All we need is one more movie about people who run businesses that specialize in murder-scene cleaning and we’ll have ourselves an Entertainment Weekly News + Notes story. Right now we’ve got only two — Renny Harlin‘s Cleaner (Sony Pictures, opening later this year), a drama about a murder-scene scrubber (Samuel L. Jackson) who unknowingly participates in a cover-up at a job, and Christine Jeffs and Megan Holley‘s Sunshine Cleaners, an apparent dramedy about two sisters (Emily Blunt, Amy Adams) running a biohazard removal/crime scene clean-up service in New Mexico.
How is it that these ideas always pop up at the same time? There have probably been crime-scene cleaners in business for a long while, but for some reason nobody got around to making two movies about this subject until 2007. Within months of each other. I’m rooting for Jeffs’ movie because it’s certain to be more layered and emotional and perhaps even funny. (Alan Arkin is in it.) Harlin hasn’t much of a sense of humor. I remember Sylvester Stallone referring to “that Finnish thing” that he has in his temperament.
In any event, we need one more. How about a crime-scene cleaners TV series that would be half comedy (the up and downs of an eccentric workplace family that cleans up blood and brain matter and caulks up bullet holes) and half C.S.I. because the bickering couple that owns the business wants to be Nick and Nora Charles and are always thinking they’ve this or that hint or lead that will help the cops in their investigation.