jamariana 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.

SnoopyStyle 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.

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.

patrickjnorton 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.