349 Kicking and Screaming

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domino harvey
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Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm

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#151 Post by domino harvey » Wed Jul 13, 2011 10:45 pm

souvenir wrote:Did anyone else notice this in the booklet?
Baumbach also chose a new font for the credits and intertitles, which were digitally inserted into Criterion's master
I guess it's not a big deal, but the font used is very boring anyway so I wonder how bad the original could have been. Very nitpicky, but why alter something after a decade?
Look what popped up on Tumblr:

Image

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hearthesilence
Joined: Fri Mar 04, 2005 4:22 am
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Re: 349 Kicking and Screaming

#152 Post by hearthesilence » Sun Jul 01, 2012 1:23 am

They just screened this at BAM today and the post-screening Q&A was hilarious. It was Noah Baumbach, Chris Eigeman, Josh Hamilton, Oliver Berkman and Parker Posey, with Chuck Klosterman moderating, and it was very entertaining to see them play off each other.

Hopefully they'll post it somewhere since it was recorded, but it was especially nice for me because I didn't know anything about the film, so everything was fresh. The difficulties of getting funding, sure, but also dealing with Trimark and "Mrs. Tri-Mark." (I especially like Noah's explanation of Trimark's origins, including the name and logo.) Everyone dumping on Jason Wiles ("...halfway through the shoot! [changes tone] Very sweet man, though.") The last minute rewrites to get Eric Stoltz in the movie, including the book club scene that was virtually improvised. (Also funny to hear Eigeman's recollection of it - he wasn't involved, but he remembers they threw it together during lunch because it was the first time he had orange roughy, and man did it make an impression on him.)

AnamorphicWidescreen
Joined: Tue Apr 16, 2013 12:21 am

Re: 349 Kicking and Screaming

#153 Post by AnamorphicWidescreen » Mon Apr 29, 2013 9:38 am

I first saw Kicking and Screaming in 2010, and felt it was both clever, poignant, and realistic; It really captured the post-college uncertainty that many of us go through. I myself graduated in the mid-1990's, and this film was spot-on in depicting that time period; especially liked the inclusion of the great Freedy Johnston song Bad Reputation that played over the end credits, since I first became a fan of that song in college.

The Eric Stoltz character reminded me of a student I knew of in college; he had apparently been a full-time undergrad for 10+ years, kept changing his major, and didn't want to graduate.

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jbeall
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Re: 349 Kicking and Screaming

#154 Post by jbeall » Mon Jul 27, 2020 6:31 pm

Had been putting off watching this for years, and finally got around to it (Baumbach-athon prior to watching Marriage Story). Overall, I didn't like it, and I thought the first 50 minutes were godawful, but that the second half was somewhat better.

A number of people in this thread compared it (naturally) to Stillman's Metropolitan, which is one of my favorite films, and I think part of my issue with K&S is that it's a portrait of such an insular world, so unless you are/were in that world, it's hard to care much about these largely IMO unlikeable characters. (Chris Eigeman's Nick in Metropolitan is an ass, but a charming ass nonetheless. All of the characters in K&S were annoying AF, with the exception of Olivia d'Abo's, and she's reduced to a voice on the guys' answering machine or Grover's flashbacks.

And it would have helped to have an outsider to give more perspective. In Stillman's film, this is accomplished through the character of Tom Townsend, who's clearly seduced by debutante society, but is also kept at a distance by his class status. But in K&S, the outside world doesn't really enter until the second half, in the character of Kate ("I work here, I don't go here"), and Elliott Gould as Grover's father. However, they both disappear--Kate gets exiled from a conversation at the bar so Skippy can fight with the guys, and Grover doesn't return his father's calls. (Yes, Kate and Max are together, but we never really see events through her perspective.) And, I suppose there's Jane, who leaves that world, but is then ignored, just like Grover's father.

Now, I realize this is part of Baumbach's point: the characters are holding "the real world" at arm's length, but it also means that we're stuck watching a fundamentally solipsistic film, which makes me think that this film is more similar to Tiny Furniture (another film I disliked) than it is to Metropolitan.

beamish14
Joined: Fri May 18, 2018 3:07 pm

Re: 349 Kicking and Screaming

#155 Post by beamish14 » Tue Jul 28, 2020 11:02 am

I saw Whit Stillman at a screening of Metropolitan at the now-defunct Cinefamily in Los Angeles a number of years back.
He wouldn't mention the film by name, but he described seeing a movie at Sundance that made him incredibly livid because it, in
his opinion, completely lifted his style and what he tried to do in his debut. It was plainly obvious what he was referring to.

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domino harvey
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Re: 349 Kicking and Screaming

#156 Post by domino harvey » Tue Jul 28, 2020 1:30 pm

Young people are allowed to be articulate in more than one film

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