Flashback: Entourage – The Cannes Kids

«Entourage» has long been described as the straight man’s answer to HBO’s urban princess fantasy «Sex and the City,» and superficially the description fits. From the sports cars and designer duds to the offhand sexist and homophobic one-liners to the endless array of curvy babes jockeying to bed Vince — or service one of his buddies as a consolation prize — the series is a fantasy of alpha male entitlement, and a weekly dip in filthy lucre only slightly less shameless than those cash baths that Scrooge McDuck used to take. It would be mere bubblegum wealth porn were it not for a singular, striking quality: its fascination with class. […]

[The] biography of another «Entourage» executive producer, Mark Wahlberg, dovetails more closely with that of the Chase brothers and their pals. Before he was a movie star and a rapper, he was a South Boston street kid who dropped out of school, sold drugs, and did jail time for beating a Vietnamese man. In his guest appearances on «Entourage,» Wahlberg is often seen on a golf course dressed like a pro-in-residence, speaking softly and hitting textbook-perfect drives. The image of this pumped-up ex-hood loping across a well-manicured green encapsulates the Chase posse’s fantasy endgame, and brings a great Groucho Marx line to weird new life. Who says you can’t belong to a club that wouldn’t have somebody like you as a member?

-- Filmkritiker Matt Zoller Seitz i Salon.