Tag: Clifton Collins Jr.

Definitely another movie I bought, just on the cover.

Sunshine Cleaning shows two women, carrying…the title of the movie, behind some caution tape.

Oooh, how mysterious. And possibly illegal? Here’s hoping for some dead bodies.

Oooh, definitely going to have some dead bodies.

Amy Adams is a single mother working as a maid in a cleaning service. But hey, at least she has a job. Her sister, Emily Blunt, is a slacker and fails at a lot of things she does.

Only real job is that she gets to occasionally babysit Amy’s son (Jason Spevack), while Amy goes to her “class”. And by class, we of course mean having sex with her former high school sweetheart, Steve Zahn. He is a cop and married with kids, but hey, affairs are fun. And he will totally probably leave his wife for her someday, right?

Yeahhh…

Well thanks to her inside connection, she hears that crime scene cleaning can be a pretty nice business, monetarily speaking. She is going to need new money for her kids private schooling, since he has a lot of behavioral problems at public and is getting kicked. But until then, the grandpa, Alan Arkin, will be able to look after him and teach him real world smarts.

Enlisting her sister as an employee, and figuring out the right paper work, they open up Sunshine Cleaning! You know, to clean up dead people blood and stuff. They also get the help of Clifton Collins Jr., a one armed man with a cleaning supplies shop. The film however makes the main characters recollect a lot on their own mothers suicide, and go on their own miniature journeys to self discovery.

Emily Blunt also starts a lesbian relationship with Mary Lynn Rajskub…because she saw her in a picture at one of the houses they were cleaning. Yeah, definitely weird.

Needless to say their methods improved throughout the movie.

This film was definitely a lot more dramatic and sobering than I had thought. With such a colorful and sunny cover, it all kinds of come out of no where. There are some amusing moments, mostly between the grandfather and the son. Well, the grandfather and everyone really. Alan Arkin is the hidden star of this film, and is a nice surprise to watch.

I personally didn’t like a lot of the moments with Emily Blunt’s character, not because she is a screw up, but just…weird slow motion falling and sad time parts. There was this weird montage moment in the middle that just felt way overly dramatic and kind of stupid. In my mind at least.

The ending was a good one though, and most of the characters ended up pretty well. Some plot lines I don’t think they answered as well as they should have though.

I had to rush out an “Irish movie” for St. Patrick’s Day, but it turns out there aren’t many of those that exist. I don’t want to watch Leap Year (at all), but it also kind of celebrates a different holiday.

So how about The Boondock Saints II: All Saint’s Day? As we have discussed before, there is no way making a sequel many years later could be a bad thing.

Also with less fucking uses of the word fuck.

The movie begins eight years after the end of the first Boondock Saints. After the final assassination, they fled to Ireland. Murphy (Norman Reedus), Connor (Sean Patrick Flanery), and their father (Billy Connolly). But after an assassination occurs in Boston by someone else trying to frame the Saints, they realize, hey, lets go stop them.

On the way they meet Romeo (Clifton Collins Jr.), a Mexican underground fighter, who serves as a nice “Rocco” replacement and joins them. They also learn that the son of the guy from the first movie is out and about, and probably set up the hit against them (Judd Nelson).

Oh yeah, wouldn’t be a Saints film without detectives trying to figure out what is going on. Now that Willem Dafoe‘s character is dead, his protege, Julie Benz, is on the case. She also comes with the same group of bumbling idiots, and tries to imitate Dafoe’s character, but you know, doesn’t do as good.

But yeah. Back to Boston, fix their name, assassination highjinks / very lucky, avoiding the law, and stopping a crime boss. End scene!

Sorry, there is no good pictures on the Internet from the sequel.

I realize not everyone liked the first Saints movie, but it does have a huge cult following, and made bank on DVD sales, so that is why the sequel eventually happened. And I think everyone who was hoping for magic let out a collective sigh of disappointment.

While it does seem to provide more of the same stuff we should like, it also feels, just not the same. It is hard to describe why it isn’t as good, because then I’d have to explain why I thought the first saints was good. I guess I thought it was clever, and going against stereotypes for movies like it (famous rope scene and all), but just didn’t find it present in the sequel.

Benz was pretty bad too, trying to do the exact same thing as Dafoe, but not being Dafoe it just seemed like a parody. I already said that, but it needed reinforcement.

Reinforcement is a weird word.

Oooh. What is that? Another surprise movie for me. Before last night I had no idea there was ever a movie based off of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Please read about it. There is a good chance you have heard of it before, but just might not remember it.

But yeah! The Experiment. A modern and fictionalized exaggeration of real events. Go go go!

Hooray science!

In case you are an asshole who doesn’t know about the experiment and didn’t click the link, it was a social experiment done at Stanford. A group of guys were chosen to be inmates, and a group of guys chosen to be prison guards. It was an experiment that was supposed to last 14 days, but lasted only six before the plug had to be pulled. Why? People adapted to their roles super quickly and performed things they didn’t think capable. Forms of tortue, abuse, no physical violecne only mental. Prisoners became complacent and passive and only obeyed orders. It worked way too well.

So yeah, that is happening here too. Adrien Brody is a very passive guy, kind of a hippy, but needs money. So does Forest Whittaker, who lives with his mother. They befriend in the original application process, because in this experiment they are offered $14,000 for fourteen days of work. Of course Forest becomes one of the guards, and Adrien a prisoner.

In his cell, Adrien is bunked with Clifton Collins Jr., a guy who seems to know how to be a prisoner already, and Ethan Cohn, a fat diabetic graphic novelist looking for new material.

The main mean guard (At the start) is played by Cam Gigandet, who quickly takes in his new role. They are given five rules that the prisoners must abide by, and the knowledge that if a prisoner breaks a rule, they must punish them accordingly (non violently). If they don’t within 30 minutes, a red light will flash and the experiment will be over and they will not be paid.

The real question is, how far will this experiment go? How much are humans different than animals, really?

“Mmm. You got a pretty (Shiny) mouth.

Just kidding, those aren’t the real questions. You know how far they go.

I liked that the movie relied not on special effects or any CGI, but just the actors themselves. A lot of them do very good jobs, showing the emotion that both sides go through, and change into their stereotypes.

BUT. It is pretty different from the actual experiment. Films change actuality. But in this case, I think the actuality is a cooler story than the film version. In this movie there was attempted rape, death, and yeah, some physical violence. Also some nice urinating on people stuff. Gross right? That kind of stuff didn’t happen in the real experiment. (Would it have happened over six days? Maybe. Have to wait for an unethical country or Texas to try it again).

Had it made it “realer” in terms of what happened in the 70s, I think it might have been a better movie. The ending also seemed to take away from some things. Was pretty unnecessary.