Go, go, go to this film!

Sep 26, 2006 by

famron

Little Miss Sunshine

★★★★★ It certainly brought light and laughter into my evening.

Cast
Alan Arkin – the irascible heroin-snorting grandfather.
Toni Collette – the harassed Mother, trying to hold the family together.
Greg Kinnear – the Dad, a self-help speaker who’s initially irritating but lives it as he talks it.
Steve Carell – the suicidal, gay, Proust-scholar uncle.
Paul Dano – the teenager who’s taken a vow of silence, influenced by Nietzsche.
Abigail Breslin - thank goodness, a child actress who isn’t all cutsey (nothing worse to turn me off a film, as if Tom Cruise wasn’t bad enough in War of the Worlds, but we also had to suffer Dakota Fanning’s screams).
And all the other minor, but memorable, parts.

It’s about a supposedly dysfunctional (aren’t we all?) family who embark on a road trip from Albuquerque to California so that the seven year old daughter, Olive, can enter the Little Miss Sunshine contest.

The scenes at home in Albuquerque establish the characters with their quirks, tics, and obsessions. The road trip, and its misadventures, strengthens the bonds between them (one of the highlights being their trouble with the VW van, which they can only start in 3rd gear, cracked me up every time). And finally, the Little Miss Sunshine competition left me open-mouthed in disbelief; I’m betting the other kids were real-life contestants, in all their fake tanned, bouffant hairstyled glory! Look out for the MC and his rendition of ‘America the Beautiful’, he’s as buffed and polished as the girls. Olive wins through in the end, just not in the way you’d expect.

0.3

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