Grab bag

Sunshine Cleaning boasts two leads (Amy Adams and Emily Blunt)I'd watch in just about anything, but the movie itself doesn't stray too far from the formulaic. Adams is the ex-high school cheerleader who hits upon the idea of a crime scene cleanup business to help send her son to private school and Blunt her "edgy" sister who tags along to help out. There's never too much doubt that healing and life lessons will be provided for the entire family (including Alan Arkin as the girls' dad); the optimism of Adams's character needed something rougher to rub against, more could have been made of a rival cleaning business that's brought up and disappears. Blunt has some fun with her role and has a nice chemistry with Mary Lynn Rajskub as a woman related to one of the victims of a crime the sisters must clean up. Must it all lead up to confronting the pain of their mother's suicide? Worth seeing for Blunt and Adams.

Maybe I'll write more about Synedoche, New York, but for now I'll just say that the directorial debut by the beloved Charlie Kaufman is an exceptionally dour piece of wankery that seems to call into question a number of the attitudes about life and the possibility of connection that Kaufman introduced in earlier scripts. A large cast is given far too little to do, with Jennifer Jason Leigh, Emily Watson, and Dianne Wiest being especially ill-used.

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