Synopsis
A Futile and Stupid Gesture (2018) is a Netflix comedy-drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by David Wain and starring Will Forte as Doug Kenney — the co-founder of National Lampoon who helped rewrite what American comedy was allowed to do. Domhnall Gleeson plays his longtime partner Henry Beard.
Kenney and Beard launched the magazine from Harvard in the late 1960s, and within a few years National Lampoon was outselling almost every competitor on newsstands. Kenney then co-wrote Animal House (1978) and Vacation — two films that built careers for an entire generation of comedians. He died at 33 in Hawaii. The film covers all of it without flinching from the self-destruction running alongside every success.
Wain shoots the biopic in the register of the magazine itself: fourth-wall breaks, a narrator who keeps interrupting the story, genre conventions flagged and then ignored. It is messier and more alive than a standard rise-and-fall portrait. Stream A Futile and Stupid Gesture (2018) online on iFILM.
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