died_dead_red

Struck by financial hardship, an ambitious mother and her unmotivated sister become entrepreneurs in the field of biohazard removal and crime scene clean-up. The movie is good but not amazing, though many members of the audience seemed to like it. With a cute kid in tow and Alan Arkin as the ladies' crotchety old dad the film aims to be Little Miss Sunshine Cleaning, but it just doesn't have the clever script, the darker edges, or the entertainment value of Little Miss Sunshine. It felt a little contrived as if to please the festival indie audiences - which to some extent it did - but friends I was with mostly reacted badly to the almost deliberate, calculated quirkiness. Emily Blunt was noticeably enjoyable, and the the technical side of the film, while lacklustre and certainly nothing special, was competent and helped the film along.

A well made, if not exactly ground-breaking, entry in the Sundance festival that justly was picked up for distribution although who knows if it will actually make it to the cinemas. The plot concerns a woman trapped by poverty and engaged in people-smuggling in rural upstate New York. I was particularly impressed by actress Melissa Leo in what must be her first central role, which showed a convincing subtlety and range. As a first feature from director Courtney Hunt I thought it showed promise and insight - especially into the reasons people do the bad things they do to survive poverty, and in its neutral but enquiring portrayal of the characters involved in something like human smuggling. Some beautiful photography and memorable performances.

Sean McGinly's debut feature The Great Buck Howard is a curious, small-scale relationship comedy/drama about an over-the-hill entertainer and his young, direction-less-in-life assistant. Colin Hanks stars as the assistant, Troy, who signs up for the gig after impulsively bolting law school and the career track his dad, played by Hanks's real-life dad Tom, is pushing him towards. Malkovich goes the opposite way, energetically turning his "Buck Howard" into a show-biz cartoon, a caricature of an impossible-to-please has-been who travels with his show through the flyover states while the larger entertainment culture passes him by. One of the film's problems is its failure to come up with engaging ways to turn the relationship between Howard and Troy into anything resembling a real story. We expect him to get drawn into both Howard's life and the methodology of his effects, but he is never much more than a bemused observer of this show-biz "fossil" he's randomly hooked up with. I found it very disappointing that this movie was even showing at the Sundance film festival, it was so below the standards of the low budget indies and if you're going to use big stars you have to make it all the more genius a screenplay otherwise people are going to be cynical and bored... like I was.