zetes Armond White was right! Noah Baumbach's mother should have had him aborted! Nah, that's more than a little too harsh, but his debut film isn't very good. It shows a bit of promise, since some of the dialogue is okay here, but, overall, this is a talky, indie bore. A bunch of college students graduate but don't know where to go from there. Most of them just hang around campus, drinking and smoking and trying to bed students. The main story surrounds Josh Hamilton and his girlfriend, Olivia d'Abo, who doesn't even tell Hamilton she's going to Prague after graduation. This story is never at all compelling because Hamilton is such an unlikeable little douchebag. D'Abo probably isn't much better, but she's so attractive you can't want her to hang around Hamilton. Eric Stolz and Parker Posey are the most famous actors in the cast. Chris Eigeman has little to do but remind us how much better a director Whit Stillman is. Baumbach made a couple of other indie failures before hitting upon The Squid and the Whale. That and his subsequent two films, Margot at the Wedding and Greenberg, have been very good, so he did finally find his footing.

jzappa 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.

bababear This wasn't a bad movie. There's some great dialogue, very fine young actors, and watching this I could see the talent that would mature ten years later in THE SQUID AND THE WHALE.Unfortunately, the characters are more irritating than involving. After a while I wanted to slap them and tell them, to quote Cher's great line in MOONSTRUCK, "Snap out of it!" It seems as if the main reason Baumbach has so many of his characters smoke is the need to remind us that this isn't set at a preschool.Maybe college was a more enchanted place in 1995 than it was when my wife and I graduated in 1969. We, and everyone else we were in school with, wanted the school business to end- I started kindergarten in 1951, so I'd had a buttload of schooling- so we could get that magic piece of paper, get jobs, and move on with our lives.We graduated at 10 AM on a Saturday Labor Day weekend, got married in her parents' living room at 2 PM, and reported to our teaching jobs in a town we'd never even visited, 400 miles away, at 9 AM on Tuesday.Life is to be lived, not talked about and over-analyzed.The saddest thing is that so many of these very promising young actors haven't had the success the deserve in later years. Only Parker Posey has really done well in mainstream films, although the others have worked steadily in small films.

JohnMurdochDubai "Kicking and Screaming" was Noah Baumach's first film. He wrote and directed it at age 25, which is a real accomplishment because the film's very compelling. Riding the wave of the independent cinema in US in the early 90s, Baumbach created a tragicomedy of a tightly-wound group of friends grappling with the reality of life after graduation. Basically, their anxiety is borne out of accepting the responsibility of, finally, you know, growing up and joining the adult-force. As actor Chris Egieman (the articulate Max in the film) has pointed out in a recent interview, these guys are forced to accept that they must now take their lives seriously. Decisions and choices are optional no longer. The question of 'what next?' would need to be answered now. Bummer, right? Of course these early-20 white kids bicker and groan; someone of them delay the inevitable and slack around on the college campus, and at least one of them returns to school and retakes the same classes just so that "he can be a student again." The guys amuse themselves on dreary afternoons: they ask each other if they beat off; they do each others' girlfriends; they crowd around the beer bottles and cigarettes to play trivia games ("Name all 7 Jason Voorhees movies"). Mostly, they just hang out. And they talk; a lot. They philosophise the little things, every little small inconsequential detail that makes up their special universe.Baumbach has confessed of his love for improv comedy, and he imbues the comedy of the film with some of that. Not all of it works (the Cookie Man scene is a little cringe-inducing) but it's cute at least. But the dialogue is pointed, always witty and full of incisive detail. Although Baumbach and regular collaborator Wes Andresen have been compared with the great JD Salinger, I think Richard Linklater could use some love too."Kicking and Screaming" will appeal to a certain type of audience: the pseudo-intellectuals who take, say, their hobbies a bit too seriously. These hobbies or interests could be movies or even crossword puzzles. But this is how the film's characters want to spend their days. They want the world, their parents and their lovers to understand that they are normal for thinking that life before jobs or marriage or kids is as good as it gets. It will make the viewer feel 'OK' about belonging to a certain tribe, a community of like-minded individuals that others accuse, "you all speak the same way." This film implies that it's not lame even if the successful moneymaking pricks on the outside may snigger and chuckle. "Kicking and Screaming" is a wonderful, uplifting, funny, poignant film about the impending doom of adulthood.