Grizzly Humor Can Be Touching Humor Too!
Story: The storyline follows two sisters who start a business of cleaning up crime scenes, despite having no knowledge of the profession. This sounds like it should be the beginning of a farce or a very, very dark comedy. Sunshine Cleaning is neither... okay there is a significant amount of dark humor, but over all the movie is actually quite touching. It's mostly about not living up to the expectations that others have of you and finding your own way to happiness, even that path means cleaning up disgusting body parts along the way. This movie has a lot of heart to it but I also laughed my ass off, so props to the story department. My only complaint is that the story about the mother of Amy Adams and Emily Blunt's characters wasn't quite as subtle as everything else in this movie and I think that might have helped some. B
Acting: I wanted to see this movie because Amy Adams was in it. So, she sold me on it and completely delivered. Emily Blunt does a great of playing her sister, and she sports a very good American accent in this movie. Alan Arkin always brings the goods. Clifton Collins Jr. plays a very good, very subtle character, quite different from his very loud but equally good performance in Boondock Saints II. Absolutely no complaints from the acting department. A!
Direction: This is movie felt gritty without being too depressing. Like walking into the life or lives of people with the worst luck in the world, and yet they're so optimistic that you firmly believe that they're going to make it out okay. This doesn't really detract from the drama either. Some scenes felt a little heavy handed, but by and large Christine Jeffs got the job done. B
Visuals: This movie was very brown. People wore lots of brown, the buildings were brown, and sky and walls all seemed to be parked somewhere between tan and brown. Even Amy's hair seemed more brown than red, suggesting a filter on the camera. This was obviously deliberate, and I'm going to guess that the symbolism in using lots of earth tones was meant to make the movie seem normal, possibly even bland looking, in order to contrast the quirky, bizarre storyline. I have something of a celebrity crush on Amy Adams and very enjoyed her scenes with Steve Zahn because of it (and yes, I'm tossing this in the visuals category). B
Overall: I really liked this movie and I can't think of anyone who wouldn't, or perhaps that should be 'shouldn't,' because realistically speaking, there's bound to be someone who from the action movie crowd who thinks this is boring and too emotional, and there's bound to be some crusader for clean entertainment who objects to the subject matter, and to all them I say, “Screw you! Give the movie a chance, you'll enjoy it!” I think that you should see this movie. It's well worth at least fifteen bucks. B
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