The Chumscrubber (2005)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

So I watched this film because having deeply enjoyed American Beauty I was recommended to this title for their similar themes. I was greatly disappointed. The film starts out with some kid going to this adult party where their all drunk or bad actors and he sees his friend dead. ooh We then are taken to his high school, where one of his friends or something sells so many drugs that every person he walks by buys from him. This is stupid, no one sells drugs like that. The plot then slowly develops with our young hero getting picked on, and then some cute teen starts coming on to him and then that takes off. At this point I decided to just flip through the rest of the movie. There's a hot mom, and she wants to bang everyone but it doesn't really do anything but provide sexual tension. This is the part for the guys. I really could have watched pr0n and gotten a lot more out of it than this whole movie though. At the end some weird stuff happens and then hes like in a video game which isn't really relevant. This movie is a huge waste of time I felt like all my teachers were being casted as the adults and it felt awkward just watching it. Don't waste your time.

This film has many positive points and many negative points. The two ultimately end up canceling each other and at the end of the film I personally ended up with nothing. The cast is simply brilliant and each and every identifiable character is well-developed and performed extremely well by an unbelievably long series of excellent actors. Being a first venture for the writer/director this shows how many people believed in the project and were ready to commit to it. Sadly what now follows is the negative part of my review. The direction, albeit very good, is also laden with numerous clichés, which after a while start being the only noticeable features of the film. While viewing the film I was slowly removed from the story and started to see all the other films it reminded me of, and sadly it was not a short list*. This fact disconnected me from it eventually and I couldn't appreciate it anymore. This fact, coupled with the fact that the writer/director claims he is shining a spotlight on a subject that is muted was irritating actually, because it was blatantly false, because even though the closest to life in American suburbia I ever was, was a month long trip in 1998, I still got the same message from this film as I got from a number of films before it. One other thing that left me a bit perplexed was some characters' behaviour. I don't mean the offbeat or eccentric behaviours of some of the characters. Those were plausible and perfectly at home with the plot of the film. What I mean is the illogical behaviour of some characters, mainly the teenagers, starting from an academically bright "good lad" (even though fleeing from over-protective and ambitious parents), and a girl who at first glance seems to be good natured, passively agreeing to the whims of an antisocial thug to the point of kidnap and threat of murder, with the latter tolerating obvious flirtation with her own mother, while the former, suddenly blows into a desperate murderous rage, and accepts the fact that the person who initially proposed the murder would not have any part in it. The fact that people who seem to dislike each other have repeated conversations on the telephone in the evening, and finally the issue about drugs: I might have missed a crucial metaphor here, but throughout the film one sees drugs of some kind being distributed to virtually everyone in school, and people pop them here and there and get an instant relief, almost as fast as an injection. The main character ingests psychiatric medication almost by the handful on an "as required" basis (akin to using an asthma inhaler) with virtually no effect apart from satisfying his father, and finally when an incredible amount of a variety of drugs is put in a casserole by a child relatively silent and yet intent on sabotage to the rest of his family beyond belief. This results in a number of supposedly drug-naive individuals at a wake, ingesting an amount of crushed pills meant to supply a whole high-school at once, and only end up laughing and being promiscuous with no further consequence. I found that to be disturbing. Well to end this rather long comment, I think this writer director has potential and certainly commands respect from people who count. I hope this film (somewhat undeservedly) gets him enough success to enable him to make further movies which he himself can relate more to, in order to have more heart and truly be an original work free from the weight of previous films dictating its impact.* I'd recommend to watch the missing child sequence from "The Phantom of Liberty" by Luis Bunuel for example.

I can hardly begin to describe how much I love this movie. If it were a man, I would marry him and bear 20 of his children. The story was good, the acting was excellent, the casting was flawless, the overall atmosphere was perfection, the intended audience reactions were felt (whether you wanted to feel them or not), and there were enough subtleties to make you feel better about yourself as a relative-to-body-size-large-brained-primate for catching them.Every actor in The Chumscrubber will go on from this movie and become new people and new faces all over again, never to be remembered strictly as "that guy in The Chumscrubber". This is not to say that their characters were not memorable or dynamic; it is quite the opposite, for their characters were incredibly and intensely dramatic composites. It is more that they themselves, as actors and actresses, define the roles they play rather than the roles defining their careers. Truly, Mark Hamill, for example, will always be remembered as Luke Skywalker (in fact, I'm sure many people don't know him as anything but "Luke"), but there are very few who would define Harrison Ford as simply Han Solo.Unlike many recent movies, with several different climaxes (taking away from the implied orgasmic excitement of a grand finale), the story builds from a disturbingly calm beginning to the tension of a Parkinson's patient constructing a card house. The so-called-sane's irrationality outlining the few truly sane individuals' frustration in the movie is enough to make the viewer want to punch someone in the face just to release the tension. With orchestral magnificence, all the players contribute to the winding array of viewpoints with their own unique (but commonly mad) personalities binding their fates.All the right ingredients were in place to create the ultimate cake of disaster: the absurdity of trivial obsessions; self-absorbed hypocrites; the influence of "the mob"; uncontrollable, chip-on-their-shoulder teens; and, of course, drugs in suburbs. Ironically, each of the above mentioned function perfectly together without interruption or question...until one drop of sanity is thrown into the mix.

This is a movie with tremendous potential, but because of an incredibly poor choice for a title, has had little traction. It will undoubtedly be a cult classic. But it was a box office bomb. "Chumbscrubber" means nothing to most people. It means something now to anyone who has seen the movie, but I'm not sure that was the audience Mr. Posin sought. For the hip 16-20 age group, it may have been too complex and depressing. For anyone older, the idea of a movie based on a video game character is a put off. Then there's the problem of no sex, not good for a lot of young males. There's a little violence, at the end. What there is a lot of is talking and that usually requires a more mature audience to want to listen and ponder. The acting is, for the most part, superb. If one is going to make an art house movie, he has to cater to that crowd. Don't mix in video games. If one is going to appeal to teenagers, then do so... give them lots of action, sex and a car chase or two. First, figure out the audience desired. But bravo for trying to make something perceptive. Obviously most people in this country aren't perceptive or we wouldn't have such a dunce for Pres.