Igby Goes Down (2002)

Wonderful character development!

the audience applauded

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

I saw the A-list actors in this and thought wow, this has got to be an amazing film! Wrong, wrong, wrong. I'm not sure what Jeff Goldblum, Susan Sarandon, Claire Danes, Amanda Peet, Ryan Phillippe, were thinking when they did this one. I saw a bratty, whiny, rich teen who constantly complained about everything, when he had nothing to complain about. (Kieran Culkan) And his mother (Susan Sarandon)? Neurotic, eccentric, drunken, druggie doesn't even come close to describing his crazy-ass mother. I could go on and on about these annoying characters with nothing redeemable them, but that would "spoil" this movie. It was so choppy. A scene would be thrown in, like the crazy-ass mother sitting on the maid's head, with no intro...why was she sitting on the maid's head? The only thing good about this movie is the New York City scenery. If you want to see a bunch of rich, whiny people on drugs, all cheating on each other and basically being a**holes, then this is your movie. Just know that you will waste 98 minutes of your life. Minutes that you will never be able to get back.

I really love these weird independent comedies, that you have to be somewhat intelligent to understand. They are so much different from all the repetitive crap that we are subjected to over and over again. This is the story of a kid from a privileged family who just doesn't fit in. He sees the hypocrisy of it all and decides to run away to NYC, where he meets some unique characters that you'd only find in New York. The middle Culkin brother, Kieran, stars and was incredible. Simply put, sometimes the story is good, but the movie is made by its star, and Culkin gives one of the best performances I've seen in a film like this. Igby Goes Down has a ton of stars, it's a clever story, and you really connect to the characters. I really enjoyed this film, but be warned, it's not for everybody. I honestly believe when it comes to this type of film, you need a personality that relates to some aspect of the film. Without that connection, you might not get as much out of this film as others did.

I didn't entirely dislike this movie, but watching it after so recently rereading The Catcher in the Rye was just making me twitch. I read an IMDb user's review earlier which said something like "Igby is the modern-day Holden Caufield." That's the praise the creators of this film were looking for, I'm sure, but it's also far too on the nose. I'll refrain from including spoilers, but I will say that right from the beginning I could parallel scenes in the movie, pretty much exactly, to scenes from Catcher. Even Igby's dialogue mirrors Holden's. He repeats phrases like "I think you're great, I really do" and "that tortures me". He drinks and chain smokes. I could go on.Let's be clear here: Igby Goes Down doesn't simply pay homage to J.D. Salinger's classic novel. It doesn't stand on its own, which means it also doesn't honor its roots. It felt almost like they wanted to make a film adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye, couldn't get the rights, and said "forget it then; we'll come up with something ourselves".The mimetic protagonist made the story as a whole hard for me to swallow, but to be fair, there are plenty of unique characters in Igby Goes Down. The premise is obviously contrived, but it still makes for an okay story. If you have never read Catcher, and therefore aren't forced to draw comparisons, you will probably enjoy this movie quite a bit more than I did.

After seeing this movie, by total accident with a friend of mine, and we were literally BLOWN AWAY by it, i have to say that i thought of Zach Braff's "Garden State" and thinking - these are the two movies that define our generation. These are the films that represent the smart people/youths of today's social overview. One of the normal kid and the other of he slightly intellectual, rebellious type, but ultimately, these are the two films that define the post grunge generation (referred to as "Generation Y").These two movies are what "My Own Private Idaho", "Drugstore Cowboy", "Fight Club", "Singles", "Se7en", "Arizona Dream" and many more were to the 90's - showing most importantly that the "youths of today" aren't all hopeless. There are still those smart kids. Thank god.Oh, and by the way - post-grunge-smart kids still worship Soundgarden, Nirvana, Alice In Chains and all 90's music. Grunge ain't dead. It's a state of mind.