Reviews (10)

What's up homebrew? ------ "..Everybody Felix!..."
What's up homebrew?
Hilarious dialogue! "..Everybody Felix!..."
It's a movie of conversations and very little action.. It's hilarious. I can't describe it.. Everyone is just so goofy! It's subtle....FELIX steals the show...And as a fan of Galaxie 500 and Luna, It is cool to see Dean Wareham in a movie and doing the music for it.. He does a cool version of "Frankie And Johnny". It's a real low-budget film shot in just 6 days! I don't know about the DVD, I only have the VHS version but it's a good movie for the people with a weird sense of humor! "How did my birthday boy spend his birthday?".... "NOTHING." this is for the people who like irreverent comedies. Support indie films. It's goofy, it's New York, it's indie, it's Rae Dawn Chong, Ally Sheedy, Justine Batemen and more! Same apartment...3 parties.. a birthday party, a halloween party and a New Year's party. "Everybody Felix! It's Felix's birthday! Everybody Felix! He's old in the best way!"

Bizarre, but quite funny
I'm a big NB fan. THis movie, with it's awful edits, still manages to be entertaining. It isn't nearly as good as his other two films, but still kept me glued to the TV for 75 minutes. The guest shots are fantastic, particularly the Ally Sheedy ones. Christopher Eigeman, my favorite actor, deserved a better part, but Carlos Jacott is terrific. Baumbach himself gives an enjoyable performance. THe movie is all about dialogue and much of it is inspired. If you are new to Noah Baumbach's work, go get Kicking and Screamin and then Mr. Jealousy. This film is really best for fans, and curious viewers. I'm awaiting Noah's next film with great hopes.

subpar versus Kicking & Screaming and Mr. Jealousy
Perhaps predictably, this movie suffers from not having the same kind of time and money invested in its production compared to Kicking & Screaming and Mr. Jealousy. Those two films had a uniquely beautiful combination of literate dialogue and humorous ensemble interaction. While Highball had many of the same actors from the first two movies, the overall dialogue and themes were totally different. The first two movies had irreverence mixed with the sympathy of nostalgia and the difficult emotional transition to adulthood. Highball had no direction at all.

While I no longer remember all the details of Highball, I felt that the characters were poorly defined and the plot less meaningful than Mr. Jealousy and Kicking & Screaming. The movie seemed incomplete and hastily put together.

If you like literate, witty ensemble comedies, you should definitely see Kicking and Screaming, then Mr. Jealousy, then the Whit Stillman trilogy (which also features Chris Eigeman): Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco. All 5 of those being among my favorites.

Quirky, crazy comedy
Interesting comedy told through the course of three parties in one apartment: a birthday party, a Halloween party, and a New Year's Eve party. Basically centered around the couple who's apartment it is who first are together (birthday), break-up (Halloween), and then are married (New Year's) and all their weird and strange friends they join together for each occasion. For anyone who can remember times like these or are going through times like these, there are plenty of moments to laugh at. Like the boring awkward birthday party magician?! Or the hideously costumed drunk hostess at Halloween?! Or a friend coming out on New Years Eve?! It's all there.....strangely and sadly so. You will recognize so man actors in this I don't know how the director got them all for this nothing of a movie but he did, from Stolz to Sheedy to Bogdanovich and more. You'll have fun guessing who's who, but there's plenty of who's not in the film too. Quirky, strange, but enjoyable.

One of the most clever scripts written!
It came upon accident i even saw this ridiculously funny movie. The editing sucks, the plot goes absolutely nowhere, but the undertones of great humor fullfill this movie even through the closing credits. If one is looking for a movie with flat out jokes please don't waste your time. To those with a sense of humor, on the other hand, this is one of my all time favorite movies. I've recommended this movie to most of my friends and have never had a negative comment. I have since purchased Mr. Jealousy and Kicking and Screaming by the same director, Noah Baumbach, god lets hope they are remotely compared to this outstanding work of art. ... Read more

Reviews (10)

What's up homebrew? ------ "..Everybody Felix!..."
What's up homebrew?
Hilarious dialogue! "..Everybody Felix!..."
It's a movie of conversations and very little action.. It's hilarious. I can't describe it.. Everyone is just so goofy! It's subtle....FELIX steals the show...And as a fan of Galaxie 500 and Luna, It is cool to see Dean Wareham in a movie and doing the music for it.. He does a cool version of "Frankie And Johnny". It's a real low-budget film shot in just 6 days! I don't know about the DVD, I only have the VHS version but it's a good movie for the people with a weird sense of humor! "How did my birthday boy spend his birthday?".... "NOTHING." this is for the people who like irreverent comedies. Support indie films. It's goofy, it's New York, it's indie, it's Rae Dawn Chong, Ally Sheedy, Justine Batemen and more! Same apartment...3 parties.. a birthday party, a halloween party and a New Year's party. "Everybody Felix! It's Felix's birthday! Everybody Felix! He's old in the best way!"

Bizarre, but quite funny
I'm a big NB fan. THis movie, with it's awful edits, still manages to be entertaining. It isn't nearly as good as his other two films, but still kept me glued to the TV for 75 minutes. The guest shots are fantastic, particularly the Ally Sheedy ones. Christopher Eigeman, my favorite actor, deserved a better part, but Carlos Jacott is terrific. Baumbach himself gives an enjoyable performance. THe movie is all about dialogue and much of it is inspired. If you are new to Noah Baumbach's work, go get Kicking and Screamin and then Mr. Jealousy. This film is really best for fans, and curious viewers. I'm awaiting Noah's next film with great hopes.

subpar versus Kicking & Screaming and Mr. Jealousy
Perhaps predictably, this movie suffers from not having the same kind of time and money invested in its production compared to Kicking & Screaming and Mr. Jealousy. Those two films had a uniquely beautiful combination of literate dialogue and humorous ensemble interaction. While Highball had many of the same actors from the first two movies, the overall dialogue and themes were totally different. The first two movies had irreverence mixed with the sympathy of nostalgia and the difficult emotional transition to adulthood. Highball had no direction at all.

While I no longer remember all the details of Highball, I felt that the characters were poorly defined and the plot less meaningful than Mr. Jealousy and Kicking & Screaming. The movie seemed incomplete and hastily put together.

If you like literate, witty ensemble comedies, you should definitely see Kicking and Screaming, then Mr. Jealousy, then the Whit Stillman trilogy (which also features Chris Eigeman): Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco. All 5 of those being among my favorites.

Quirky, crazy comedy
Interesting comedy told through the course of three parties in one apartment: a birthday party, a Halloween party, and a New Year's Eve party. Basically centered around the couple who's apartment it is who first are together (birthday), break-up (Halloween), and then are married (New Year's) and all their weird and strange friends they join together for each occasion. For anyone who can remember times like these or are going through times like these, there are plenty of moments to laugh at. Like the boring awkward birthday party magician?! Or the hideously costumed drunk hostess at Halloween?! Or a friend coming out on New Years Eve?! It's all there.....strangely and sadly so. You will recognize so man actors in this I don't know how the director got them all for this nothing of a movie but he did, from Stolz to Sheedy to Bogdanovich and more. You'll have fun guessing who's who, but there's plenty of who's not in the film too. Quirky, strange, but enjoyable.

One of the most clever scripts written!
It came upon accident i even saw this ridiculously funny movie. The editing sucks, the plot goes absolutely nowhere, but the undertones of great humor fullfill this movie even through the closing credits. If one is looking for a movie with flat out jokes please don't waste your time. To those with a sense of humor, on the other hand, this is one of my all time favorite movies. I've recommended this movie to most of my friends and have never had a negative comment. I have since purchased Mr. Jealousy and Kicking and Screaming by the same director, Noah Baumbach, god lets hope they are remotely compared to this outstanding work of art. ... Read more

Reviews (15)

"Do People Still Spit in the Cream Pitcher?"
While Mr. Jealousy hinges on the darker side of relationships than did Noah Baumbach's first feature, Kicking and Screaming, it's still a smartly stylized romantic comedy you're not likely to find at the top of the box office--but that's usually a good thing. In the tradition of Woody Allen and Jean Renoir (catch the Rules of the Game reference at the beginning of the film), Baumbach has crafted a neurotic, idiosyncratic love story, that, unlike Allen especially, seems to recover from its human folly with a somewhat optimistic ending. You're liable to laugh out loud at all of Carlos Jacott's (the real Vince's) scenes, as he pretty much reprises his role from Kicking and Screaming as a vulnerable yet loveable goofball--his moments in group therapy alone are worth seeing the flick.

Literate, Funny, Touching, and Beautiful
What I liked most about Mr. Jealousy was that it was really about these two writers and their growth and development as real people. The literary jokes were, like Kicking and Screaming, refreshingly funny. The fact that Mr. Jealousy is supposed to be a romantic comedy and is totally misrepresented by the trailer and box graphics/description might mislead certain people into seeing this movie. The film is really very sad at what should be the ending. The last bit that turns the movie into a "happy ending" seemed contrived and pasted on. Kicking and Screaming did not have that problem, but the ending really does not detract much from the movie's overall beauty and humor. I would definitely recommend seeing Kicking and Screaming first to appreciate the director's development of the "becoming an adult" theme which is further developed in Mr. Jealousy.

A Rare Mediocrity
Mirabella calls it "a comic revelation." I had a different reaction. I fell asleep. This in of itself cannot be considered a pan, as I have fallen asleep during a lot of movies that were highly acclaimed, such as the first Star Wars, which I saw with my dad and bored me to tears-or would have if I could have focused on the screen for more than the first twenty minutes. (He was there with his spanking new family.) This movie, which the New York Times of Jason Blair fame, calls "a shrewd comedy" I found to be wanting. The back of the DVD calls it "the most possessive romantic comedy ever." However, Lester, played by Eric Stoltz, is only vaguely jealous, which is appropriate considering the hair styles and vapid conversation of his new love interest, Ramona (Anabella Sciorra). Sciorra, who is not bad to look at, has a richly boring erotic past of flings with some twenty-odd twenty-somethings, each one (from what the sleeping reviewer can gather) a more inane yuppie than the last. And none of her inane yuppie love interests is more aggravating than Dashiell Frank (Chris Eigeman), the New York generation X writer who receives huge contracts for his best-selling short stories of intercourse in unusual positions with his x-girlfriends, of whom Ramona is, to Lester's consternation. Well, without giving the plot away (difficult considering my sleep and its absence), let's just say that the inanely unjealous Lester (who turns down a scholarship to the Iowa writing program because "he isn't interested in school"-MTV beckons, no doubt) spots the enviable and dashingly intellectual Frank and, following him, joins his group therapy group under an alias. Why? You'd have to ask the writers (?) but my guess is that, as so often in modern "cinema," these same writers were neuronally overstimulated from MSG from all the Chinese take out that they ate during the day (or two) when the screenplay, for which they were certainly overpaid, was composed. And group therapy (arguably the exact opposite of the solitary task of writing-but not of the Hollywood group marketing that passes for writing!) must have just commended itself to them as a brilliant technical device to tell their story. Edith Wharton in the introduction to Ethan Frome tells of the necessity of having the stories of simpler people told by more intelligent or complex ones. I think something similar occurs in movies like this: the would-be complex and intelligent writers (usually paid for by oil executives that own the film conglomerates) choose (or are forced to choose) as their subject matter relatively simple and less bright "ordinary people." It is this leveling process that may be in part responsible for what Kurt Vonnegut calls the American tendency of "aspiring to mediocrity." In short, a must-have for the serious possessive romantic comedy collector.

Huge Stoltz Fan
I enjoyed this movie Ilaughed a lot and Eric seemed he liked the role he played.

This is a great film.
I loved this movie, and for some reason didn't see it when it first came out. My girlfriend made me watch it which is kind of a bad sign but I think for all the right reasons. Great acting and music, it's funny and kind of sadly weird too. I'd never heard of it, but now I'm showing it to my friends. ... Read more