Sunshine Cleaning - Review

There are so many superficial similarities between Sunshine Cleaning and that fellow Sundance success, Little Miss Sunshine, that the new movie was probably doomed from the start. It's all too easy for snide critics to point out the cute kid, charming old grandpa played by Alan Arkin, desert setting and quirky family drama, and deduce that Sunshine Cleaning is just another mishmash of indie tropes trying to cash in on the success of that movie with the big yellow van.

While it's true that Sunshine Cleaning indulges in a little too much quirk, and is not as good as Little Miss Sunshine, the new movie starring Amy Adams and Emily Blunt has a lot to recommend it, starting with the honest performances from its two leads. As two very different sisters scrabbling out a living in dusty Albuquerque, Blunt and Adams build a believable rapport between them, and each digs deep in their characters to give the audience a view into their difficult, lonely lives.

Adams is Rose, a single mom raising an oddball son (Jason Spevack) by working for a cleaning service, and keeping her social life on hold while she engages in an affair with her married high school boyfriend (Steve Zahn). He's the one who gives her the idea to go into crime scene cleanup, and motivated by the chance to re-imagine herself as an entrepreneur, she talks her slacker sister Norah (Blunt) into joining the business.

Norah and Rose are incredibly inept at first, and the movie indulges a little in some blood-and-guts sight gags before taking the sisters in some unexpected directions thanks to the new job. Rose turns out to be really good at the business, and imbued with some of the can-do spirit from her entrepreneurial dad (Alan Arkin), she uses the business as means to get the rest of her life in order. She ditches the ex, works up the guts to attend a baby shower held by a ritzy former classmate, and starts a very tentative, warm flirtation with the guy who sells their heavy-duty cleaning supplies (Clifton Collins Jr.). Norah, on the other hand, is much more emotionally affected by the crime scenes they clean, and finds herself in a semi-romantic friendship with the daughter (Mary Lynn Rajskub) of a suicide victim.

Megan Holley's screenplay slips into stilted language and awkward coincidence sometimes, especially in the subplot that finds Rose and Norah recovering from their mother's suicide when they were children. Where other parts of the movie capture so much realism, from dingy parties to the tyranny of school principals, it's a ridiculous notion that two sisters struggling to get over a death that happened 25 years earlier would go into crime scene cleanup. As a result some of the key moments of the film, in which Rose and Norah are supposed to have found inner peace and new realizations about themselves, ring hollow and cliched.

But director Christine Jeffs is great with her actors, and takes a light, witty approach to the material that largely steers the movie away from the maudlin. Every time one of the characters does something unbelievable, like talking to her dead mom through a CB radio, Jeffs inserts a clever camera angle or well-timed edit to pull the mood back from the brink. Sunshine Cleaning avoids a tidy ending, and despite being cute redheads, Rose and Norah emerge as genuinely complicated, not always likable characters. Beyond the over-reliance on easy quirks, there's an intent toward real storytelling at the heart of Sunshine Cleaning that sets it above typical indie schmaltz.

Bee Movie - Review

DreamWorks may have messed up on the title for Bee Movie. Oh they got it half right, it is about bees after all, but it’s not so much a movie. Instead, Jerry Seinfeld has jotted down a few fairly obvious bee observations and then paid a bunch of incredibly talented artists to animate them. There’s not much of a story to string those observations together and what story there is, well it’s bee-buzzingly silly.

Actually, silly may be a somewhat generous term for what’s going on here. Stupid may be a better one. It starts rationally enough, with the movie taking us inside the secret lives of bees inside a bee hive. Barry B. Benson (voiced by Jerry Seinfeld) is a newly graduated bee about to select the job he’ll do in his hive, a job he’ll do until the hive quite literally works him to death. Barry, unlike all the other buzzing bugs around him, finds this prospect somewhat unsatisfying and the film seems on the verge taking its audience down the path of some grand social statement about corporatism and working a life of drudgery for very little reward. It’s also sort of funny, with the Seinfeld co-written script making cute bee related gags, about on par with the sort of corny gunk you’d see on an episode of The Flintstones, only with a much funnier, wry, Seinfeld twist.

Then in a moment of pure cinematic exhilaration, Bee Movie tosses all of that as Barry flies out of his hive for the first time into a wide open world; a world where quite literally everyone is certifiably insane. I’m not just talking about insane from the point of view of a bee; I’m talking all American, grade “A” crazy. Bee Movie stops making any sense. Barry starts talking to a human named Vanessa (voiced by Renee Zellweger). Vanessa reacts appropriately, with utter shock and amazement. They form a relationship, and Barry talks her into helping him sue honey manufacturers for stealing bee honey. That’s right, this is a courtroom movie. With almost no effort Barry is suddenly arguing before a human judge and jury, who unlike Vanessa, are surprisingly accepting of the notion that bees are intelligent and can not only talk, but make a pretty mean legal argument. Before long even Vanessa has lost her head, and she dumps her boyfriend in favor of dating Barry. I guess she has a thing for stingers.

Bee Movie goes from cute and funny to bizarre in an instant. The film’s universe is inconsistent, topsy turvey and I’m not sure what it’s trying to do. It keeps on making those giggle-worthy little bee-related observations, and they’re enough to keep it entertaining, but the story doesn’t make sense by any standard. It morphs from the bee version of Toy Story into some sort of wacky Looney Tunes cartoon, complete with John Goodman doing a Foghorn Leghorn impression as opposing council and an erratic plane crash sequence governed by the laws of Bug Bunny-style physics. I love the Looney Tunes, but Bee Movie needs to pick a tone and stick with it. One minute it’s a more realistic, epic animated film in the vein of Ratatouille, the next it’s Space Jam. Any pretense of sensible plot progression is abandoned in order to put Barry in common human social situations where he’s given the opportunity to insert a randomly funny comment on human/bee relationships. The result is a lot of great Seinfeldian bee jokes, but they come at the expense of more basic things, like say logic.

The baffling thing about Bee Movie’s wildly weird behavior, is that it’s hard to figure if the script is simply that bad, or if there’s some sort of wicked genius at work here. Yes the film is completely illogical and absolutely all over the map, yet I think maybe it’s on purpose. It’s as if the Bee-team said screw all that normal stuff and let’s just focus on entertaining ourselves by having a lot of fun with bees, doing whatever the heck we want. And so they did. The grand, uplifting theme about individuality and grabbing your dreams hinted at in the beginning is a red herring that never goes anywhere, as is any other sensible thing in the film you might grab on to. Bee Movie is what it is: an amiable black and yellow collection of rather silly, mildly amusing jokes thrown together with some great animation and a few pulse-pounding bee-flight sequences. Utterly ridiculous? Absolutely. But maybe that’s not so bad.