16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It's no "St. Elmo's Fire", May 26, 2003
And thank God. I can't add much more to what others have already said. It's a great film. Warm, funny, touching. Great performances, great writing. I particularly like the scene with Chris Eigeman in the bar, saying, "Look at these [bleeping] people." And the ending is a masterstroke. Heartbreaking, but perhaps that's the point: youth will go and in the end the best you may have is a wonderful, nostalgic memory.
They tried to make a film addressing post-graduate angst when I was in college. It was called "St. Elmo's Fire" and it was truly one of the worst things ever put on screen. Max, look at Demi Moore, Judd Nelson and Emilio Estevez and ponder how such dark forces could gather together and create such a pretentious, self indulgent mess of a movie and get people to see it. There were actually a couple of people I went to school with that took that movie quite seriously; formed dialogues over it, etc. The way to handle them was to nod as if you took them seriously and get them to continue to embarrass themselves.
The point is, while the theme or idea may not be anything new, what matters is the writing, the performances and the presentation. "Kicking and Screaming" is honest and human while "St. Elmo's" was (at that time) star-studded, cynical and pandering and ultimately very stupid.
I recommend people buy a copy of "Kicking and Screaming". Because it is one of the great films of the 90's that hardly anyone saw and it will probably be difficult to find it stocked in video stores after 2004.
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Joyous Good Time!, June 13, 2004
Few movies do I enjoy more than Kicking and Screaming. I own a copy and watch it every six months or so. It always makes me laugh but it also succeeds in making the viewer experience sincere empathy and sympathy for its characters. Anyone who went to college in the nineties can relate to these individuals at some level. Furthermore, just in case you're wondering, its not a Whit Stillman film but many of the same actors are used such as Chris Eigeman. Here we have a group of friends who have to be dragged kicking and screaming into adulthood. All of them appear to be deflated by their graduations from college. "What do we do now?" is their central question. By the end, nearly everybody discovers some kind of direction in which to take their lives.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
best movie i've seen in a long time, May 7, 2005
PLEASE, please, put this movie out on dvd! it's been said so many times before, but i can not stress how worthy and worthwhile this movie is, and how totally deserving it is of a dvd release. i hope somebody with some authority reads these reviews and realizes that they are idiots for not having this excellent movie out on dvd already.
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