Kicking and Screaming

Plot synopsis:
Phil Weston (Will Ferrell), is an average person who had to endure his father Buck Weston's (Robert Duvall) over-competitiveness throughout his childhood, an upbringing which has left permanent mental scars. Now middle-aged and married, with a young son named Sam, Phil runs a small vitamin store, while Buck operates a local chain of sports stores.
Buck is coach of the Gladiators, the most successful little-league soccer team in the district. Sam is on Buck's soccer team, but to his dad's annoyance his grandfather keeps him on the bench, a humiliation he also visited upon his son decades prior. Buck eventually transfers Sam to the Tigers, the league's worst team.
At Sam's first game with his new team their coach is absent. Rather than forfeit, Phil decides to coach the team, a position he takes up permanently. However, despite Phil's best efforts the team does not seem to improve. In desperation Phil recruits Mike Ditka (played by himself), who is Buck's neighbor and hated enemy. Enticed by the opportunity to beat Buck, Ditka accepts the position. Despite grueling training, the team continues to lose.
Ditka introduces Phil to two exceptionally talented Italian boys working in a local butcher's shop. Phil succeeds in gaining their Uncle's permission for them to play for the Tigers. They have an immediate impact, scoring repeatedly. The resulting winning streak makes them serious contenders in the league. After finally winning a couple of games and Phil said that his team was going to go to the finals, Phil and Buck make a bet, if the Gladiators win then Phil would sell his store and work for Buck. If the Tigers win then Buck would hand over his most prized possession, 'The Pelé Ball', a soccer ball struck by the famous player which Phil caught as a child and Buck took from him.
Meanwhile, Ditka also introduces Phil to coffee, which rapidly changes him from a mild-mannered caring dad, to an obnoxious, over-competitive coach, not that different from his father, abusing kids and parents alike. The team's mantra becomes "Get the ball to the Italians", which, though effective, demoralizes his team. In the ultimate over-competitive act he benches his own son for the entire semi-final game.
The Tigers make it to the finals where they face off against the Gladiators. At half-time, the score is two-one to the Gladiators. In a heart-to-heart discussion with his son, Phil realizes the error of his ways. He tells his team to do exactly the opposite of what he taught them. Although the Gladiators score one more goal after half-time, they don't give up hope. Phil gives the goalie a vision test with glasses from the crowd. From there, Ambrose scores one goal—making the score three-two. After another goal, the score is tied. The team rallies and produces a spectacular team performance to win 4-3, with Sam scoring the winning goal against his uncle Bucky (Josh Hutcherson), (Buck's child who was born on the exact day as Sam) using a move that he practiced when his dad benched him in the semi-finals.
Honoring the bet, Buck tries to give Phil the ball, but Phil refuses. Making peace with his father, they merge their businesses, realizing there is more to life than winning.
The film ends with an adapted version of the "He's Got Balls" commercial originally produced by Buck. In it, the entire Tigers team appear, announcing the merger of Phil's vitamin shop—Phil's Pills—and Buck's Sporting Goods Store. The team shouts, after the "He's got balls" line, "And vitamins."
Closing credits are set to a cover The Beatles song We Can Work It Out.

Tags: romantic, cult, boring, flashback

Review:
Of course, we know the ending, because Jane and Grover's fate has basically been the subject of the whole film, but the way Baumbach ties all of this together is truly inspired.
Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming is one of those rare films that actually gets it right when it comes to understanding the angst of being a young adult right out of college.
We all identify with the characters of Kicking and Screaming whether it is Skippy and his wanting to further his education because there might be something he missed out on or if Skippy doesn't subconsciously want to become his friends Max, Grover, or Otis.
and I didn't have a good time." Kicking and Screaming is a film deserving to be recognize as a journey through the minds of graduates and self-discovery of oneself..
One of our girlfriends actually made the comment, "you guys all talk the same."So I can understand why some may pass this film over, but since the action and dialogue hit so close to home, I have to love this movie.
I can tell that Baumbach felt a lot of the same things I did in college - Max's speech at the Hole comes to mind, as well as the writing class scene, and especially, "I'm Max Belmont, I do nothing."Fortunately, it's SUCH a well-made film.
"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.
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" 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.
Apparently, I watched "Kicking and Screaming" at the perfect time -- not even a month after graduating college.
Still, I don't find myself identifying with its characters or empathizing with their struggles other than the basic "I wish I didn't have to leave." Granted graduating college is different now than it was in the 1990s, but if this film were truly very good, it would resonate with college graduates of all generations.
He manages to write a lot of dialogue that we all think but never actually speak aloud (admirable), it's all quite clever (funny or at least amusing) but his characters like to talk a lot about what they do, which in this movie is nothing (boring).
College graduates and friends Grover, Max, Skippy and Otis, all played by no-name actors basically decide to spend their first year post-graduation back at school because they are to afraid to leave.
People just generally don't talk this way, which helps the movie avoid cliché, making it fresh and funny, but also alienates the audience at times.
With so much dialogue, everything Baumbach really wants the audience to understand he must have spoken aloud and so rather than discovering meaning, it comes in the form of explanation."Kicking and Screaming" is an experiment, an artsy film that some will love just for being artsy and others will find boring for being exactly that way.
It's a gloomy episode of "Friends" stretched over an hour and a half, where "wit" is created through pop culture references, cheap cynicism, and nifty little one-liners.I'm still not sure what the point of the whole thing was; I've a feeling the only people who get anything from this movie are the ones who watch films for the experience of "relating to the characters."  Maybe the point was simply to give me a slice of post-college life.
It's also not a film you can drift in and out of, it requires undivided attention to 'get it', and for a film where 'nothing happens', that is a lot to ask of most people.Despite all this it is one of the best character films (you know, those movies you watch just for the characters and their little interactions on screen) that I know of and well worth a viewing, even if you do have to pull out the phone, disconnect the doorbell, displace your housemates/loved ones and black out the windows.A very good, well made and very underrated/underexposed film..
KICKING AND SCREAMING (1995) **** Josh Hamilton, Olivia d' Abo, Chris Eigeman, Parker Posey, Eric Stoltz, Jason Wiles, Carlos Jacott, Cara Buono.
Of course these early-20 white kids bicker and groan; someone of them delay the inevitable and slack around on the college campus, and at least one of them returns to school and retakes the same classes just so that "he can be a student again." The guys amuse themselves on dreary afternoons: they ask each other if they beat off; they do each others' girlfriends; they crowd around the beer bottles and cigarettes to play trivia games ("Name all 7 Jason Voorhees movies").
Although Baumbach and regular collaborator Wes Andresen have been compared with the great JD Salinger, I think Richard Linklater could use some love too."Kicking and Screaming" will appeal to a certain type of audience: the pseudo-intellectuals who take, say, their hobbies a bit too seriously.
This film is fine if you're a college student who hasn't declared a major and enjoys sitting around stoned and discussing trivial ironies and popular culture.The writing is definitely a little more intelligent than "Clerks," and the acting is certainly better.
There's a lot of angsting and whining in this movie that I didn't relate to when I was an optimistic college student, but now that I too am joining the ranks of the confused and unemployed post-graduate, I look upon its memory more fondly.Eric Stoltz is very amusing as the eternal student/bartender.
Josh Hamilton does a great job expressing idealized romantic yearning, especially in the last scene of the film, which I won't give away but which is familiarly and achingly bittersweet.If you're a stickler for realism you might say to yourself, "Yeah right, like these people just graduated from college, they're all in their 30s." If you're the type that can look past the fact that Olivia D'Abo played an 18 year old 10 years ago on The Wonder Years then you'll be OK.(And if you like Josh Hamilton and Parker Posey, check out House of Yes).
While the plot revolves around the romance between Grover and Jane, the most enjoyable and funny moments come from scenes where the housemates are just hanging out together, expounding on their somewhat pitiful lives.Great performances by all, including Chris Eigeman (who you might recognize from various Whit Stilman films or TV's "It's like, you know..."), Parker Posey (always crazy and hilarious), and Eric Stoltz, as the bartender who has been attending college for over a decade...a frightening glimpse of things to come..
Feeling unprepared for the 'real world', four recent college graduates spend their time philosophising and avoiding taking action in this feature film debut from Noah Baumbach.
The film features witty, memorable dialogue left, right and centre as one friend reckons "I've begun reminiscing events before they even occur", while another comments "I feel like I'm being poisoned" if a bartender at a bar does not drink with him, and the list goes on.
Kicking and Screaming is an ensemble film about a group of friends who have just graduated college and are now forced to take the next steps in their lives as they emerge into the real world.
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.
I'm not sure what I was expecting, having seen only "The Life Aquatic" as an example of notable writer-director Noah Baumbach's work (and of course that film was written with Wes Anderson, and directed by Anderson, so I wasn't sure how much of it was Baumbach's), but nothing I read specifically about "Kicking and Screaming" lead me to expect what I got: one of the most devastating films ever made, and one which while not on par with stuff like "The Graduate" formally, remains one of the very best 'where-is-my-life-going-after-college' movies ever made.
It also boasts perhaps the smartest use of flashbacks in a recent American film.I was thinking this would be sort of like a Wes Anderson film but it's really more what Kevin Smith would have written circa 1994-1997 if his parents were critical thinkers instead of lower-middle-class Catholics, and if he'd been writing about students and recent college grads instead of deadbeats lounging about convenience stores and malls and comics writers involved in bizarre love triangles.
Perhaps that's selling this short because as much as I am drawn to some of Smith's work he could never come close to capturing the sort of melancholy Baumbach absolutely nails with this film.The film isn't really brilliant, mostly because it is really plot-less (which wouldn't be a problem usually but read on) and especially since outside of Eric Stoltz's philosophizing bartender I found nothing particularly interesting about any of the supporting cast.
Olivia D'Abo has never been as attractive and appealing as she is here, and the same could be said for Eric Stoltz.But the film belongs to Chris Eigeman and Josh Hamilton, as two sides of the same coin, both stuck in a place that we've all been stuck in and hopefully will not be stuck in again.It's not a beautiful film, it's shot kind of dim and unappealing, but I thought that was on purpose, especially after seeing Noah Baumbachs THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, which again looks like a college production.
And then Noah Baumbach faxed Eric Stolz who was making Rob Roy in Scotland, and Eric Stolz agreed to do the role even though the role hadn't been written yet.Overall the film is hopeful and funny and smart, and I loved it and can't wait for the new DVD to come out.I give it a 9 out of 10.
Noah Baumbach does a similar thing with Kicking and Screaming that Amy Heckerling did with her film Clueless of the same year, and that provide the people from high school/college that we loathed seeing every day with some semblance of identification and humanity to make them into people.
Finally, they are the kind of people who think they're the only people going through the kind of quarter-life/millennial identity crisis they are currently experiencing, and as such, feel better holding long conversations about living at home, getting drunk, masturbating, and repeating said events day-in and day-out until an opportunity's knocks are deafening or ambition hits them like a good buzz.We focus on four college pals: Grover (Josh Hamilton), who breaks up with his girlfriend in the opening scene of the film when she reveals that she'll be bound for Prague in a few days, Max (Chris Eigeman), who often insights the ridiculous, aforementioned games, Otis (Carlos Jacott), who proclaims to only have two emotions, antsy and testy, and Skippy (Jason Wiles), who finds himself in that awkward stage with Miami (Parker Posey) between hooking up and going steady.
After graduating, instead of moving on to bigger and better things, as many college graduates do, the four comrades remain on campus, happily indulging in the same food they condemned having to eat for the past four years and slumming around campus through endless nights of drinking and conversing about everything and nothing.The rapid-fire wit in Kicking and Screaming is probably the film's most laudable feature.
Those same words were probably coming out of the mouth of Noah Baumbach, who was twenty-five at the time of directing and co-writing (with Oliver Berkman) Kicking and Screaming.
Having spent six years at a stunningly insulated school, I could and still can see ample grounds to relate to the four despairing rapscallions of this brittle slice of life, who graduate from college then go on to spend the next several months on or around campus, doing things as trivial as possible.Josh Hamilton, seen recently in Louis C.K.'s show playing an obnoxious stoner, here expecting to live in Brooklyn with girlfriend Olivia d'Abo, is so agape and livid when she takes a scholarship to Prague that he won't return any of her calls and can only wonder about their past in five deliberately placed scenes, each signaled by a black-and-white snap of her.
As Miami and Kate, a 16-year-old to whom Max turns next, both highlight on individual occasions that this foursome talks and acts alike, making up dumb quizzes while drinking lots of scotch and beer and overall embracing something similar to a four-man frat house.The synchronicity of drollness and disturbance has grown even more obvious in Baumbach's work since this folksy film.
And in the even more self-critical Squid and the Whale, Jesse Eisenberg's academic pretense is even more prominent, because, like one of these four, he frequently hasn't read the books he pontificates about.Stoltz appears in this filmed chain of thought as a long-standing philosophy major and bartender who's stayed on campus for a decade, by some means a more forward-looking instance of the trouble shaping the four principals but in other ways more practical and focused, since by now he's a father and gladly acknowledges the distinctiveness of being a career student as something more than an evasive standing.
The scenes with Grover and Jane really stand out as the best in the movie, and I would have to say that this film works MUCH better when the emphasis is not on the comedy.
Having seen it many times, I have a Ferris Club theory about it, so indulge me if you're bored.The film's main character is ostensibly Grover, but it all revolves around Otis.
Kicking and Screaming is the best recent ensemble film about a bunch of young people.
It is certainly far superior to Stillman's film about people the same age, The Last Days of Disco.It's funny and unpredictable, like when one unlikely romance works out while another perfect romance falls apart.
I notice many other reviewers related to this film, and I did too, even though I had been out of college for 10 years when I saw it.I'm sorry to say I saw this on video, not the big screen, and feel doubly guilty that I didn't make it to Mr. Jealousy on time.
The fact that there is excellent acting by the dream cast certainly helps, and the film might not have worked without the cast.Although there are eight lead characters, after viewing, you leave feeling as though you know them on an individual basis, especially the male ones.
Like the "characters" in this "film", I graduated from college at the approximate time this was released (or is that "foisted") to the public, I also had the great dilemma of "Where do I go from here?".
And lastly, without giving too much away, I felt the powerful emotions that the lead, Grover, was feeling at different points in the film.Eric Stoltz is a VASTLY underrated actor; I really like the guy.
I first saw this film a few years ago before I got to college, and thought it was fairly good with good acting, direction, and a great script but couldn't quite relate.
This movie is very witty, very charming, and very suiting for college graduates or anyone struggling with taking the next big step in life, with great romantic line at the end.
Essentially a 6-month story that features the lives of four characters, all recent college graduates; Grover, the troubled writer, whose parents have split up, has lost his girlfriend to a foreign exchange program and doesn't know what to do with his life.
Unlike so many films with couples at the centre, KICKING AND SCREAMING succeeded in making me like these people, and furthermore, it showed me why they belonged together- without even one on-screen kiss, I might add.
Exceptional Film, I loved it, and its not just another college bitch fest movie..
The characters were extremely easy to relate to, the dialogue was perfect, and very, very funny, my life is almost exactly like Grover and the Cougar's (I think that what was it) lives.
I'm sure there are a lot of people that can "get" this film, but I'm glad I do not have friends like any of these characters.
(I don't think I said anything that's considered a spoiler, but that warning scared me) I graduated from college and watched this movie just a couple of years after it came out, and I absolutely loved it then.