Sunshine Cleaning’s a Little Cloudy

Sunshine Cleaning feels like a movie you’ve seen before – probably because you have. It’s a murky blend of two better movies: Little Miss Sunshine and In Her Shoes (and probably a dozen others). But what saves Sunshine Cleaning from falling victim to forgotten indie syndrome is its dazzling leading ladies: the always charming Amy Adams (Enchanted) and quickly up and coming star Emily Blunt (Devil Wears Prada). Their super-large expressive eyes are what keep the tired plot from seeming commonplace. You want for these women who find their own little pieces of salvation and confidence in the morbid business of crime scene clean-up.

Like Little Miss Sunshine, Sunshine Cleaning is chock full of quirky moments and lost souls. Its dark comedic moments are never really funny, they’re often too troubling for that, yet somehow they make you laugh. And its redemptive spirit is nothing exceptional as far as movie plots go, but it feels exceptional for these characters. Then there’s Alan Arkin, playing the same yelling grandpa role he played in LMS. It’s a particular kind of type casting he’s found himself stuck in.

But more than LMS, Sunshine Cleaning reminded me of In Her Shoes for its sisters and their burdensome relationship. They lost their mother young – and like another Rose and her little sister – never seem to get over the loss in their adult lives so they find solace in cleaning up the tragedies in other peoples. They screw up, fight, make up, and battle through their abandonment issues and tragically low self-esteem.

Amy Adams is a single mom, still sleeping with the high school boyfriend (the always underappreciated Steve Zahn) who dumped her for his wife long ago.  Her son’s been kicked out of school – again – for licking things, and she doesn’t have the money to send him to private school. So she forgoes the real estate license she’s pursuing for the crime scene clean up business. Plus she’s tired of being a maid, especially for the people she went to high school with who married well, while she peaked as captain of the high school cheerleading team. But her Sunshine Cleaning gives her the opportunity to help others and herself, and revive her self-worth.

However, it is relative newcomer Emily Blunt who steals the show. Her devil may care personality masks a truly unhappy little girl, the kind who’d keep the old photographs of a dead woman and track down her daughter.  Her wide, darkly lined eyes give way to an unnerving deep sadness while her sardonic sense of humor keeps her loveable and charming.  Ultimately, it’s Blunt’s brilliance that keeps Sunshine Cleaning from becoming too cloudy.

So Sunshine Cleaning may not be the indie sleeper hit I was hoping it would be, but it was decent enough fare for a rainy afternoon – a simple and sweet flick about the sunshine after the rain.

Click here for Jaimie’s review!

Sunshine Cleaning

Sunshine Cleaning is strange. Not exactly a drama, with its light tone and some easy laughs. And it’s not a comedy, because of all the Amy Adams-I’m-going-to-cry-no-I’m-not-faces that come before and after bad news. Is it me, or does she always look like that? So it falls somewhere in between, and I hate to use the word “dramedy,” because I don’t think the movie pulls strongly enough in either direction to warrant that throwaway term. It’s funny, but it’s not funny, and it’s dramatic and sad, but I think because someone read the “how to write a drama” handbook and pulled out the typical elements and threw them all together. A light-hearted drama with no catharsis? What’s the point?

It is the kind of movie you can’t recommend that anyone see in the theater, but then, you can’t recommend that they don’t watch it at all. Is it DVD-worthy only? Or was Emily Blunt’s refreshing turn as the rebel sibling worth sending your friends out to see now? I think it might be, but then I remember that Amy Adams is Amy Adams and she’s a little draining with her ever-quivering lip (but still more entertaining than expected). Is that her fault, or the script’s?

It’s a nice movie, even with the death and the blood, neither of which shows up as often as you’d think. The trailers led me to believe the film would be more “Adventures in Crime-Scene Cleaning and Babysitting,” but funny and with heart. However, I think it’s supposed to be more about finding out who you are and that you are good enough, smart enough, and gosh darnit, people like you…or they would, if they hadn’t succeeded after high school where you didn’t.

The bio-hazard storyline might be unusual, but the rest of the film isn’t. Poor, hard working single mother with a slightly negligent dad, a precocious son and an irresponsible sibling becomes the missing mother for the whole family, but doesn’t have it all together herself. She doesn’t feel she’s good enough for the people around her until she realizes that if she just believes in herself, then that’s the real key to happiness. Oh and somewhere along the way, she’s actually helping other people, and isn’t that the real reward that all the soccer moms and cheating husbands are missing?

We’ve all seen the character and plot elements before, and we can guess how the film ends and the choices people make before they do. A little cliché. Just a little, though, because even with Amy Adams, the strength of this film lies in its actors, who make the usual dialogue sound fresh, and the usual choices seem spontaneous. I’m pretty sure Alan Arkin plays the same character here as he did in Little Miss Sunshine, but who cares because he’s a joy to watch no matter what he does. The movie really belongs to Emily Blunt, who provides a nice contrast to Adams and who adds layers of depth to an overplayed, archetypal role – even though, sadly, we’ll never know what many of those layers hold.

So I recommend that you try Sunshine Cleaning. In the theaters? At home? If you find yourself with nothing to see on a weekend afternoon, then this is a nice one to check out. I expect you’ll enjoy yourself. You just won’t be blown away by anything. But then, they don’t all have to be blockbusters, do they?
Click here for Kaitlyn’s review!

Life: Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant

To be perfectly honest, I have a really hard time writing about this show. The reason for that is simple: I’m in love. When I try and express what I feel and what I think about Life, my brain shuts off. I can’t find the words. My heart races whenever each episode starts and I feel like I can’t breathe. It’s the first thing I think of when I go to bed and the first thing I think of when I wake up. There hasn’t been a single episode thus far that hasn’t made me laugh hysterically, get goosebumps and cry at least a couple of times (to be clear, when I say cry, I don’t mean whiny sobs, just little manly water sprinkles). I would take a bullet to save this show, no questions asked.

With that out of the way, now I’ll try to do some honest to goodness reviewing. The catalyst for this week’s perfect episode is the discovery of a family man who is found brutally murdered and bound to a chair at the bottom of an empty pool. (One of the great things about Life is that each crime of the week is very visual and economically sets up the conflict without relying on over-the-top visual effects like CSI.) It appears to be a gang hit, but Crews and Reese visit the dead man’s family and learn from the youngest daughter that the father went to go pick up the oldest daughter from a party-that’s where he was killed. To find out more, Crews goes undercover in a place he knows all too well: prison. He overhears two inmates talking about the steroid monster who murdered the man.

Crews and Reese track the steroids to a posh (and shady) gym in Beverly Hills and quickly finger the perps: a group of rich punks who think they are above the law. They think they own the world, and that they can have everything they want…all the time. Crews and Reese’ job is to show them they’re wrong, but their task isn’t easy. The evil trio is aided by their money and by the unethical and immoral therapist who sees them all and gives them alibis. In an awesome scene, Crews goads the steroid freak of the group into assaulting him so they can arrest him and start squeezing the slimy shrink and the rest of the group.

As always, it’s a true delight to see how the villains test Crews and Reese and how the unlikely partners work together to solve the case-Crews with his unconventional tactics and quirks and Reese with her toughness, self-sufficiency and unbendable force of will.

But there’s way more to the episode than just all that. Crews tries to break through to Rachel Seybolt-the psychologically damaged young girl who was the sole witness to the crime for which Crews was wrongfully convicted-whom Jack Reese hid until Crews found her at the end of last week’s episode. Toward this end, he enlists the reluctant help of his ex-wife Jennifer (who also knew Rachel twelve years ago before her family was killed). Jennifer divorced Crews while he was still in prison but he still loves her, and finally they reconnect in this episode in a wonderful scene that is incredibly poignant without feeling unbelievable or conveniently staged.

And in the most disturbing scene, Jack Reese tries to turn Crews’ loveable friend/roommate/money manager/conspiracy-investigative helper Ted against Crews by threatening to get him sent back to prison. This is a twist I never ever saw coming and is even further testament to the show’s brilliant brilliant brilliant writing. We know that Ted owes Crews his life and cares deeply for him, so when we see him thinking about selling out Crews to Jack Reese to save himself, we feel for both Crews and Ted. That being said Ted (hey that rhymes), if you turn on Crews I will find a way to metaphysically jump into the TV and I will happily kill you. Don’t do it.

This show is as good as anything that has ever been on the air, and if you’re not watching it, you’re committing a crime and should be locked up. You’re harming humanity, you’re being evil. To paraphrase Edmund Burke, the only thing necessary for evil to prevail is if good people do nothing. So watch the show and don’t let NBC kill it. Please.

Season 2, Episode 2: Everything…All The Time (originally aired 10/3/08)

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays at 9/8c, NBC
Photographs courtesy of www.nbc.com

Life: Perfect “Life” Returns

“Life was his sentence, and life was what he got back.”

Normally I would try and write something semi-formal and organized, but I’m just going to get to the point, because we don’t have a lot of time. Here it is: This show freakin’ rocks. Life—created by Rand Ravich and starring the superb Damian Lewis, the wonderful Sara Shahi, and the enchanting Adam Arkin—is one of the most consistently enjoyable, electrifying, clever, creative, original, and just plain amazing television shows I’ve ever seen. Ever. And I watch a lot of TV.

And because it is all those things I just said, it is predestined to be cancelled by the genius suits at NBC, who are afraid of the show and don’t know what to do with it. They will murder it, and I can’t let that happen. We can’t let that happen. I’m asking someone…anyone…everyone: help me save it.

For those who have never seen the show—and there are far, far too many of you—Life revolves around protagonist Charlie Crews, a cop who has returned to the force after serving twelve years in maximum security prison for a crime he didn’t commit: the murder of a fellow cop friend and his family. Advances in DNA evidence cleared Crews of the charges, and, with the invaluable guidance of his loyal (and beautiful) attorney Constance Griffiths (Brooke Langton), Crews secured a multimillion-dollar wrongful imprisonment settlement.

Crews—richer than God and obsessed with fresh fruit after a twelve-year prison sludge diet—rejoins the LAPD to track down and take down the people who killed his friends and set him up for it. Also, as Crews says at one point, when he was locked up and getting beaten to within an inch of his life, thinking that he was still a cop was the only thing that kept him going. Crews turned to Zen in prison to try to stay (barely) sane, and now constantly spouts confounding, philosophical Zeni-sms, much to the irritation of his new partner Dani Reese (Shahi), who was assigned to work with Crews because she was at the bottom of the department’s barrel after getting hooked on drugs while she was undercover and botching up her operation. If you want to make the Lethal Weapon comparison, Crews is to Reese what Riggs was to Murtaugh.

The third principal character is Ted Earley (Arkin), a former CEO who was imprisoned for insider trading. Charlie took Ted under his wing while they were in prison and kept him alive, and as gratitude, Ted now lives in a room above Charlie’s garage and manages his money for him. Life is character-driven to an amazing degree, and the performances are all stellar. Damian Lewis especially is a revelation as Charlie Crews. This show should be on HBO, not a major network. The quality is that strong.

It manages to do what CSI and all of its spin-offs, and the myriad of other procedural shows on the networks cannot: it transcends the procedural formula with the strength and uniqueness of its characters (even more so than House). You’re never aware that you’re watching a cop show when viewing Life, although the weekly crimes are always offbeat and entertaining. The real hook of the show is watching Crews use his Zen mindset to solve the cases and try to decipher the complex conspiracy behind the dirty cops who set him up. There is the A storyline (the crime of the week) and the B storyline (Charlie’s conspiracy), and unlike most shows that involve a complex mythology or serial storyline, with every episode you see Charlie get closer and closer (last season’s finale saw him make a huge leap forward). As a viewer you are rewarded promptly, and that is a tremendously rare and satisfying experience.

If you’ve never watched the show, you will feel a little lost during the second season premiere, which finds Crews and Reese trying to find a killer who is locking people up in numbered boxes all over L.A. until they suffocate and still dealing with the aftermath of last season’s finale. You can definitely still enjoy it, but to really get the character dynamics and complex backstories and interrelationships you owe it to yourself to watch the 11-episode first season (all available for free on hulu.com). I haven’t addressed the show’s style (e.g. showing Charlie always standing in bright light, trying to make up for the darkness of the last dozen years and incorporating Errol Morris-like documentary segments interviewing acquaintances of Charlie into the narrative proceedings) or plot specifics from the season premiere or recapped last season, because I want others to have the chance to feel the surge of excitement I have gotten to feel with every episode of Life. That surge comes from knowing you are discovering a work of art that is fresh, exciting, fun, and original.

Life is endangered. Give it a chance, and let’s band together as lovers of brilliant TV and save it.

Season 2, Episode 1: Find Your Happy Place (original aired 9/27/08)

For another take on Life, see Elma Rahman’s review here.

For more on Life, click here.

Wednesdays 9/8c, NBC
Photographs courtesy of www.nbc.com