Rose In the Brambles – Sunshine Cleaning

Just saw Emily Blunt as the gorgeous and noble Queen Victoria in “The Young Victoria”, it’s really a bit hard for me to see her in a Gothic outfit playing a troubled-and-not-so-teenager teenager. Plus the silly vase from “Night at the Museum 2”, Amy Adams, this “Sunshine Cleaning” truly brought us quite some surprises.

Struggling single mother, troubled family members (tough-to-handle father, troubled son, even more troubled sister and a mother killed herself) and an affair with the detective in town who has already got wife and kids, every element here could be used to tell a nice story by Hollywood writers, and here they were so generous to pile them up! Some reviews compared this movie to the awards-winner “Miss Little Sunshine”, and I can understand that now. Life is tough, and even tougher for Rose here. Obviously the budget for this movie is quite limited – there is no special effect, no splendid stage setting, no fashionable costume, even no impressive music. With a bunch of no-so-famous actors (although some of them have earned some attention in recent yrs), the director was lucky enough to get a good chemistry among the crew and make the miracle to happen.

The mood is a bit over sometimes, like the scene that the younger sister Norah crazily shouting under a bridge and the one that Rose “spoke out” to Winston (the owner of the cleaning appliance shop) all of a sudden. I would prefer that Rose to be tougher here.
And since the scripts had been finished before early 2008, there were some “out-of-date” info in the movie like a “fantastic job” in real estate… The writers were not as smart as their colleagues working for “Transformers 2” that intentionally left the name of the US president blank and used the post-production to “fill in” the winner’s.

Another “surprise” is the little boy acting as Oscar, the cute son of Rose. The young actor, Jason Spevack, made his debut in 2003, while he barely started to walk by himself…

The Real “Ever After” – The Young Victoria

There is a rather unknown movie by the legendary Romy Schneider (in case you don’t know her, she is the Princess Sissi forever) about the same topic of this one. But that version is a pure prince-and-princess-style fairy tale: the prince married the princess, and they were happy ever after. And today, this movie is gonna show you some not-so-happy things behind the fairy couple and ppl surrounding them.

Basically almost everyone in the movie got a dark side somewhere: the mother that wanted to be Regent of her own daughter, the prime minister that wanted to use the young queen to defeat his political enemies, the uncles that wanted to use marriage to control the queen and even the whole empire, etc. But the only role that was doomed is Sir John Conroy, a.k.a the lover of the mother. The scenes that Conroy shouted at the young princess (later on the queen), grabbed her in the arms, and even tried to force her to sign the “Regent Order” seemed rather unbelievable to me – Can you imagine that kind of things happened in any sovereign country where the bad guy actually had no power (officially he was just the treasurer and housekeeper of the mother)? Several simple words from the queen could easily send him to jail or even the guillotine. And when you saw the scene that the queen happened to meet Conroy alone in the corridor shortly after the unsuccessful assassination, you knew what would happen next…

As the core of the whole story, the B-cast Emily Blunt showed the potential of another “Her Majesty actress” – not so good-looking, but always behaves like a noble, and just like what Victoria said about herself in the move, “stronger than looks to be”. We are so glad that we find a successor to Cate Blanchett. And standing by her is the rather C-cast Rupert Friend (although he looks quite like Orlando Bloom, this is the first mainstream leading role he ever got in a full-length movie). Actually he did a pretty good job, but for commercial reasons, we would prefer a better created face…

And as a historical topic (and even more, a royal topic), this movie showed us some interesting points of the royal life. Some of them had been well-known via other Victorian movies (like the Romy Schneider version), but others are rather novel, like the funny rule that Victoria must hold the hand of a maid whenever she stepped up or down the stairs, and when she was having a date with Albert (given it a walk in the garden or a chess play by the stove) there would always be a group of “companions”. Maybe we shall thank the consultant of this movie, the former wife of Duke of York, Sarah Ferguson.