Day Fifty-Six: Sunshine Cleaning

SUNSHINE CLEANING

Starring:
-Amy Adams
-Emily Blunt
-Alan Arkin

Directed by: Christine Jeffs

Screenplay Credits: Megan Holley

MPAA Rating: R – language, disturbing images, some sexuality and drug use


Rose Lorkowski and her slacker sister Norah have stumbled into the crime scene clean-up business. Rose needs money to get her “imaginative” son Oscar into a better school and Norah’s just kind of a loser who’s out of a job.

Rose befriends a one-armed model maker who runs a cleaning supplies store, and she’s having an affair with her old high school sweetheart who is now married to a real b with a witch on it.

The movie follows the sisters’ exploits as they struggle to make their business a success. It doesn’t turn out too well, as Norah manages to burn one of their client’s homes down. It’s not all bad, because she saves a cute kitten. So yay! But anyway, Rose is pretty ticked off because now she owes like 40,000 bucks. In the end, Norah and her new kitty go off on a road trip to find themselves and Rose gets back into the clean-up scene, only this time she’s got a new name and a new partner…her eccentric salesman father (Alan Arkin).


Amy Adams is just as cute as a speckled puppy and when it’s time for her big meltdown scene toward the end she really breaks your heart. You feel bad for this adorable woman with the toned body and volumized hair.

I love Steve Zahn, but in this movie he plays a dog. A mean a real dirty old egg-sucking hound. Not an actual dog, you know. But like, a really immoral man.

Anyhow, this one has its merits and I guess I like it okay, but it isn’t one of my new favorites. I love the device with the mother and her bit part in a made for TV movie. That was a really cool element. Oscar got on my nerves a little bit, but that’s just because I don’t like it when parents can’t control their kids in public. It is for the same reason that I have never seen that John Ritter movie about the bad kid they adopt. I’m telling you, if I ever had a kid that like, the only thing they’d have in their bedroom was a mattress and a Bible. But that’s a rant for another day.

What was that movie called, anyway? PROBLEM CHILD? I know it was something like that. Justin, you’ll probably know.


FINAL GRADE: B-

Off in search of fancy corn,

M.