ReaderKenka Let's be realistic.

CommentsXp Best movie ever!

SeeQuant Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

bababear This wasn't a bad movie. There's some great dialogue, very fine young actors, and watching this I could see the talent that would mature ten years later in THE SQUID AND THE WHALE.Unfortunately, the characters are more irritating than involving. After a while I wanted to slap them and tell them, to quote Cher's great line in MOONSTRUCK, "Snap out of it!" It seems as if the main reason Baumbach has so many of his characters smoke is the need to remind us that this isn't set at a preschool.Maybe college was a more enchanted place in 1995 than it was when my wife and I graduated in 1969. We, and everyone else we were in school with, wanted the school business to end- I started kindergarten in 1951, so I'd had a buttload of schooling- so we could get that magic piece of paper, get jobs, and move on with our lives.We graduated at 10 AM on a Saturday Labor Day weekend, got married in her parents' living room at 2 PM, and reported to our teaching jobs in a town we'd never even visited, 400 miles away, at 9 AM on Tuesday.Life is to be lived, not talked about and over-analyzed.The saddest thing is that so many of these very promising young actors haven't had the success the deserve in later years. Only Parker Posey has really done well in mainstream films, although the others have worked steadily in small films.

Alan P "Kicking and Screaming" shows a considerable degree of self-awareness for a film about college graduation directed by a 25-year-old, but it is still an awkward, self-conscious film that is no more confident than its insecure characters. It was fortunate that in 1995, there were producers out there who believed a movie about depressed upper-middle class white boys had commercial potential, because those producers launched the career of Noah Baumbach, who would go on to make superior films in the next decade. As in his later films, Baumbach seems to take pity on pretentious and tremendously insecure characters while simultaneously taking delight in exposing their weaknesses to the world. But in "Kicking and Screaming," unlike, say, "The Squid and the Whale," Baumbach seems to identify just a little too closely with his young characters and seems to believe that they are less obnoxious than they are. "Kicking and Screaming"'s greatest strength and weakness is how well it captures an aspect of growing up not often captured on film: the resistance to change. Many films deal with characters who gradually change as they come of age, but "Kicking and Screaming" deals with characters who desire on some level to move on past their current selves but are hesitant to do anything about that desire. This also hurts the film, however, since very little changes from beginning to end, and when characters do change at all, they change less than they (or the film) believe. The stagnation would not be a problem if the film were a comedy, but, while the film is full of quirky characters and occasionally funny jokes, it deals with the dullness and depression too honestly to really work as a comedy. When wealthy Max, perhaps the most stagnant of all the characters, puts a "broken glass" sign over a pile of shattered glass rather than cleaning it up, it is good for a laugh, but as the film goes on, we get to know Max well enough that it almost stops being funny. "Kicking and Screaming" is certainly worth seeing for any fans of college-related movies and should probably be required viewing for anyone in their junior or senior years, since it could work as an effective warning against the perils that await graduates without plans. But the film, like its characters, has both too much self-consciousness and too little self-awareness to achieve the levels of comedic or dramatic potential that it hints at.

ametaphysicalshark "Kicking and Screaming" really depressed me. I'm not sure what I was expecting, having seen only "The Life Aquatic" as an example of notable writer-director Noah Baumbach's work (and of course that film was written with Wes Anderson, and directed by Anderson, so I wasn't sure how much of it was Baumbach's), but nothing I read specifically about "Kicking and Screaming" lead me to expect what I got: one of the most devastating films ever made, and one which while not on par with stuff like "The Graduate" formally, remains one of the very best 'where-is-my-life-going-after-college' movies ever made. It also boasts perhaps the smartest use of flashbacks in a recent American film.I was thinking this would be sort of like a Wes Anderson film but it's really more what Kevin Smith would have written circa 1994-1997 if his parents were critical thinkers instead of lower-middle-class Catholics, and if he'd been writing about students and recent college grads instead of deadbeats lounging about convenience stores and malls and comics writers involved in bizarre love triangles. Perhaps that's selling this short because as much as I am drawn to some of Smith's work he could never come close to capturing the sort of melancholy Baumbach absolutely nails with this film.The film isn't really brilliant, mostly because it is really plot-less (which wouldn't be a problem usually but read on) and especially since outside of Eric Stoltz's philosophizing bartender I found nothing particularly interesting about any of the supporting cast. The main emotional pull for me was with Grover (Josh Hamilton) and Jane (Olivia d'Abo)'s story. Jane is pretty much the ideal realization of all the odd, quirky, lovely, bizarre, pretentious, disaffected, writers I had crushes on in university and even before and after that time, and the few I was fortunate enough to date. Ideal really because she's a deeply flawed character. Outside of this core story "Kicking and Screaming" relies primarily on Baumbach's witty banter. The trouble is that I found few of the characters to be all that interesting outside of Grover, Jane, and Chet.Baumbach's direction initially seems primitive but every so often he surprises with a genuinely sophisticated shot. I assume he got better as he went on and that stuff like "The Squid and the Whale" is entirely sophisticated but he already showed a lot of promise with this film. While again I didn't find the film perfect, I connected so much with Grover and with the place in their lives that all these people are that I found the film genuinely devastating at time. When focusing on Jane and Grover it is absolutely phenomenal, and the final scene, I admit, almost made me cry.

herr_sean_tuttle OK, granted, I thought it a well done film. I'm not going to dispute any of that. I'm sure there are a million reasons why. I especially liked the way the flashbacks were done. . .HOWEVER being a college student about to graduate, being as I am--sick of pseudo-intellectual BS and academia in f-ing general--I found it incredibly depressing. Towards the end it got better for me, when I was yelling "just go to Prague you moron!" Seriously though, interesting, yes. But I wouldn't say judge your friends based upon whether or not they like this film. Certainly it's good--but I'd say I'm glad I now own this movie, yet I doubt I'll ever want to watch it again. Perhaps it hit too home for me. Perhaps I just hate all the brown suits. Perhaps I just can't stand they way they all talk the same! Yeah, I know, this is supposed to be the critique or humor or whatever. . . STILL, just made me groan and groan and groan. . .