THE LANGUAGE OF KICKBALL
Year: 1999
Country:
USA
Run Time:
80 minutes
"Sometimes I"m only pretending to listen." "Sometimes I'm only pretending to talk!" The verbal volleys go back and forth in actor/filmmaker Michael Barron's feature debut, a made-in-Cleveland comedy that plays as though Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard, Whit Stillman got tossed into the same burning Cuyahoga River together and clung to a Drew Carey-shaped flotation device for safety. Barron plays Fitz, a young man facing the world (i.e. dreary jobs at places like Burger Bazaar) armed with a worthless creative writing degree, a car composed mostly of rust, and arcane philosophies nurtured along by his slacker housemate Austin, ten years a lazy mall janitor and proud of it. Austin is able to pull some strings with upper management and gets Fitz in a position - wearing a urine-stained bunny costume at an Easter display. Just when it looks like things can't get any worse for the hero, a guy calling himself the devil offers to buy his soul, adding that Fitz should sell now, while it's still worth something. A humorous Gen-X file of existential angst and workplace humiliation, THE LANGUAGE OF KICKBALL is for eveyone who's said there's got to be someone out there worse off than you.
Screenplay
Michael Barron
Director
Michael Barron
Producer
Michael Barron
Cinematography
David Litz
Editing
Ana Gil-Costa
Principal Cast
Michael Barron, Chris Gerson, Emma Vogel, Paul Soychak, Amanda Gaspar
Michael Barron
31117 Roanoke Ave.
Cleveland, OH 44109
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