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.

I liked The Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale but Kicking and Screaming is so inferior to that. It's obvious that this film is his first effort.It is so cliché and slow moving that it is unbearable to watch. It is like the poor man's version of St. Elmo's Fire. I imagine Noah watched St. Elmo's Fire and tried to copy it scene by scene to create an updated version for the 1990's. For the most part, the acting is good and convincing.Although I only paid a few bucks to rent it on Comcast I felt totally ripped off. The only good thing I can say is that it encouraged me (and probably many others) that they too can easily sell their tired,uninspired scripts as well!!

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.

"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.