"It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen."

Friday, December 23, 2011

Movies about Moms

It's bizarre how often I hunker down for a line up of random movies I found on Netflix or elsewhere, just random choices, and they turn out to have very similar themes or plots or something. The first time it happened, years ago, back when I went to rental stores for my movie options, I found Rachel Getting Married and The Tracey Fragments - both about a girl whose little brother died while under her care. That's a pretty specific plot line to randomly select twice in a row!

The two movies I just saw that were remarkably similar: Away We Go and Sunshine Cleaning. They both got mixed reviews. I loved them both.

They both featured a woman and her sister (to a lesser extent), and how they dealt with losing their mothers at a young age. Both movies made me miss my mom fiercely. They play opposite one another well with respect to relationships: Away We Go has a couple that seems to get on swimmingly. The guy adores his pregnant girlfriend. In Sunshine Cleaning, the main character can only get men to want her, not stay with her. Such is.

But where Sunshine Cleaning shines a little brighter, despite its harsh reviews, is in the attitudes both women have about fitting in with the cool kids in their respective lives. In SC, she figures out that she really doesn't want to hang out with snotty rich women anyway. She loves her weird job, and who cares if they have an issue with it! In AWG, she doesn't feel like a real adult, or anything more than a total mess-up, because her house isn't nice enough. She's not happy until she has a house that looks right - that looks like the type of house an adult (a wealthy adult, really) would have. I kept hoping she'd pull a "there's no place like home" and just add some insulation to her old place. But she doesn't. The stuff in her life is what develops her character.

A shame.

No comments: