Very disappointing...

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Instant Favorite.

Captivating movie !

A group of college friends graduate. Jane (Olivia d'Abo) tells her boyfriend Grover (Josh Hamilton) that she moving to Prague to study rather than joining him in Brooklyn. Chet (Eric Stoltz) has been in school for 10 years. Three months later, Otis (Carlos Jacott)'s worst fear comes true and he moving to Milwaukee. Grover is staying with Max (Chris Eigeman) who is just as aimless but then Otis returns having changed his mind. Clueless Skippy (Jason Wiles) is moving in with Miami (Parker Posey).These people are a little too aimless to be completely compelling. There are some fun dialog. The friendships are interesting. They just need something bigger to deal with. Even artificially, it needs something central to hold these characters together. I keep wondering why these guys don't go off on their own. They need to deal with something or anything. For so many character being so aimless but being aimless together, it would make more sense that this is one night or a few days instead of months and months. Let them be aimless after the graduation party but they have to leave sometimes. Apparently not.

Like the subsequent work of Noah Baumbach, there's ample wittiness on the face of this debut, but the grief of lethargy prevails, piercing and lucid. Having spent six years at a stunningly insulated school, I could and still can see ample grounds to relate to the four despairing rapscallions of this brittle slice of life, who graduate from college then go on to spend the next several months on or around campus, doing things as trivial as possible.Josh Hamilton, seen recently in Louis C.K.'s show playing an obnoxious stoner, here expecting to live in Brooklyn with girlfriend Olivia d'Abo, is so agape and livid when she takes a scholarship to Prague that he won't return any of her calls and can only wonder about their past in five deliberately placed scenes, each signaled by a black-and-white snap of her. Otis finds himself unable to fly to grad school in Milwaukee, just one time zone away, and returns to living with his mother. Max, who prefers marking broken glass as such on the floor over sweeping it up, finds nothing better to do than harass Otis, do crosswords and have sex with Parker Posey Any better suggestions? Didn't think so. And Skippy, Posey's actual boyfriend, actually returns to school but can't bring himself to do any of the work. As Miami and Kate, a 16-year-old to whom Max turns next, both highlight on individual occasions that this foursome talks and acts alike, making up dumb quizzes while drinking lots of scotch and beer and overall embracing something similar to a four-man frat house.The synchronicity of drollness and disturbance has grown even more obvious in Baumbach's work since this folksy film. The muttered witticisms that sound designed to restrain, suspend or else displace various cries and screams ultimately seizes the limelight in the great The Squid and the Whale, already unmistakably standing by in his first feature. The polished teasing and shattered nerves of teenagers and young adults appear too close to call, so that clamming up and sounding off, the two things that Baumbach's four male postgraduates do so nimbly, are little more than a traditionalist East Coast upper-class guise of kicking and screaming, meant to bottle up the discharge.The dangers of being refined beyond one's power to handle it are a persistent Baumbach predicament. In the first comprehensive interchange of this Generation X relic, Hamilton exemplifies this pattern by attempting to hold forth expertly about Prague when all he can do is make cursory, lighthearted references to Kundera and Kafka. And in the even more self-critical Squid and the Whale, Jesse Eisenberg's academic pretense is even more prominent, because, like one of these four, he frequently hasn't read the books he pontificates about.Stoltz appears in this filmed chain of thought as a long-standing philosophy major and bartender who's stayed on campus for a decade, by some means a more forward-looking instance of the trouble shaping the four principals but in other ways more practical and focused, since by now he's a father and gladly acknowledges the distinctiveness of being a career student as something more than an evasive standing. Stoltz brings to the movie a sort of slack, theoretical insight that's greatly needed by the foursome. All the women, including, apparently, Hamilton's unseen mother, and even the teenage Kate, seem more even-tempered than the guys, notwithstanding that d'Abo's in psychoanalysis and compulsively plays with her retainer.Baumbach is often footnoted by Wes Anderson. But if Anderson in his prime, as in 1998's Rushmore, has the high-brow egalitarian sharpness of an Ernst Lubitsch, Baumbach's most significant impact is the more lax and investigational Jean Renoir. His predilection for long takes, where he occasionally lets his camera meander while following his actors from a distance, is already remarkably palpable in the very first shot of this dry celluloid soliloquy. Even more pertinent, his strong suits as a director are associated with an ability to entice unforeseen and superb things from his actors, which is no less plain in the final shot. It's a catch-unawares kind of moment suggesting some impression of hopefulness, albeit Baumbach is amply restrained in keeping it in the past.

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.

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.