I Have to See This Film - Thumbsucker

The writer-director has a blog. He could be speaking for me in this quote from the Salon article (yeah, you need to watch the ad).

"American Beauty" I completely hate. I find it a really reprehensible movie because it's making fun of people that live there. I don't respond to "Donnie Darko" at all, because its quirkiness overtakes any sense of reality. But "Ordinary People" I watched a lot. "Ice Storm" I watched a lot. Those are two suburban movies I would embrace. And while mine has certain visual gags, I guess, I'm more in that camp.

I get compared to "Donnie Darko" every frickin' day. That and "Garden State," another movie I hate. I'm not going to argue with the audience. But my take on suburbia is that I have no interest in picking on people, or saying they're "dysfunctional." I hate that phrase. As if there's a family that's functional, you know? It's a very George Bush way to be looking at family: Evil is to be killed, and good will go to heaven.

I grew up in a 1910 Spanish colonial house, but I walked home every day through developments like that, and had this projection that there was all this happiness and togetherness that I didn't feel like I had. So I'm a little bit like the Lars von Trier of America: It's this imaginary thing. But it's very real, and it's still very hard for me to look at the suburbs and understand that it's not as perfect or as well integrated as it seems. That's a 6-year-old's problem, but it's still in me.

Badass, muthafucker. He gets it.