Sunshine Cleaning and Heavenly Creatures

Sunshine Cleaning was an even better movie than I hoped for. It stars Amy Adams and Emily Blunt as sisters who start a crime scene cleaning service to make some money, and Alan Arkin who plays their father. While there are several funny scenes in the movie, it's a poignant drama about a family coping with the suicide of their mother/wife two decades later, and how her loss still deeply touches them all. It's an excellent movie and well worth your time to watch it.

My latest movie rental was Heavenly Creatures (1994) which, like Sunshine Cleaning, was better than I was expecting. It's a true story starting Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey as girls who develop an intensely close relationship in prep school in the 1950s. Their parents are disturbed by this relationship and the extremely elaborate fantasy world they've created for themselves. One of them is forced to move to South Africa and the other is not allowed to go with her, so the two girls kill one of their mothers in an attempt to stay together. It took me a little while in the beginning of the movie to realize that all the hokey melodramatic music was a device that kept the viewers in the girls' constant existence in their fantasy world. Once I got past that I really got into the movie. I definitely recommend this one.