Sunshine Cleaning, a quirky indie picture staring Amy Adams, originally released in 2008, has finally made it to Taiwan for a mainstream release, possibly with the idea of picking up on some of the massive publicity which surrounded the release of Julie & Julia (2009) earlier this year, which brought Adams to prominence with local audiences. It also reveals to us that Adams is a more sophisticated actress than her role as Julie Powell gave her the opportunity to show.
This is an old-fashioned film in that it relies heavily on a fine script and interesting characters to drive the story forward, but it also has a gloss of indie chic about it, which links it up with recent hits such as Little Miss Sunshine and Juno. For better or for worse, it doesn’t have the same edginess as either of these films, and its indie appeal is something of a pose.
Sunshine Cleaning opens with a man walking into a gun shop with a 20 gauge shotgun cartridge in his pocket. He asks to inspect some guns, then uses one to blow his head off. The resultant mess is clearly a tragedy for someone, but it also represents a business opportunity for those specializing in the cleanup operation.
The rest of the film follows this formula of tragedy leading to opportunity, and we know that despite all the obstacles that the main character faces in getting her life together, she will inevitably succeed. This makes the tragedy of life just a little too facile for the film’s own good, and fatally undermines its attempts to achieve real indie street cred.
Rose Lorkowski (Amy Adams) is a former high school cheerleader now eking out a somewhat precarious life as a maid. She is having an affair with police officer Mac (Steve Zahn), who she knows deep in her heart will never leave his wife Heather, a former schoolmate. As Rose is in desperate need money to pay her son’s tuition, Mac helps her connect with the crime scene cleanup business, and Sunshine Cleaning is born. Rose is insecure, having failed to provide herself with a husband, or become part of an acceptable profession that will put her on the same social footing as her high school friends. Her ambition is to be a real estate agent. Her efforts to achieve a solid, tiresome middle-class respectability are hampered by her slacker sister Norah (Emily Blunt) and father (Alan Arkin), a small-time scam artist.
The messy business of crime scene cleanup serves as a remarkably good springboard for Megan Holley’s script, which opts for a thoughtful humor rather than picking up easy gross out jokes. The main complaint about Sunshine Cleaning is that it takes on too much, and a subplot that involves Norah tracking down the daughter of a deceased woman whose house she helps Rose clean out is left hanging mid-movie. It is a sign of the film’s quality that even this loose end vibrates with dramatic potential before it is unceremoniously dropped. For the rest, it sometimes seems that Holley is trying to incorporate every possible device and character type ever used in light comedy into this film. There are some excellent moments, and just when you hope the director will pursue a particular line, it is dropped and another device is introduced.
One of the highlights of Sunshine Cleaning is the performance of Alan Arkin as Joe Lorkowski, a character who has the wisdom of the deeply flawed personality. Although the role is not quite up to the same levels of weirdness that he displayed as Grandpa Edwin Hoover in Little Miss Sunshine, it is still full of a skewed vitality, and hints at depths that the efficient and sometimes all too slick performances of Adams and Blunt fail to provide.
Sunshine Cleaning is a deeply enjoyable film to watch, though it promises more than it actually delivers. It has good intentions, but the film is too programmatic, the careful nuts and bolts of its structure all proudly on display. Any organic unity, and the satisfying feeling that goes along with that, are lost in this display of technical prowess.
June 9 to June 15 A photo of two men riding trendy high-wheel Penny-Farthing bicycles past a Qing Dynasty gate aptly captures the essence of Taipei in 1897 — a newly colonized city on the cusp of great change. The Japanese began making significant modifications to the cityscape in 1899, tearing down Qing-era structures, widening boulevards and installing Western-style infrastructure and buildings. The photographer, Minosuke Imamura, only spent a year in Taiwan as a cartographer for the governor-general’s office, but he left behind a treasure trove of 130 images showing life at the onset of Japanese rule, spanning July 1897 to
One of the most important gripes that Taiwanese have about the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is that it has failed to deliver concretely on higher wages, housing prices and other bread-and-butter issues. The parallel complaint is that the DPP cares only about glamor issues, such as removing markers of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) colonialism by renaming them, or what the KMT codes as “de-Sinification.” Once again, as a critical election looms, the DPP is presenting evidence for that charge. The KMT was quick to jump on the recent proposal of the Ministry of the Interior (MOI) to rename roads that symbolize
On the evening of June 1, Control Yuan Secretary-General Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) apologized and resigned in disgrace. His crime was instructing his driver to use a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a pet grooming salon. The Control Yuan is the government branch that investigates, audits and impeaches government officials for, among other things, misuse of government funds, so his misuse of a government vehicle was highly inappropriate. If this story were told to anyone living in the golden era of swaggering gangsters, flashy nouveau riche businessmen, and corrupt “black gold” politics of the 1980s and 1990s, they would have laughed.
It was just before 6am on a sunny November morning and I could hardly contain my excitement as I arrived at the wharf where I would catch the boat to one of Penghu’s most difficult-to-access islands, a trip that had been on my list for nearly a decade. Little did I know, my dream would soon be crushed. Unsure about which boat was heading to Huayu (花嶼), I found someone who appeared to be a local and asked if this was the right place to wait. “Oh, the boat to Huayu’s been canceled today,” she told me. I couldn’t believe my ears. Surely,
RSS