First the title really threw me off.. I can think of two definitions of Chum - 1 being a friend - the other being a soup of blood and fish parts used to attract sharks. Neither fits with the word scrubber or this film.
In the movie, it is the name of a super hero who survived radiation.
This movie is hard to fully describe. The 1 sentence plot line summary doesn’t do the film justice - a guy’s friend commits suicide. He tries to figure out why.
Doesn’t sound very good does it? It didn’t get better when I started watching the film either. Much like Napoleon Dynamite - the acting starts off very stiff and disaffected. It was so much so I was beginning to think the cast couldn’t act. As the movie goes on, I realized that they were doing it on purpose.
The whole movie is about the life kids live right in front of their parents. Parents who are all too busy with their own lives to actually know what is happening with their kids.For example in the film includes a parent who doesn’t even realize that her son has been kidnapped.
There are all these surreal moments in the movie that still stick with me. Glenn Close is the mother of the boy who committed suicide. She calls everyone in the neighborhood to invite them to the wake (normal) and tells them that she doesn’t blame them for his death (not so normal). Another example is that any time a kid is stopped from doing something by a parent, they are able to continue on by saying - “It’s for school”. Even when that doesn’t make any sense - it is the pass phrase to access.
This is one of those films that has suburbia as the monster behind every door. I’m not sure if I would have watched if it I had known that. All too often, the suburbia as the enemy film ends up sounding like the complaints of a grown up misfit who is using film to get back at society for the injustices they suffered in high school. The thing that makes this movie so much different, is that it does a great job of alternating between comedy and tragedy in a way that make you want to know where it is all going.
The whole movie works from a very simple idea - this is what happens when everyone is trying to figure out their own wants and dreams and is too busy to acknowledge any one else. It is that obliviousness that makes the film hilarious in some places, and depressing in others.
Bottom Line: Prepare for a ride through the perfect neighborhood - turns out the reality is both funnier and sadder than you thought.
March 26th, 2007 at 7:52 am
chum is the stuff they feed to dolphins, the town is shaped like a dolphin, the chum is the drugs, troy supplied the drugs, then killed himself, therefore scrubbing the chum. making him the chumscrubber