Monday was to be Cinema Blend’s last day at the Sundance film festival, and so we woke up enthused and energized to tackle whatever shenanigans Park City could throw at us. As a group we rolled out of our bunk beds early, threw on our clothes, raced out the front door of our hotel… and plowed straight into a snowdrift. At some point during the five hours we’d allotted ourselves to sleep, old man winter had dumped a new load of snow on Utah, and now our comically auto was buried under a foot of snow.
Certain that our clown car would never be able to move more than a foot or two in this mess, we went back inside and threw out all our plans. Two hours later the plows cleared the roads enough that we could slip and slide our way into the festival. By then we’d missed half our movies and spent the day scrambling. For me that meant seeing movies I hadn’t planned on catching like the ones below, and later in the day it meant standing outside in the snow four hours in line for Where in the World is Osama bin Laden? tickets (read that review here). While I stood around freezing my ass off, apparently the rest of the CB team was hanging with William H. Macy and Anjelica Huston (expect Kelly’s report later today). Needless to say, our last day wasn’t exactly a good day for me. Still, as I sit here in the Park City airport drinking Polygamy Beer (it’s better than you’d think), I know I’m going to miss Sundance. We’ll be back next year. For now, here’s a quick look at two of the movies I scrambled to see on Monday:
Red
Brian Cox stars in the strange story of an elderly man accosted by three young hoodlums. When he doesn’t have any money, they kids kill his dog Red, laugh about it, and then walk off assuming they’ll get off scott free. They didn’t reckon on dealing with Avery Ludlow (Cox).
Ludlow is a gentle, plain talking widower who can’t stand to leave well enough alone. Determined that justice be satisfied he does a little detective work to track down the boys’ father, whom he asks to punish his son Danny. Daddy is a wealthy asshole, and so of course he tells Ludlow to fuck off. Avery, still mourning for his dog, keeps at it, pushing and pushing, taking things further and further, in his almost insane quest to satisfy his desire for recompense. In his case, all that means is he wants an apology, but before long he gets more than he bargained for.
Red is an incredibly low budget film, shot using only the bare-essentials of video tech. It’s also a bit ridiculous, the idea that a man would go so far over the death of a dog is a little hard to buy into. There’s some attempt to work in a dark, hidden past for Avery as being responsible for his unwavering dedication to the satisfaction of justice, but it’s so over the top it doesn’t seem to fit Ludlow’s soft-spoken, plain-dealing, kindly character.
Sunshine Cleaning
Most of the buzz over Sunshine Cleaning while it was in pre-production concerned the profession of its characters. Amy Adams and Emily Blunt play two sisters who start a biohazard cleanup company. That doesn’t mean they pick up old needles. When someone dies violently, it makes a mess, and they’re the people called in to clean up the blood, goo, and leftover body parts. Sounds like a cool idea for a movie right? Well that isn’t this movie.
Yes, Adams and Blunt do run a biohazard cleaning company, but it’s barely more than an aside in an otherwise rather simple little drama about a family down on its luck. Adams and Blunt are both, as you’d expect, great as two conflicted sisters with a difficult past and Alan Arkin shows up in another great turn as a family patriarch. At one point Blunt’s character was supposed to be played by Zooey Deschanel and it shows. Emily almost seems like she’s doing some sort of Zoey impression, something which is actually against type for her, but she puts enough of her own spin on the pot smoking outcast character that she pulls it off. Sunshine Cleaning is cute and lovable, well worth seeing once it finally gets around to hitting theaters.
It’s not without problems though. There’s a subplot involving the daughter of one of their clean-up jobs which the movie spends a lot of time on, and then inexplicably abandons. There are several little asides built into the movie like that, story threads which Cleaning picks up and then simply forgets to finish out to some sort of payoff. Then of course there’s the disappointment a lot of people are going to feel, expecting a dark comedy about a crime scene cleanup crew. Sunshine Cleaning is cute and sweet, but not exactly laugh out funny and the girls profession is only a very minor part of this particular script. They could have been doing anything, the job doesn’t matter.
