A non-profit newsroom, powered by WNYC.

Weekend Movie Forecast: Sunshine Cleaning, The Cake Eaters

12 photos

In the cutesy, "offbeat" indie Sunshine Cleaning, Amy Adams and Emily Blunt play sisters who go into business together cleaning up crime scenes. Alan Arkin is thrown in to play the girls' grandpa, and Steve Zahn turns up, too. But none of that <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/movies/13suns.html">appeals to A.O. Scott</a>, who hates this movie: "A better title...would be Sundance Recycling, since the picture is less a free-standing independent film than a scrap-metal robot built after a shopping spree at the Park City Indie Parts and Salvage Warehouse."I donât just mean that aspects of the setting, characters and plot seem awfully familiar (and, in a few cases, familiarly awful). The deeper problem is an overall confusion of tone, mood and genre, a breathless incoherence that comes from the effort to jam too many disparate elements together...All in all, itâs a mess, and much as Ms. Blunt pouts, Ms. Adams twinkles, and Mr. Arkin growls, thereâs nothing they can do to clean it up."

Gothamist

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Stuart_Masterson">Mary Stuart Masterson</a> (Fried Green Tomatoes) makes her directorial with The Cake Eaters, which stars Kristen Stewart (Twilight) as Georgia, a high school student in rural New York whose degenerative muscular disease doesn't stop her from finding romance at the flea market. <a href="http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090311/REVIEWS/903119990/1001">Roger Ebert likes it</a>: "Georgia, as played by Stewart, is not looking for sympathy. She's looking for sex and is very forthright about that. When a hairdresser asks her if she isn't rushing things, she says simply, 'I don't have a lot of time.'... Masterson, like many actors, is an assured director even in her debut; working with her brother Pete as cinematographer, she creates a spell and a tenderness and pushes exactly as far as this story should go."

Gothamist

Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's (Pulse) new movie Tokyo Sonata concerns an unemployed Japanese man who dresses up and pretends to head off to work every day because he can't bear to break the news to his wife. <a href="http://www.observer.com/2009/movies/working-family">Andrew Sarris at the Observer</a> says it "reminds me of a French film I saw a few years ago, Laurent Cantetâs Time Out, about a suddenly unemployed married man who keeps going off each morning as if he still had a job. If anything, this central plot line is even timelier today than it has been at any time since the Great Depression, and I write as one who lived through that global cataclysm."The economic disruption that we are all feeling around the world hit Japan much earlier than it did here, which may explain why Tokyo Sonata is much more au courant with the current crisis than comparable American movies on the general subject of middle-class life... As it is, Tokyo Sonata speaks to us, with feeling and passion, as one of the most eloquent statements on the world today that we are likely to see in this moviegoing year."

Gothamist

Super-low budget art house indie Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America tracks two Vikings lost in the New World in 1007. <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/movies/13seve.html?ref=movies">Manohla Dargis at the Times</a> finds it incoherent, but at least it's not mumblecore: "Independent to the nth degree, the movie is the mad creation of a young American, Tony Stone, who not only wrote, directed and edited âSevered Ways,â but, as one of the warriors, also slaughters a chicken and defecates on screen. Standing in the forest at one point, he even begins head-banging, thrashing hair so luxurious that itâs a wonder that he isnât scalped immediately..."Though thereâs no doubt that Mr. Stone is as serious as a heart attack when it comes to creating an air of authenticity â hence the sloppily butchered chickens and authorial defecation â he never settles on a coherent tone for the movie... That said, American independent cinema could use more young filmmakers who go off the story grid. Far too many, having embraced the workshop maxim 'write what you know' with grave literalness, seem to believe (wrongly) that their first loves, screwy families and adolescences merit their own movies."

Gothamist

Danish director Carl Theodore Dreyer's 1928 feature The Passion of Joan of Arc is, according to <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/events/the-passion-of-joan-of-arc-940398/">J. Hoberman at the Village Voice</a>, "one of the culminating masterpieces of European silent cinema. Shot almost entirely in close-up, the movie is ecstatically claustrophobic." The screening kicks of <a href="http://bam.org/view.aspx?pid=914">BAM's Dreyer retrospective</a>.

Gothamist

Documentary Carmen & Geoffrey is about the fruitful creative marriage between choreographers Carmen de Lavallade and Geoffrey Holder. <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/movies/13carm.html?ref=movies">The Times's Stephen Holden</a> says it "leaves you wondering why its subjects are not widely recognized as national treasures. The marginalization of the dance world in American culture is certainly one factor. But so is the subtle but still pervasive racial attitude that views work like Mr. Holderâs as exotic.' What does it say about our culture that Mr. Holder is probably best known as the voice in the 'uncola' commercials for 7-Up?"

Gothamist

World War II adventure-romance Waiting for Dublin stars Andrew Keegan (10 Things I Hate About You) as a fighter pilot stuck in a small Ireland town while trying to win a $10,000 bet he made with Al Capone's nephew that he could shoot down five Axis planes during the war. Besides trying to get up in the air to win the bet, he also spends the movie trying to get up the skirt of one of the village girls. <a href="http://www.avclub.com/articles/waiting-for-dublin,25025/">Tasha Robinson at the Onion says</a>, "since their one-note characters are so clumsily portrayed, thereâs no reason to care about them as people. Waiting for Dublin seems to be aiming at the homey charms of Waking Ned Devine or The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down A Mountain, but its shrill amateurishness makes it feel homemade in all the wrong ways."

Gothamist

Miss March has something to do with a young dude who drifts in a coma for four years after his buddy hits him with a baseball bat; when we awakens, he finds his virginal high school sweetheart is now a Playboy centerfold. Take it away, <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-03-11/film/miss-march-sprays-like-an-exploding-colostomy-bag/">Village Voice's Melissa Anderson</a>: "Miss March... sprays like an exploding colostomy bag for 89 minutes. Only a moron would expect a dude road-trip-sex comedy to be more than an aggressive expression of male sexual anxiety, but really. When did women become such vile creatures that they must be stabbed in the face with a fork after a botched blowjob, become near roadkill, and drink dog pee (and love it!)?"

Gothamist

The 1969 smash hit film Z is based on the assassination of Greek politician Gregoris Lambrakis; the title comes from demonstrators who painted the letter Z (the Greek symbol for âLifeâ) on the streets to protest Lambrakisâs killing. <a href="http://www.nypress.com/print-article-19518-print.html#">Armond White at the New York Press</a> writes: "When Costa-Gavras's Z opened 40 years ago it was a sensation.There wasnât another movie with such pop and political excitement until Do the Right Thing in 1989âand nothing comparable since... Years later, Costa-Gavrasâ shrewd contrivance and superb form hold up impressively." <a href="http://www.filmforum.org/films/z.html">Film Forum screens it</a> for the next two weeks.

Gothamist

The Last House on the Left is Wes Craven's remake of his own 1972 brutal debut film of the same name, which, <a href="http://jamespeak.blogspot.com/2009/03/come-on-hollywood.html">Jamespeak reminds us</a>, was itself a remake of the 1960 Ingmar Bergman film <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virgin_Spring">The Virgin Spring</a>. The story explores how far two ordinary people will go to exact revenge on the sociopaths who hurt their child. <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/movies/13left.html?ref=movies">Jeannette Catsoulis at the Times</a> calls it a "toned-down, tarted-up remake," stressing that, "though I have never actually heard a skull exploding in a microwave, I suspect the movieâs sound designers deserve some kind of an award: thanks to them, the damage one can inflict with small appliances and a giant grudge is all too clear."

Gothamist

If you've ever wanted to see John Holmes getting down to business in 3D, head over to the Sunshine, where they'll be screening the 1978 3D porno The Disco Dolls in Hot Skin, also known as Blonde Emanuelle, at midnight tonight and Saturday.

Gothamist

The Cronenberg Classics midnight series continues this weekend <a href="http://www.ifccenter.com/event?eventid=999852">at the IFC Center</a> with The Dead Zone, starring Christopher Walken as a hands-on psychic trying to stop Martin Sheen from becoming president and starting a nuclear holocaust.

Gothamist

Weekend Movie Forecast: <em>Sunshine Cleaning, The Cake Eaters</em>