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Monday 16th November sees the release of "Sunshine Cleaning" on DVD and Blu-Ray. Starring the lovely Amy Adams and Emily Blunt, the movie sees two sisters Rose (Adams) and Norah (Blunt) embark on an unusual business venture, motivated by Rose's desire to put her son through private school and Norah's desire to maintain a job. The two open Sunshine Cleaning, a biohazard and crime scene cleaning company and find a deep connection to the people they are cleaning up after along with a few new friends and a couple of hurdles.
I always like to sit down and watch a "nice" film every now and then to provide a well earned break from the usual horrors and thrillers. Sunshine Cleaning is definitely one of those "nice" films. It is a genuine and lovely tale of family and the strength of the bonds between the members through life's tragedies.
I was engrossed from start to finish in willing Rose's life to turn around and go her way for once, in watching the endearing dynamic between Rose's son Oscar and his grandfather, and watching Norah's relationship with an unintentional friend. I loved the innocence of it all. Seeing Rose reach a point in her life where she decides on a change and embark on this journey with no knowledge of what it will entail was delightful in its naivity and watching her overcome the obstacles in her way with the help of her sister and father was a beautiful illusatration of how important family are.
Unfortunately though, I have to criticise the movie on one point, and that is the repetitive feeling of incomplete story lines. All of the character plotlines are wonderful and as I said, engrossing, however none gave me any fulfilment at the end. They seemed very quickly tied up in order to conclude the film and I found myself wanting more. Some didn't even feel tied up at all and were left for one to assume their conclusion, which is something I'm not a fan of.
Other than that, Sunshine Cleaning was a refreshing and original story of one family's ups and downs and I found myself emotionally going up and down with them. Recommended to anyone who wants about an hour and a half of escapism into the world of an inspirational family. It gets 3 Biohazards out of 5 from me.
Monday (02nd November) saw the release of Blood: The Last Vampire on DVD and Blu-Ray.
"Blood" tells the story of Saya, a half-demon, half-human slayer of demons who live among us disguised as humans and have walked the earth since an ancient war. Working in conjunction with "The Council", Saya slaughters demons in pursuit of the ultimate goal of facing Onigen, the oldest demon and the one who killed Saya's father.
"Blood" brings back the winning formula of a vampire killing other vampires using martial arts and a samurai sword, which I'm sure is still fresh in everyone's mind thanks to Wesley Snipes. The benefit of this one though is that the slayer is an attractive asian girl in an extremely stereotypical outfit.
It was a bit of a rollercoaster ride to be honest, but in a much more literal sense than my usual use of that phrase. It started out a little shaky at first with me questioning how good it might be due to the first few lines of dialog. It soon got on track though and I found myself pretty engrossed and enjoying myself until a tiny disappointment halfway through as a result of some particularly poor CGI. After that though I quickly started loving it again but then it ended, and I my only reaction was "Oh" in astonishment.
It's a short movie by today's standards, lasting a mere 91 minutes, and it feels like there is a hell of a lot of story to tell other than what we see in the movie. Whether there is further story written in some comic somewhere I honestly have no idea but this felt way too compressed. I wanted to know more about Saya's journey, way more about The Council and even more about Saya's father and Onigen but everything is neatly packaged up into this 91-minute ball that offers no room to delve into the intricate history of the world in which the movie is set. All of this explains my reaction at the end of the film. I really expected there to be more, a lot more.
That being said the movie is 91 minutes of some thoroughly enjoyable action involving the decapitation and dismemberment of swarms of demons by a lethal Asian 400 year old schoolgirl. There are the usual gravity defiant acrobatics of most martial art movies, which were more tolerable than most I've seen and the blood flows pretty freely, though I'm still trying to determine if the look of the blood in the movie was intentional, or it just accidentally looked completely unnatural.
The movie is based on an Anime movie of the same name released in 2000, which I haven't seen so I can't apply any comparisons in that area but this movie definitely has it's Anime roots on show in the form of the look and the pace of the action.
The movie is let down by some terrible CGI and some less than convincing performances but I have to say I quite enjoyed it. I'm no longer disappointed that I missed it at the cinema as it's certainly a DVD only movie but I liked it a lot and it's biggest let down was the fact that I wanted to know more! I'll be giving this one 3 samurai swords out of 5.
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