World movie found a warmth and sweetness in Mike Myers’s suburban metalhead that Myers has struggled to recapture ever since. 

I’ll go to the wall for the MacGruber movie as a perfect replication of the overheated 80s action cheese Will Forte and Jorma Taccone so clearly love, made even funnier by the weird, desperate anxiety of Forte’s dipshit superspy. 

This is not to validate Lorne Michaels’s strategy of getting a movie deal for every half-successful SNL character. For every MacGruber there’s a Superstar, a Coneheads or a Ladies Man. But when it worked, it worked. Who would have thought John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd’s vanity soul act could power a studio blockbuster in 1980?

I’m not comparing Entertainment to The Blues Brothers, mind you. Alverson and Turkington have something very different in mind. But that’s what’s so great about it: like Neil Hamburger himself, it’s going to do what it wants to do with the time allotted, and it doesn’t give a crap if you like it.

See our review of Entertainment.

normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner

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