The AV Club blog on the abysmal indie film "Sunshine Cleaning":
For me Sundance isn’t just a film festival. It’s also a strange cinematic subgenre onto itself characterized by downbeat comedy-dramas/character studies about struggling misfits on the fringes of society set to tremblingly earnest guitar noodling. These pucky dreamers are often played by movie stars keen to prove their acting chops by nobly going without trailers, bravely facing the world with a minimum of make-up and a wardrobe rooted in K-Mart garb and thrift-store finds instead of the usual designer togs. In the case of Sunshine Cleaning, Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, Steve Zahn and Alan Arkin are all suffering for their art.I saw this the other night; there's really no reason in the world for it to exist. If not for the presence of the impossibly lovable Amy Adams, it would've been totally unbearable. Posted by Stephen Silver at March 11, 2009 10:01 PM
Sunshine Cleaning felt like a movie I’d seen over and over again, sometimes actually at Sundance. Yet writing about the films’ overly familiar feel in my review I realized that the film is derivative of movies most of my readers have never seen and will never see, semi-obscurities that fill video stores yet are seen by a fraction of the audience of the Paul Blart: Mall Cops of the world. There is a whole world of indie mediocrity and sub-mediocrity many of you tragically will never be able to experience firsthand.