KICKING AND SCREAMING (59)

Directed by: Noah Baumbach (1995)

Starring: Josh Hamilton, Chris Eigeman, Parker Posey, Eric Stoltz

The Pitch: A quartet of twentysomethings are dragged - as per the title - from extended adolescence into the beginnings of adulthood.

Theo Sez: At its best - as in its beaut of an ending - a film that elevates Gen-X slackerdom into a hopeless, yearning kind of shaggy-dog romanticism : inertia as a 90s equivalent to the Great Gatsby's all-night parties, full of crushed longings and a half-formed sadness - only substituting comedy for tragedy. At its less exalted, which is most of the time, four guys and a couple of girls yacking away in a variable series of satirical bull-sessions, some of it funny (especially when it features the priceless Eigeman), much of it sophomoric and just slightly "off". The inadvisability of going to college parties a few months after graduation is mentioned at one point - you just seem out of place, neither one thing nor the other - and the whole film feels a bit like that, far enough from its milieu to try for satire yet too close to separate the really sharp observation from the you-had-to-have-been-there stuff : you'd swear on a stack of Bibles that it's autobiographical, which is partly the problem (and it's worth remembering that director Baumbach is in his twenties - whereas Barry Levinson made DINER when he was almost 40). Still pretty special, the kind of film where everyone'll have a Favourite Moment even if nothing else really worked for them. My personal choice : an airline clerk fiddles ever-so-slightly with a model airplane on her desk, reminding our hero of planes = flying = other places = Prague = his ex-girlfriend (currently in that city), and causing him to shuffle out of frame with a poleaxed expression on his face, mumbling "I wish I hadn't noticed that..."