Sunshine Cleaning :)

[CaliBlonde]

Has anyone heard about Sunshine Cleaning ?? It comes out today and I can't wait to see it! I'm a huge fan of Little Miss Sunshine and this movie is by the same people... I love the humor.

If you haven't seen the trailer yet... here it is>> Sunshine Cleaning (http://www.hollywood.com/trailer/5329378/Sunshine_Cleaning)

[Tzarinna]

I saw it last night. It's a dark comedy, Amy Adams is very convincing, Alan Arkin was funny. The little kid was adorable, and I liked the one arm guy too, Collins Jr.

[Tolkien]

I heard good things about it and want to see it. Should've made this a review thread with a poll.

[unity768]

trailer looked good

[Steve from Indy]

I want to see this. I'll have to wait for it to come to our local Landmark art cinema.

[Daniel]

I am direly anticipating this one. Gotta wait for a release date here in Austin, though.

[CaliBlonde]

I am direly anticipating this one. Gotta wait for a release date here in Austin, though.

Yeah, looks like you will have to wait until the 27th to see it in Austin. I was pretty surprised at how few cities it came out in... luckily for me I live in Los Angeles... so we usually get every single movie.

I still haven't seen it yet though... might see it Weds or wait until next week when it opens at the theater closest to me...

I was happy to see that it's getting great reviews though :)

Review: Sunshine Cleaning (http://www.hollywood.com/review/Sunshine_Cleaning/5410491)

[LuvMiTux]

I enjoy both Amy Adams and Emily Blunt so I have high hopes for this film. I know it has something to do with cleaning up crime scenes but that's about it really.

[Steve from Indy]

So this was okay. It didn't blow me away, but I enjoyed it.

[Silent Yoda]

Yeah, it won't be a sleeper hit like Little Miss Sunshine, but it was still a decent little indie film. I think all the performances were great. It's definitely worth a rental at the very least.

[CaliBlonde]

I finally saw it last night and I LOVED it! I thought it was very well written and the perfect combination of comedy and depth. Amy Adams and Emily Blunt were perfect cast to play sisters... their natural on-screen chemistry was incredible and reminded me of me and my own sister! Also, Oscar (Rose's son) was so adorable!!!

I definitely recommend seeing it... For me, it was the best movie I've seen this year!

[Drizzt240]

I thought it was very genuine movie.

Adams and Arkman are both great in the film. The film never takes itself too seriously, but displays a lot of raw emotion. Not very accessible nor mainstream. The film focuses on women issues. Motherhood, sisterhood, daughterhood, lesbian and coventional relationships, women independence. Saw it with a girl friends and she really seemed to enjoy it.

This was a very enjoyable film that will probably be overlooked.

7/10

[unity768]

Call me a sucker, but I regularly enjoy these festival circuit flicks. I was warned this would play out something like "Little Miss Sunshine." It is from the same producers and co-stars Alan Arkin, playing basically the same role he played in 2006. Amy Adams continues to shine. Her Oscar nominated work in the superior "Junebug" and "Doubt" are no flukes; she is a very promising talent. I have not seen too much of Emily Blunt's work, so she was a mystery for me coming in. "Sunshine Cleaning" seems to be tackling a tough task, maybe a task too large for its own good. Dysfunctional families, finding yourself, recovering from the past, reliance on strangers, and death is all touched on throughout director Christine Jeffs 91 minute film. "Little Miss Sunshine" succeeded because it had a sense of balance. You laughed a lot but you also felt for those characters. "Sunshine Cleaning" tries to invoke some of the same emotions the Oscar nominated "Miss Sunshine" had embedded. With a mediocre script from newcomer Megan Holley, and inconsistent direction from Jeffs, "Sunshine Cleaning" is saved from collapsing onto itself based solely on the performances from leads Amy Adams and Emily Blunt.

The plot unfolds in Albuquerque, New Mexico with a scope inside two sisters' lives. Rose (Adams) is working as a house cleaner. She has a son who seems to be too creative to stay in one school consistently. Does acting like a kid ever get you in trouble like this? She is single but attends to an affair with her ex-high school boyfriend Mac, whose a cop. He has a wife and family for him back home. She runs into one of her lost high school friends when on the job. Rose tells her friend about the interest she has in real estate, while seemingly trying to form a facade around her troubling life. She is still stuck in the good times from ten years ago. Her younger sister Norah has a darker, more edgier personality. She is fired in the opening reels from her job. With Rose trying to conjure up cash for her sons private school, and Norah's lack of income, the two are in dire straits for cash. Luckily, Mac is able to hook the two up with a job cleaning up murder scenes. Lots and lots and lots of blood to clean for good money. There is cheery music in the background that is suppose to make us happy for these two. Is that possible?

"Sunshine Cleaning" has a lot of little issue-orientated ideas within its narrative that do not seem to add up to much. The most obvious deals with the the two women and their struggle with direction in life. This is probably the most unbalanced of the bunch. We get a lot of screen time with Rose. We get to know what she actually does during the course of a day. Single women everywhere can probably relate to Rose and what she goes through. Leaving her kid with her eccentric but caring father, cleaning up blood, real estate dreams, financial issues, and the loss of self dignity is all easily shown within this character arc. Amy Adams seems to be the driving force behind this triumph. The material she has to work with is mediocre at best, but she is the rare kind of performer that can lift material to other, unimaginable levels. Emily Blunt is good here...really good, but by the end of the film I could not help but wonder where this character was going or more importantly, who she really was. I wanted a larger scope here but director Jeffs instead throws Norah to a subplot dealing with unhealed wounds from the past.

After cleaning a house where a woman had died, Norah uncovers the identity of the deceases' daughter. She forms a weird relationship with this daughter, played by Mary Lynn Rajskub. This arc is handled very oddly. One the one hand, we eventually get an explanation as to why Norah began this friendship. On the other hand, there is a big gap spearing through dealing with the absence of closure. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for ambiguity. I actually wrote a strong essay on "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and why it should have ended when Huck consciously decides to free his runaway slave pal Jim. But the story presented longs for a sense a closure. The script from Holley is chuck full of holes like this. There is a man named Winston, played by Clifton Collins Jr. who Rose drops her son Oscar off with while she attends to an old friend's baby shower. Winston has one arm. This might be borderline nitpicking, but why must he have one arm? Just wrote in a random guy with one arm as a side character? I guess so.

Furthermore, there are some aspects to "Sunshine Cleaning" that work. In fact, they work so well that it was tough for me to write this review with mixed feelings. Rose and Norah come to a house where an old lady had just lost her husband. Rose has a moment with the older woman that is purely poignant and bittersweet. Additionally, towards the tale end there is a scene that showcases the wonderful talents that Adams and Blunt have in there arsenals. This was the first time where the script seemed to go punch for punch with the performers. The conversation feels very real and authentic. But perhaps "Sunshine Cleaning" tries too hard to invoke comedy. For me, the darker material worked better than the lighter fluff that seemed to come off not so much a distraction but a disguise. "Rachel Getting Married," one of the better films of last year, was able to hold a strong balance between sorrow and optimism. It shows that it can be done when in the proper hands.

Maybe there are too many films in this genre that are just plain better than "Sunshine Cleaning." It isn't a bad film. Adams and Blunt are terrific. Arkin got some chuckles out of me while young child actor Jason Spevack is irresistibly cute and warm as Rose's eight year old son. Director Jeffs is trying to pull on your emotions in two different directions, and the comedy sadly drowns the drama. There are two different conclusions for Rose and Norah, and only one is satisfying. Perhaps this is proper. Why not? Instead of being consistently intelligent lets be consistently uneven. Well, at least they were consistent.

Stars (out of four): **1/2

[Daniel]

Not going to say alot ... movie was better than I expected, but not a masterpiece or nearly as good as "Little Miss Sunshine." The acting was really good and the story was nice, but this movie felt a little ... quaint.

Above average and enjoyable. 7/10.

[IanTheCool]

I was getting pretty bored with this movie. I actually thought about taking a nap until the end. It really wasn't that great. The acting by Adams was really quite good, but not enough to save this. Alan Arkin was essentially playing the same character he played in Little Miss Sunshine. The story was nothing special and just reached for toomuch sentimentality. Emily Blunt was too quirky and it didn't work. The side story with the grandpa and son also didn't work. The plight of these characters was layered on too thickly and the ending was wrapped up too nicely.

5/10

[carnage4u]

i thought it was an interesting story. Nothing over ally amazing or special. Not really sure what I expected when I rented it. Just heard it was something worth seeing.


7ish/10

[SMS]

Mildly entertaining, but I felt as though they tried to tackle too many issues at once - finding a sense of purpose, the importance of a family unit, independence and shedding the need for approval from others, finding love... It was too much for 88 minutes. Amy Adams and whoever played her sister were excellent. Definitely a lot of similarities to Little Miss Sunshine.

[pixiness]

I enjoyed it, felt it was genuine and really liked the little monologue at the end when Amy Adams is explaining what she does for a living and why. But I can't really say that I found it even darkly "funny". It certainly didn't give me any of the little chuckle moments that little miss sunshine did. But - don't let that be a reason for anyone NOT to watch it. It was still thoroughly enjoyable.

[todd philip]

This is an odd timed thread, anyway, to me this film ends right when it starts to get good and funny! I would of loved to watch more of Alan Arkin cleaning up scenes.

[Tolkien]

While I found it to be a quite enjoyable film, I do agree that it ended too soon.

8/10