MOTD: The Chumscrubber...and a difference

I was going to write two entries: One personal, one movie review but I couldn't think of what could actually make the personal one worthwhile so I'm compounding them...maybe this will become a regular thing...that would be unique enough to please me...

So topics today are my weekend and the 2005 movie everyone gets confused with "Thumbsucker". Shall we?

Well I thought, to be rewarded with a blissful lack of worries I'd avoid fun on friday after work and stayed home to get ahead on Moby-Dick. As you may or may not know the final essay is threatening to consume the better part of my life for the better part of the next few weeks as there is a rapid succession of ever-increasing in weight assignments topping with a first draft ("as good as a final draft") on the 25th. I'm writing on the X-Files and Battlestar Galactica. This seemed like a good idea, but perhaps not. Oh well.

Anyway it seemed like a good idea until I woke up Saturday to see my closet flooded by stinkwater from above. A morning of tub-washing every piece of clothing I own and 2 days (and counting) of turning our house into a smelly, moist drying rack leaves me basically being insane.

Put on top of that TWO friends in town from Edmonton (including the incomparable Mark Hayes) and TWO outdoor drinking fests and well...I still managed to get behind on my homework. Not to mention being drunk , frazzled and feeling out of place wherever I planted myself...

wait...that feeling of detached malaise reminds me of a movie I saw recently...
Chalk another one up on the big board for both "sarcastic suburbia satire" and "I need drugs to just feel normal" with Chumscrubber.

The movie is only Okay...Okay movies deserve bullet points:
- The acting by the teen leads, performed mostly by people from Green Day videos, is not surprisingly much like a Green Day video. So much so I did some googling to try to find a link between them. Woefully, thankfully there wasn't.
- Jamie Bell was actually pretty good as the anti-depressed flaneur but I prefer him 12 years old and dancing like no tomorrow
- If Jason Issacs isn't cursing mudbloods I don't quite know what to do with him.
- The main plot is pretty inventive but it gets weighed down by its own ideology. Basically, they want every character to have problems to reflect the soul draining nature of modern life in suburbia (i think ) but there are too many characters with too many problems so most of them remain flat and undeveloped
- That said , I really dug the Glenn Close character. She plays muted suburban housewives with dead sons so often it's pretty impressive to see her pull of an original one.
- Raph Finnes loves dolphins.
- The movie vastly underestimates how good video game graphics have gotten.
- I don't think I grew up recently or in suburbia so the only version of this kind of story I've ever enjoyed are tongue-in-cheek ones like "Weeds"
- Though the film is a bit clunky it has a satisfyingly odd ending. As much as I hate some epic conventions being rode to death, I loves me some heavily ironic comeuppance




Anyway, It kicked all the whiny out of me because I was so disgusted with people being whiny on-screen. I'm caught up on reading, I went to Richmond for tacos, I have a 2 dollar mesh cube to serve as my new closet and, gosh darn it, I dont even need to do well on this essay I'm basically graduated.

bwhahaha

Tomorrow : Superbad hopefully...though you all will have seen it with me...maybe movie reviews nobody needs aren't such a hot idea...

Cam