'The Chumscrubber' is a re-make of 'American Beauty'...the cast of 'The Chumscrubber' even includes Allison Janney as a weird mom, and the story partially concludes with a court trial, which was how 'American Beauty' ended whilst in script form.
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"The Chumscrubber" is a re-make of "American Beauty" (which itself is a re-make of a lot of other movies). "American Beauty" won a lot of Oscars and other awards. Perhaps the people at DreamWorks thought that they could strike gold twice with the same material, so DreamWorks picked up some of the distribution rights to "The Chumscrubber" via its Go Fish unit (which formerly distributed only Japanese animation).
"American Beauty" is about teenagers, one of whom is a drug dealer, who have strained relationships with their parents, who are mostly dis-associated from reality. The characters are mostly neighbors who become involved in a series of mis-understandings that lead to a ghastly crime. The movie attacks suburbia even though it´s clear that the moviemakers find suburban life comforting.
"The Chumscrubber" is about a bunch of teenage drug addicts who have strained relationships with their parents, who are mostly dis-associated from reality. The characters are mostly neighbors who become involved in a series of mis-understandings that lead to a ghastly crime. The movie attacks suburbia even though it´s clear that the moviemakers find suburban life comforting--probably because they´ve never left its safe confines, which turns the movie´s attitude towards suburbia into a lie. For good measure, the cast of "The Chumscrubber" even includes Allison Janney as a weird mom, and the story partially concludes with a court trial, which was how "American Beauty" ended whilst in script form.
The key difference in the ways that "American Beauty" and "The Chumscrubber" satirize suburban life is that the former laughed with its characters while the latter laughs at its characters. Laughing at your subject matter is an artistically valid position, but you can´t laugh at your subjects only to end up loving them. That is a dis-honest and savagely ugly approach to telling a story; that is certainly no way to treat your viewers, whom you invited to share in your contempt for life only to say, "Hey, there´s a lot of good in life after all."
The main character is a high-school boy who discovers that his best friend committed suicide by hanging himself. The dead boy used to sell his schoolmates drugs, and a group of bullies want the main character to find the dead boy´s drugs. This is a set-up for a kidnapping and a series of contrived coincidences. Using coincidences is very popular lately, as seen with TV shows like "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and Paul Haggis´s "Crash" (2005). In and of themselves, there´s nothing wrong with coincidences, but like all other storytelling tools, coincidences must be deployed artfully to avoid criticisms. In "The Chumscrubber", coincidences are combined with one-dimensional caricatures so unbelievable that I didn´t want to see just one or two of the characters die. Rather, I wanted to see the premise of the TV show "The Chumscrubber" come true--apocalypse.
The title "The Chumscrubber" refers to a cartoon show/character that is popular with the teenage characters. The Chumscrubber appears in a few (likely drug-induced) hallucinations. The moviemakers didn´t really know what to do with their self-contained allusion, so the concept of referring to The Chumscrubber never really accomplishes anything.
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