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The Chumscrubber (Arie Posin) is a pretty weak film, despite a surprisingly good cast and some interesting promotional material. Some of the actors appearing in this film include Glenn Close, Ralph Fiennes, Jason Isaacs, Carrie-Anne Moss and William Fichtner. This is a film about suburban life, with the typical intersecting of characters and storylines. I think it was meant to be a satire, but watching it made me sa-tired. It’s a very nice looking neighborhood, and the people look very nice, but that is the irony… get it?

Jamie Bell does an excellent job of playing Dean, the main character of the main storyline, a young man who is your typical teenaged film character: unpopular, depressed and medicated. His best friend recently killed himself and instead of helping him to grieve and move on, his famous psychiatrist father (Fichtner) keeps him drugged up and feeling nothing. Dean hates that he is medicated and has some interesting anti-psychiatry posters on his wall (maybe he’s a scientologist, too!). His family is quite dysfunctional, but if they weren’t then this movie wouldn’t be around.

Enter the storyline involving drugs. Dean needs to get them from his recently deceased friend’s bedroom, which introduces us to the late friend’s mother (Close). She blames everybody for the death of her son. She’s a drunk and she is kind of coo-coo. Then Dean is forced to hang out with popular people. Some of them are mean, and then they kidnap a kid who plays the tuba.

Ralph Fiennes is the town’s mayor. He sees visions of dolphins. Carrie-Anne Moss is the hot mom of one of the people that Dean needs to hang out with now, Crystal. (Crystal is another unoriginal character: she’s in the cool group but she’s actually really deep and thoughtful!!! And after talking to loser Dean she realizes that he is a real person too!!! WOW!!!)

Lou Taylor Pucci, the star of Thumbsucker, is also in this film, and I was struck by how terrible an actor he is. I was a bit reluctant to watch Thumbsucker after seeing him here, but I thought that maybe this film came first and he learned how to act before starring in that indie hit; alas, I was wrong: first came Thumbsucker, then Chumscrubber. I guess one of these performances was a fluke - hopefully it was this one.

So, a typical “sad teenager” movie, with drugs, a kidnapping, silly dolphin visions and big names. I really wanted to like it but I just couldn’t. The worst thing was the whole “Chumscrubber” thing. It was a weird kind of video game parallell about some guy whose head gets blown off and then walks around town killing people, all while holding his head. I guess he is supposed to be the one who protects people from evil, which in this case is themselves and their completely clueless and self-indulgent lives. Maybe I totally missed something here, but it is possible that if I “got” what was supposed to be happening, I would have liked it even less.