Kicking and Screaming (1995) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

A group of college pals can't figure out what to do with their lives when they graduate. After four years of hanging out with their friends, discussing the philosophy of life, and making fun of the less sophisticated, they are unwilling to leave their warm womb to enter the cold world. So they try to cope and they talk, and talk and talk ...

I have often said that Quentin Tarantino is the most-imitated man in the past decade or so, but I may be wrong. If I give some thought to it, I think I can make a better case for Jerry Seinfeld. In fact, even Tarantino himself is something of a Seinfeld impersonator. What I mean is that Seinfeld seems to have elevated the art of talking about nothing - musing about Superman or airline peanuts - into a valid art form. Tarantino himself uses this tactic in Pulp Fiction, in a context which makes it seem fresh, since it is not Jerry and his nerdy pals but two hit men who are babbling about hamburgers.

Tarantino wasn't the only guy who was thinking in 1994 that interesting small talk could make for good cinema. Pulp Fiction came out the same time as Kevin Smith's Clerks and Whit Stillman's Barcelona. Clerks and Barcelona are basically long Seinfeld episodes, films about nothing, with bright and discontented but trivial people babbling along so tirelessly and so insignificantly that Eric Rohmer would be tempted to "shush" them.  Kicking and Screaming came one year after those three. Although Kicking and Screaming was written by Noah Brumbach, a man 17 years younger than Whit Stillman, it seems to me to have about the same characters as Barcelona which, in turn, also seems to have the same characters as Stillman's The Last Days of Disco (1998) and Brumbach's Highball (1997).  If I'm not mistaken, these four movies even have some of the same actors playing the same characters, albeit with different names. I think one of the actors plays the same character (more or less) in all four films!

Of course it doesn't really matter which actor plays which character because they all sound alike. Brumbach even addresses that directly by having two different people comment "you guys all talk alike." If you stop and think about it, that's a pretty clever screenwriting trick. It sort of co-opts the film critics.

Of course, this type of film doesn't really derive its appeal from sharp character differentiation or complex plotting. The value of dialogue-based movies like this resides in their ability to make the small talk interesting and fun to listen to. After all, we know the talk isn't going to be profound, so it had better be witty and evocative. I'd say that Kicking and Screaming is moderately successful. A few lines are brilliant. One character won't leave the house with his friends until he sees if a TV character can remove a stain. His friends are amazed to see that he's watching not a murder mystery, but a detergent commercial. That shows you the general level of the humor.

Despite its selection by The Criterion Collection and some sincere admirers, Kicking is rated a weak C+ by Yahoo voters. (That's quite low on their softball scale. Deuce Bigalow is a B-.) It's rated a solid but uninspiring 6.7 at IMDb, and the IMDb top voters score it even lower than that. People outside the USA score it lowest of all at IMDb - below 6.0, which is in "B" movie territory. In other words, it is a film which speaks directly only to those who come from a certain time and place. It's one of those American-generation-specific films, like Carnal Knowledge. If you are an American who graduated from college in the early 90s or thereabouts, you may well find that the film encapsulates your experiences and speaks to you directly. The farther you get from that demographic group, the more the film will seem like a bunch of lightweight babbling from the Future Losers of America.