What a waste of my time!!!

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Sophsitication, wit, and charm abound in Noah Baumbach's directorial debut, Kicking and Screaming. It's a movie about life. It's a movie about love. It's a movie about growing up. It's not about growing up in the childhood sense, but growing up as in maturing into true adulthood, post schooling. Kicking and Screaming is an ensemble film about a group of friends who have just graduated college and are now forced to take the next steps in their lives as they emerge into the real world. Some of them cope better than others, but they all struggle to find meaning in a post scholastic existence where they aren't quite sure what will become of them. The film is a sort of stream of consciousness, almost rambling foray into adult life in which we must make something of ourselves. It is a smart film, it is a sophisticated film, but it's almost too smart for its own good.We learn a few key things from Kicking and Screaming. One. Noah Baumbach is a smart guy who knows how to write and has a keen sense of reality and what makes us human. Two. He may be too smart to make a coherent and entertaining story about human interaction and psychology. And three. Having so many things on one's plate is overwhelming and it causes a film to lose all sense of purpose. Baumbach tackles a lot of subjects with Kicking and Screaming, but they sort of all run into each other and get tangled up with one another that this film loses its direction starts to feel less and less like a film and more like an astute psychological study that lacks any real emotion.I feel like the characters in Kicking and Screaming aren't as much human as they are simply vehicles for Baumbach to exemplify offbeat quirks and complex relationships. He's created very diverse and very smart characters, but they don't connect on the emotional level that is necessary for this film to work. Baumbach obviously knows what he is doing with this film but he barely misses the mark, only by throwing in too many quirks and too many off kilter personality traits that turn these characters into test subjects instead of humans. That being said, I enjoyed this film for its intelligence and integrity, but the flaws are there and they hold back the film from being really great. Kicking and Screaming would make a great psychological research paper that detailed hypothetical situations and closely examined the human interaction in these situations but, as a film, it lacks the extra step that makes the art of cinema something more than a research paper can accomplish.You can't diss anybody in this film for what they accomplish. I have lots of respect for the keen awareness Noah Baumbach displays about life in this film. It is certainly a good film and it is smarter than the average dribble we see today, but it's far from perfect. It isn't something I would watch again, but I don't regret checking it out for its fascinating sophisticated qualities.

"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.

Kicking and Screaming has suffered many setbacks on it's way to being considered somewhat of a cult film. The fact that another film exists with it's same title starring the well-liked Will Ferrel does it's own damage, but still many complain about the content of the film itself.Starting first with the characters that the film depicts. Many complain about them being boring and uninspired. Why couldn't Noah Baumbach pick a group of interesting people and have things happen to them? Mainly because this film is a realistic depiction of types of people you meet and may befriend despite their faults. Baumbach paints each person carefully onto the page from obvious personal experience in college life. Typically, events take place that could happen to any of us; a break up, a divorce, someone moves away, someone stays when they shouldn't, we all make bad decisions which effect our lives in ways we don't realize until it's too late.A good example of the type of slight an artist such as Baumbach faces in his own work is a flashback scene which takes place in Jane and Grover's writing class. Jane makes a comment regarding Grover's piece regarding the hollow nature of his subjects and how they never discuss anything important and tend to discuss the little things with more anxiety than anything else. This rings true to many things I have personally heard regarding "Kicking and Screaming", that everyone could be interesting if they put all of the jokes and snide comments aside and talked about how they really felt. The problem with this is how often do those situations of pure honesty and intimacy arise in the common person's life? It is rare to be able to pull your deepest feelings out for all of your friends to see in every conversation you have, and it usually comes out in a fight or when a situation is deteriorating - such examples are Skippy and Miami/Max and Skippy, which are some of the most honest moments in the film combated with the development of the persons themselves throughout the film.Baumbach tends to overkill the stress on aspiring (as well as accomplished) writers in his best-drawn films, which are this and "The Squid & The Whale. Where as the two parents on the edge of divorce in the latter film are writers, in Kicking and Screaming, the two young people in the outs of their love are aspiring writers and the main's parents are going through divorce. You can see many pieces of Baumbach's latter work in Kicking and Screaming, as he went back to the basics with The Squid & The Whale after suffering many disappointments in the 1990's.It is clear that Baumbach is a different type of film maker than his auteur counterparts such as Wes Anderson. His films feel and look realistic, rather than coming from another world inspired by the many worlds within our own. He has an interesting voice, and a knack for dialog. Kicking and Screaming is a piece of romantic comedy history, and more people should go out of their way to watch it with perspective and an open mind, rather than looking at the faults in the subjects which we all have ourselves.

I first saw this movie right after it came out...I was in high school and didn't get it, not the humor or dialog or tone or why it would one day become one of my favorite movies. while not much happens in the movie (relationships change, some people grow up and some regret past decisions), it's the individual scenes that make it so successful. there's so much going on in each conversation, and even in background conversations, that even after perhaps 10 viewings I still don't think I've caught it all. Someone wrote that they hated the characters in this movie because they were unmotivated and represented everything he despised in people...fair enough, I suppose, but for the rest of us who graduated from college without much of an idea about what we wanted to do, other than 'something, someday,' this movie's a real pleasure. So crack a 40, stop not working on that unfinished novel, and check out this film.