#a futile and stupid gesture (2018)

[domhnallgleesonhaven]

“A futile and stupid gesture”: the IMDB Studio at Sundance 2018 🧡

Photo Tommaso Boddi

[gleesonarchive]

The red carpet premiere for 'A Futile And Stupid Gesture' at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival

📷 Jason Merritt (24.01.2018)

[thefugitivesaint]

''National Lampoon'', Jan. 1973 (Quick Note: should you decide to venture into this issue to see what content it contains, you should be warned that the humor is solidly of its time and that there is a section in here that I find to be in poor taste called "Play Dead", ostensibly making fun of 'Playboy', where naked women assume various forms of death by suicide. Y'all, it's fucked up and it's even more fucked up when I imagine the possibility of some adolescent boy masturbating to those images. How many serial killers and sexual predators did this issue midwife into existence?*) This was the cover for 'National Lampoon's' "Death" issue and it became one of the most famous magazine covers of the 1970s. "Designed by the late Lampoon art director Michael Gross, the cover is widely regarded as one of the greatest not only in the history of the magazine but in the history of magazines, period. In 2005, the American Society of Magazine Editors named the Death cover one of the Top 40 Magazine Covers of the Last 40 Years. It ranked No. 7, right between the New Yorker's 9/11 cover on September 24, 2001 and the October 1966 cover of Esquire." From what I've been able to glean from some (what the podcast 'The Rewatchables' would call) half-assed internet research, people bought this issue in droves to save this dog's life. (I can only image what the internet reaction would look like to a magazine cover that had the message "If You Don't Buy this Magazine, We'll Kill This Dog.") The dog's name is Cheeseface and the crazy thing about this dog that is news to me as I type these words is that in 1976 an unknown person shot and killed Cheeseface in Vermont. "The identity and motivation of the assailant remain unknown." Someone labeled this shooting "the only assassination in celebrity animal history." I can't verify that claim. (I mean, who would put in the time to verify that claim? Some "true crime" podcast maybe. I hear there's some Reddit threads out there on this. I won't be reading them.)

Maybe all of this is covered in the 2018 film adaptation of Josh Karp's 2006 book, "A Futile and Stupid Gesture." I haven't see it yet.

*this sentence is a joke although the warning prior it and the sentiment about the section is sincere.

[postmodern-blues]

I’ve been thinking about it and honestly I would posit that A Futile and Stupid Gesture (2018) succeeded at what Saturday Night (2024) failed to pull off. That is, occupying the space between “comedy” and “biopic” without necessarily falling into the trappings of either one. Gesture isn’t perfect, but it seems at all times to know what it is, and exploits this meta-commentary to the fullest. Having Martin Mull play an imagined older version of Doug Kenney who comments upon the movie within the movie, playing fast and loose with facts but always in the service of comedy, always cutting with the sword of irony, a wink at the camera, seeming to say we know you’ve seen a biopic before, and Doug Kenney would have known it too. In the end, Gesture feels like a tribute, a comedy wedged into the somewhat austere round hole of “biopic”. By contrast, Saturday Night always feels like it’s trying too hard. Its self importance always comes before its subject matter, and the comedy is almost utterly lost as a result. It gets so lost trying to be a capital-F Film that it forgets what it’s about. Saturday Night has no wink, no tinge of satire, no indication that it understands its subject matter and is engaging with it. And that’s truly why Saturday Night fails, beyond the poor casting and character choices. The bottom line is: Saturday Night Live, the show, in its early 1970s form, would have kicked the shit out of Saturday Night, the film. It would have lampooned it to hell and back. And the film fundamentally does not understand this.

[dgleesonsource]

The Futile and Stupid Gesture Cast for Hollywood Reporter

[fyesnatashalyonne]

Show Dogs, A Futile and Stupid Gesture (2018)

[yuna-ya]

Photo: Jay L. Clendinn

[domhnall-tonal]

A Futile and Stupid Gesture cast at Sundance 2018

[42minutesin]

42 minutes into A Futile and Stupid Gesture (2018)

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[jadecoded]

A Futile and Stupid Gesture (2018) dir. David Wain

-What’s up with the Barry Goldwater fan club?

-They’re double-majoring in white collar crime and applied hubris.

[sesiondemadrugada]

[domhnallgleesonhaven]

“A futile and stupid gesture” premiere at Sundance 2018: Domhnall with Matt Walsh, Jon Daly, Emmy Rossum and Rick Glassman

[natasha-online]

A Futile and Stupid Gesture (2018)

[celerylapel]

I must say I really appreciated Joel’s powder blue pants in A Futile and Stupid Gesture.

[dgleesonsource]

Domhnall Gleeson at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival of A Futile and Stupid Gesture

[shagrathmovies]

A Futile and Stupid Gesture - 2018 - David Wain