Every Friday Chris hand-selects a streaming recommendation for your weekend.
This Week’s Featured Flick
Kicking and Screaming on Netflix
THE TRAILER
THE DETAILS
DIRECTOR: Noah Baumbach
WRITER: Noah Baumbach, Oliver Berkman
CAST: Josh Hamilton, Samuel Gould, Catherine Kellner, John Lehr, Olivia d’Abo, Peter Czernin, Carlos Jacott, Chris Eigeman, Eric Stoltz, Jason Wiles, Parker Posey
GENRE: Comedy / Horror (if your name is Hunter Cates)
RUNTIME: 96 min
YEAR: 1995
THE PLOT
After Graduating, four college roomies — petrified by the prospect of facing “real life” — reluctantly step into adulthood in this ensemble comedy.
THE REASON
First I feel I must apologize for the 90s indie trailer.
Sorry.
I don’t need to ask if you’ve seen Kicking and Screaming. I know you haven’t. But you absolutely should. This is one of those rare gems that you discover and end up spending the rest of your life shoving into the hands of anyone who will watch it. At their best Noah Baumbach’s films feels like The Great American novel up on the big screen. He has a keen ear for dialogue that feels like conversations you have with your friends, only a little quicker and sharper than than you’re actually capable of being. Kicking and Screaming is an alarmingly relatable portrait of a group of friends in a post-graduate malaise staring adulthood in the face and cowering in fear.
Released when Baumbach was just 26 years old, this isn’t just a “promising debut” effort. This isn’t the film you just mark off the list in an effort to be a Baumbach completionist (that one’s called Highball, and it’s an odd experiment with an appearance by Peter Bogdanovich.) Kicking and Screaming can stand toe-to-toe with any of his later films and remains one of my all time favorites from him.
WATCH NOW ON NETFLIX
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