As summer winds down and studios run out of things that go "boom", so begins the slow return to so-called real films. There's more acting, more writing, and a general sense of preparing for awards season in the air. Late as they may be to this side of the globe, Sunshine Cleaning and The Brothers Bloom dovetail nicely with that trend. But it's baby steps for the moment; neither film is terribly challenging. They offer more of a nice diversion before the heavy hitters of fall are unleashed.

But Sunshine's director Christine Jeffs (Sylvia) and Bloom's helmer Rian Johnson (Brick) come from very different cinematic backgrounds, and so their diversions are equally different. Jeffs has a fixation with death and winds up with meandering, often pretentious meditations on the subject. I mean, come on. Sylvia Plath? Johnson is the clever revisionist that seemingly enjoys playing with genre la Quentin Tarantino. His first film was a hybrid of hard-boiled detective thriller and high school angst. Mickey Spillane Secondary if you will.

In Sunshine Cleaning, former high school celebrity Rose (Amy Adams) and slacker Norah (Emily Blunt) are two sisters wrangling with their mother's suicide (there's some death) and financial uncertainty. They start a business cleaning up gruesome crime scenes (more death), and in doing so learn to deal with their widower dad Joe (Alan Arkin) and the emotional baggage associated with their mom. Subtle it's not.

In The Brothers Bloom Johnson blends the caper flick (genre number one) with the Wes Anderson-type observational family comedy (genre two) in a story about rival brothers and the woman between them. Con artist Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) and his brother, er, um, Bloom (Adrien Brody) decide to hang it up after One Last Job. Their would-be pawn is heiress Penelope (Rachel Weisz), and how she gets between the two is about as surprising as humidity in a Hong Kong summer.

If Sunshine bears a resemblance to Little Miss Sunshine beyond the title and the presence of Alan Arkin as the kooky relative, there's a reason: It's almost the same movie. Produced by the same team, it has the kind of hopeful, forced humor that marked the first film and the producers are clearly hoping lightning will strike twice. But this Sunshine also boasts some ripe clichs, including overtures of personal closure that are mistaken for romantic ones (they don't come much more sitcom predictable than that), a one-armed salesman (Clifton Collins Jr., the standout here) and of course, the film's entire premise. The scrubbing symbolism is plied on thickly. Really thickly.

On the upside, Jeffs and writer Megan Holley avoid the pitfalls of the squabbling sisters genre. Rose and Norah are relatively complete characters - flawed, mature, and desperate. Norah's cynical, blas directionlessness is nicely rendered by Blunt (The Devil Wears Prada), until now an unremarkable actress.

Adams' strongest moments as Rose, the tainted beauty queen, come in the quiet ones, like when she sports a hopeful face with her son Oscar (Jason Spevack) or when the flustered boredom with her dead-end romance shows through. Adams manages to breathe some life into Rose - thought it's the same determined perkiness she breathes into all her characters. And frankly it's getting tiresome.

But Rose and Norah do have considerably more life than Stephen, Bloom and Penelope. The comparison to Anderson is apt, but sadly, Johnson doesn't have the droll sensibilities that he's channeling. He also lacks a feel for the caper film, a tough genre to master and set apart from a heist thriller. Johnson spends a lot of time working on the setup, but when push comes to shove, he lets narrative threads go that should really be addressed. When we find out Penelope is far more than the sum of her parts... that's it. End of story. It's important for capers to have a payoff, and Johnson lets any chance at that fall by the wayside in his drive to create a complex (frequently convoluted) plot within a plot. In the end there are a few too many red herrings, switchouts and double-crosses to keep the audience engaged as opposed to exhausted.

Bloom's cast is game, and everyone seems to be trying hard to make something out of very little, which stems from a painfully erudite script that doesn't always hit the right notes. In a world where pop culture references in films are a dime a dozen, Johnson goes for highbrow (um ... Dostoevsky?), rounding that out with an appearance by Maximilian Schell - Ingmar Bergman's alter ego. What Johnson is saying after all this is anyone's guess. Bloom looks great with its quasi-exotic locations and bright, sunny palette, but the fun ends there.

Neither Sunshine Cleaning nor The Brothers Bloom is a bad film, but neither leaves the cinema with its audiences. These are not films that linger, and maybe they don't have to. They just have to get you through the dog days.

Sunshine Cleaning and The Brothers Bloom opened in Hong Kong Thursday.

(HK Edition 08/29/2009 page4)