The producers of Little Miss Sunshine make another quirky family-comedy-drama with Alan Arkin in a supporting role. Sunshine Cleaning stars Amy Adams (Doubt, Enchanted) and Brit Emily Blunt (Devil Wears Prada) as sisters that don’t get along, but come together in their need of quick cash. Police Officer Steve Zahn (Rescue Dawn) gives them a heads up on money to be made by cleaning up crime scenes. Little Miss Sunshine is funnier, but Sunshine Cleaning is far more emotional. It’s about dealing with the love, happiness, frustration, and pain in a dysfunctional family in the real world. At 91 minutes, it’s not overly spoon-fed and quite recommended.
Posts Tagged Family
Sunshine Cleaning
Feb 11
I have been underwhelmed with DC Universe direct-to-video features since the end of Bruce Timm’s Justice League series. Green Lantern: First Flight is a return to form. GLFF retells the origin story of Hal Jordan, the first Green Lantern (not John Stewart, who took up the Green Lantern mantel in Justice League). The animation, action and acting are each top-notch and the story is surprisingly nuanced. GLFF is not a crossover movie–it won’t change the minds of anyone uninterested in watching animated superhero movies. For the rest of us, I highly recommend it.
Avatar (Real-D 3-D)
Jan 1
James Cameron directs an ambitious science fiction epic about human efforts to wrest mineral-rich deposits from the tribal denizens of a jungle planet, called Pandora. Critics of Avatar will note that its ambitions are limited to its visuals and that the story never diverges from its archetypal roots: there is an earnest human soldier and a fierce warrior princess; there is an aggro human general for whom explosives solve all conflict; and there are “spirit trees.” Strictly speaking, the criticism is not misplaced: every beat of the story can be predicted by anyone paying marginal attention, and the characterizations are paper thin.
But while we have seen this story before, we have never seen it like this. Avatar depicts Pandora with an unprecedented level of visual richness; it never feels like a slapdash of expensive computer-generated effects. Go see Avatar because it feels like being transported; you will not to see anything like it for years to come.
The Harry Potter films continue their (generally) upward quality trend. The cuts keep getting smarter. By dropping the least endearing bits of the series, the lengthy book is condensed to an easy 2.5 hours. Only the purest Harry Potter nerds will mourn the loss of Harry’s previously obligatory self-pity. Some will retch at the teen soap opera that takes center stage, but again, the cuts “keep it light,” retaining the cute moments of affection, but dropping the burdensome angst that went along with it in the books and prior films. This is my favorite Potter thus far.
But all of the above is irrelevant because, by now, the sorting has has already placed you into one camp or the other: You are either Someone Who Watches Harry Potter Movies or you are Someone Who Does Not Watch Harry Potter Movies. If you skipped the Sorcerer’s Stone, the Chamber of Secrets, the Prisoner of Azkaban, the Goblet of Fire and the Order of the Phoenix, you will not make time for the penultimate chapter. But if you have followed Harry, Ron and Hermione through a five movie journey, stop kidding yourself: You will watch The Half Blood Prince and the remaining two films as well.