A Futile and Stupid Gesture
- warm
- brisk
- gentle
- intimate
Warm, kinetic, gentle comedy / drama, grounded in texture. Ambivalent, intimate, measured, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.
How every film is hand-scored →In a life full of triumph and failure, "National Lampoon" co-founder Doug Kenney built a comedy empire, molding pop culture in the 1970s.
Our read · A Futile and Stupid Gesture (2018) reads as a warm, kinetic, grounded comedy · drama entry — gentle in intensity, intimate in scope, measured in temperature, ambivalent in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.
More info & search links
The shape of A Futile and Stupid Gesture
What watching it is actually like.
“You want chaotic seventies comedy history with sharp meta wit.”
Skip it tonight — You're not up for drug excess and suicide in a comedy biopic tonight.
The reading.
Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.
Eight films that read most like this one.
Closeness in the twelve-axis space — how the film actually reads, not “people also liked.”
Discussion
What does your Movie DNA look like?
Rate a few films you've seen. We map your taste across the same twelve axes and find the films you'll actually want to watch tonight.
Calibrate yourself