The Chumscrubber

Think of Desperate Housewives meets South Park. Marc Cherry's take on the suburbs was supposed to be a morphing of Sex In The City to, basically, sex in the suburbs. Less Cul-de-Sac and more Cult and Sack, this film has an even darker tone and covers not just the secret lives of housewives but goes into the lives of the kids they and their self-absorbed husbands bring up. If you're expecting a chick flick because it features some staples of the genre, Glenn Close and Rita Wilson, think again. The violence is stark and seems to come out of nowhere.

If you really want to see the stark reality of disconnected people living in Utopias of manicured lawns and Ionic columns, check out The Ice Storm or American Beauty. This film has none of the whimsy, the characters are all a bit too weird. It's not enough to make the lawns recognizable, the people have to be genuine. I couldn't find one character in this film that felt real to me. The extremities were believable in The Graduate but, Jamie Bell (from Billy Elliot) is no Dustin Hoffman and doesn't portray the irony as well.

Director Arie Posin, a first-time director, helps us understand some of the pointless nuances, making the DVD at least less of a waste of time than a trip to the theater would have been. I did like the fact that the film covers a wide range of characters and perspectives and weaves them together well. I happen to like watching the suburbs held up to ridicule so for me, I'm not sorry I ordered it on Netflix. But, unless you're a disaffected youth, I wouldn't buy this one.