chumscrubbers, teenage worlds

Worst film of the year: The Chumscrubbers. I cannot even begin to describe how bad this movie is (and what a cast)

not quite sure why you feel this way, jeff. this is not, you’re right, a *good* movie — it’s badly written, acted, and directed, with a lot of stiffness and contrivedness, in spite of the stellar cast… it can even get a bad performance out of glenn close, and an awful one out of ralph fiennes — but it does something that i thought was interesting, namely show the teenage world as an impossibly difficult one, difficult well beyond the reach of adults. so i thought the adults came off as so awful not because they were really that awful, but because they were inexplicably selfish, self-involved, and idiotic in the eyes of the kids. thanks to jeff’s recommendation of allison bechdel’s fun home i have been thinking a lot about the way i felt when i was a teenager or thereabouts, and i have to say that this film resonated with me — the way in which it shows the terrible seriousness and complexity of teens’ lives, and the adults’ complete inability to get it. but also, conversely, the way in which teens perceive adults to be so awful, when in fact they *might* not be…

so i found it moving when the allison janney’s character fantasizes out loud with her son that it would be interesting if she were the child and he the parent, because i find myself, sometimes, wanting to scream to my students (some of whom i’m worked really closely with on campus activism stuff and who therefore consider me as a different beast from “simply” a professor) that i am not different from them at all, that, all these years later, it’s still all the very same shit.

and i want to credit you all, and this blog (which may or may not be bigger than the sum of its contributors), for forcing me to try new genres — teen films, boy films, small-town america films, investigations of masculinity, suburbs films… I haven’t yet tried my luck into comedy and cult territory, but i’m certainly trying to give films that in the past i simply dismissed a fighting chance, and i’m grateful for the widening of my horizons.

14 thoughts on “chumscrubbers, teenage worlds”

  1. gio, i’ve taken the liberty of turning your comment in the crash discussion into its own topic. not because it isn’t about crash but because this is a very interesting topic in its own right: the filmic depictions of teenage worlds. my own teen years were so different from anything that my american peers or my students seem to have experienced in the u.s that i can’t really gauge the “authenticity” (for lack of a better term) of american movies about teens. though i do find many of them deeply creepy in a sort of vampiric way.

  2. well, it isn’t about crash!

    my teenage years, also, had nothing whatsoever to do with the way american kids seem to experience them. for the longest time i thought it was all a fiction, until my best friend’s kids turned teens, at which time i realized it’s TRUE!!!! like, say, all the stuff about drugs and alcohol. italy’s got its share of drugs, but they are not as pervasive and mandatory in a young person’s experience as they are here. ditto with alcohol. and, most definitely, middle and high schools and college are not the social nightmare they can be in this country. it’s all much more low key and benign, you know.

    i’m sorry if i seem like i’m ragging on american dysfunctionality, but the whole thing about teen life has always shocked me a bit. i know my friend, who’s italian (we have known each other since we were, ourselves, teenagers, and she too now lives in the US) is totally traumatized by how hard it is to raise teenagers in this country.

  3. I liked Chumscrubbers. It’s territory pretty well gone over in films, so there was nothing new, but it had a kind of funky sensibility.

    BTW, while we’re all ‘fessing up, my teenage years were also nothing like these movies. And I mean nothing.

  4. I could go on and on and on . . . but Thumbsucker covers similar territory and is simply far more genuine and believable. The Dardenne Brothers’ The Son, Raising Victor Vargas, Igby Goes Down, Terrence Davies’ The Long Day Closes, L.I.E., Peter Bogdonavich’s The Last Picture Show, This Boy’s Life, The Ice Storm, Beautiful Thing, Rushmore, My Summer of Love, Ratcatcher, Boys in the Hood, Whale Rider, Over the Edge, The Virgin Suicides, About a Boy, American Graffiti, Say Anything, Elephant, Breaking Away, Election, Running on Empty, The Slums of Beverly Hills, Holes, The Year My Voice Broke, Flirting, The Devil’s Playground, Friday Night Lights . . . As I said, I could program a two week film festival with titles so far superior to The Chumscrubber that it just makes me want to yell to high heaven.

  5. Fat Girl, Thirteen, George Washington, River’s Edge, The 400 Blows, Leolo, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, DAZED AND CONFUSED, Ghost World, The Butcher Boy, My Life as a Dog, Spellbound, Freeze, Die, Come Back to Life, Heathers . . .

  6. I haven’t been on in a couple of days . . . I would love to take you up on your Miami offer. I’m putting cash away monthly. Is February the best month?

  7. february is the best month. march, too. january, possibly. april, as well. may can go either way. i make my boat available for late-afternoon expeditions to cuba for mojitos!

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