Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea. —Henry Fielding

28 January 2006

The Chumscrubber

Wow... The Chumscrubber, Arie Posin's social satire/drama is terrible. I mean really, really bad. I'd been looking forward to this movie. It has a cast that looked great on paper: Jamie Bell, Camilla Belle (who's great in The Ballad of Jack and Rose if you haven't checked it out yet), Glenn Close, Allison Janney, William Fichtner, Rita Wilson, Carrie-Ann Moss, Ralph Fiennes, John Heard, Jason Isaacs, Tim DeKay and even Lou Taylor Pucci who I loved so much in Thumbsucker (similar title, quite another movie altogether). This cast adds up to nothing, let me tell you. It's about drugs and kids and how much everyone's parents ignore them oh so much and how much angst all those little kids in "Generation Rx" (isn't that cute?) have. It's stupid. There's also this whole insanely ridiculous subplot about a man who's losing his mind and wants to paint dolphins everywhere. The titular "Chumscrubber" is some kind of video game creature... a symbol, I suppose for (duh) violent video games and their lasting effect on children. The video game guy doesn't really scrub chum or anything like that, though; he mostly just carries around his head and beats up zombies or something.

Arie Posin has no sense of subtlety whatsoever and the film is filled with idiotic shots and disconnected scenes. Mostly, the film is a cartoon: something that the director intends to look phoney and, after all is said and done, is phoney. He seems to succeed, except that the film never stops being phoney and nothing of any substance ever actually happens.

Moved to the bottom of the list: between Transamerica and Ladies in Lavender.

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