Saturday of the Dead

When I arrived at the apartment the night before, an orange slip sat on the coffee table to let me know that a large brown envelope would be waiting for me because of its too-large size. Saturday morning, Caesar dropped me off at the Post Office downtown while on his way to help MM with the twins at Gymboree for their morning exhaustion session. I didn't have to wait long and was soon quickstepping the 20 or so blocks back to the apartment with an envelope from Broadway Books in my hands. Perhaps this was the latest zombie novel I'd won from LibraryThing.com, and sure enough, as I tore through the wrapping while opening the apartment's front door, S.G. Browne's novel Breathers: A Zombie's Lament fell to the floor. A note from the publisher also floated down, congratulating me for winning a copy of their book and hoping that I enjoy it enough to write a review.

After reading the first chapter, I hope it gets better....

Later that afternoon, after running a few errands at Target, we decided to see a 4:30PM showing of Sunshine Cleaning. However, after browsing through Best Buy and Barnes & Noble, we couldn't think of anything better to do so we headed to the movie theater about an hour early. Good thing, because the movie I thought started at 4:30PM (thanks to Yahoo! Movies) was already running previews as the actual showtime was 3:40PM. We rushed inside with our tickets, finding two seats at the back of the darkened theater.

Rose Lorkowski, once the captain of the cheerleading squad, finds herself years later working for a maid service, cleaning the homes of the wealthy of Albuquerque. Raising a son by herself and feeling like her life is going nowhere -- and after running into a former classmate whose house she was cleaning -- Rose decides to take hold of her future and convinces her sister Norah to try a new venture: crime scene clean-up. After a rough start, their new business -- Sunshine Cleaning -- begins to take off and the two sisters find themselves finally growing closer to one another, able to work out their differences and to come together about the suicide of their mother while they were still young.

A quirky movie from the producers of Little Miss Sunshine, it felt more like a drama with elements of comedy rather than an out-and-out comedy. That's not a bad thing; Megan Holley's script allows the humor to flow naturally from what's happening in the scenes, never forced. Amy Adams is wonderful as Rose Lorkowski, and I enjoyed seeing her character grow and change from the woman who feels trapped in a dead-end life to someone empowered, who finally understands and respects herself as a person. Emily Blunt also gives a fine performance as Rose's sister Norah, a woman who can't seem to keep a job, but through the cleaning service with her sister, begins to understand relationships. (And turns out to be lesbian!) Alan Arkin, Jason Spevack, Steve Zahn and Clifton Collins Jr. are equally good and help add to the quirky goodness of the film.

We left the movie with smiles on our faces, and that, to me, is a sign of a good movie.

Image from Baltimore Magazine.