Kicking and Screaming (1995)

Purely Joyful Movie!

Fresh and Exciting

Fantastic!

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

I get it. The hook of this film for most people is that it's supposedly "realistic" - the film is focused on a bunch of university graduates not knowing what to do with their lives. Bah, there isn't an ounce of realism in this film - at least not coming from the very made-up characters. Sure, we all feel like we don't know what we're doing at one point or another in our lives, we all have moments where we aren't sure if we're happy or living the best way that we can - it's not a great feeling. However, this movie hardly does that feeling justice because the characters are so unbelievably thick, annoying, uninspired, pretentious, and un- relatable. I couldn't care less what the characters were going through as spoiled, rich (YES, RICH), white kids terrified of working or entering the real world. I am sick of stories where characters like these have their lack of suffering played off as something deeply troublesome and worth anyone's attention at all. They are well off! They are intelligent, but choose to waste their education! Ultimately, they are just cry-babies. I couldn't relate to any of them, found them all so incredibly irksome and pretentious, and there was absolutely no point to any of their narratives. They are just terrible characters. This film could have been better if it had drastically different characters. They are not realistic, completely unlikable, and shallow. There's no character development, there's no reason to root for any of them, and in the end, I just couldn't believe I put up with them for the whole runtime. I do not recommend the film.

Feeling unprepared for the 'real world', four recent college graduates spend their time philosophising and avoiding taking action in this feature film debut from Noah Baumbach. The film features witty, memorable dialogue left, right and centre as one friend reckons "I've begun reminiscing events before they even occur", while another comments "I feel like I'm being poisoned" if a bartender at a bar does not drink with him, and the list goes on. There is also some quite pointed in how unprepared the foursome are for the real world despite their extensive education, unleashed into the world like a baby not wanting to be born, as the title suggests. None of the characters are, however, particularly likable for all of their witticisms and at times thought-provoking conversations. The foursome actually come across as more lazy than scared or ill-prepared for post-college life, and none of them have especially vibrant personalities either. The brightest moments in the film are, in fact, had by Elliott Gould as the far too open father of the foursome, sharing his experiences with using condoms at his age and finding love post-marriage separation, much to the disgust of his son. The film does tap into something interesting though as the foursome come to realise that they feel "pressure ... to remain friends" post-graduation. This more than anything else captures how microcosmic college life is often considered to be and how different the actual world is. It's a different, inevitable phase of life involving a big transition indeed comparable to birth.

i rented this movie because it was in the criterion collection section of the video rental store, and i was very disappointed. my boyfriend and i literally got up and walked around and did other stuff while it was on. to me it seemed like total undergraduate pseudo-intellectual masturbation on baumbach's part. we watched the special features to see what these guys had to say for themselves, there it was revealed that they went to VASSAR (where apparently everyone wears sport coats ALL THE TIME). maybe i just had a totally different college experience, but this movie was completely unrelatable except for the fact that everyone in college seems to think they're smarter than they actually are. in that sense, it was nostalgic in a bad way. i guess maybe the movie didn't appeal to me because i watched it in a vacuum (it's not 1995 anymore, i'm not 22 anymore, and i'd never heard of it). i'd say most of us would probably think the flaming lips' first album sucked if we didn't know about everything they'd done since then. so, all i can say is, renter beware. for me, this movie just never quite clicked. (also, we all know parker posey is hilarious, but totally diluted in this film.)

This movie is not great. It is an accurate portrayal, nothing more. All the characters are the clichéd prototypes of college life, all those who are interesting for the first part of school but get gradually more and more annoying as semesters plug on. And eventually, you no longer really want to spend time with them, because they are going no where and doing nothing, and haven't their entire "career" as students. Its just a bunch of high schoolers without boundaries or parents, and it isn't art, or even interesting once the initial humor and novelty wears off and the realization comes: this movie is the people I hate. Because they are pretentious posers unwilling to put forth the dedication necessary to become masters of any craft, much like the director at the time when he made this. Hopefully he will at some point, The Squid and the Whale is at least moving in the right direction.