Little Miss Sunshine | Abigail Breslin, Greg Kinnear | Brilliant and just about flawless

Little Miss Sunshine | Abigail Breslin, Greg Kinnear | quirky

DVDs:

Little Miss Sunshine

	Little Miss Sunshine Abigail Breslin, Greg Kinnear 20th Century Fox, 2006 average customer review:based on 515 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Despite their individual problems and disappointments, the Hoovers decide to support young daughter Olive's dream of competing in a California beauty pageant.
Genre: Feature Film-Comedy
Rating: R
Release Date: 5-FEB-2007
Media Type: DVD

Brilliant and just about flawless

This movie is absolute perfection. There is nothing I don't like about it. I laughed, I cried. This is one of those movies that everyone needs to see. It is filled with characters that are brilliantly acted and quickly become people we know. It moves swiftly and powerfully from comedy to drama and back again.

If this film doesn't touch your heart, you need to check to be sure you're still breathing.

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quirky

Little Miss Sunshine is about a family trying to get the youngest daughter across country to compete in the "Little Miss Sunshine" pageant. There's the dad (Greg Kinnear), who's a motivational speaker and author of a self-help book he's trying to sell; there's the gay uncle (Steve Carell), just out of the hospital after trying to kill himself; there's the teenage son (Paul Dano) who's taken a vow of silence; there's the grandfather (Alan Arkin) who's been kicked out of the retirement community; there's the daughter (Abigail Breslin) who's not quite like the other pageant contestants; and the mom (Toni Collette) who tries to hold them all together.

The trip tears them all apart and puts them back together, as a family.

If the characters were less quirky, the story would be too heartwarming for words, and would require a warning from dentists. But as it is, they're understandable and sympathetic in their quirkiness, and because they're exaggerated, it's easy to see parts of them in your own life, whether in yourself or those around you, making the movie very thought-provoking.

Little Miss Sunshine is described as a comedy, but I don't see that. There are funny parts, yes, but the story is too tragic to be a comedy, I think.

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Good dark humour. Hilarious and heart-broken at the same time.Abigail Breslin's so cute, lovely, and innocently funny.

It contains good dark humour. It won't appeal to many people. Many scenes made me laugh and broke my heart at the same time. It's not suitable for children because of foul language, dirty jokes, and drug scenes.

**** SPOILER. DO NOT READ THIS if you HAVE NOT WATCHED the MOVIE.

For example, in the scene where the grandpa died in the hospital. The lady in charge of the corpse yelled at Greg Kinnear (the father) when he wanted to pospone the burial. She did not want to listen to his explanation why. It brillantly portraited how cruelly sometimes people treat each other. It moved me.

The next scene is hilarious when it showed the family trying to sneak the corpse into their car to continue their trip to California.

The most moving scene was when Abigail walked to her brother who was extremely depressed and sitting on the ground. She then sat down beside him, saying nothing, just leanning on him.

In the last scene, the director cleverly took aim at child-beauty-pageant industry. My stomach hurt when I saw kids from
5-7 years old in heavy makeup did their catwalk. Adults were exploiting kids for their profit and pleasure!

Abigail Breslin was the best actress here. She's so cute, lovely, and innocently funny. She's naturally beautiful without any makeup. Yes, her dance was meant for adults. But in my opinion, it's acceptable and funny. Why was it okay for adults to exploit kids but it's not okay for kids to dance like adults?

No wonder it got an Oscar.

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Little Miss Overrated

Having finally rented this DVD after all the praise and an Oscar, I was expecting a good dose of hilarity. What I got was a dark rewrite of National Lampoon's Vacation brought up to these Napoleon Dynamite times. It's dark, cynical and relentlessly bleak, even if moments of really funny stuff bounce off the bleakness.

The actors are all well suited for their roles, with Abigail Breslen perfect as Olive and Alan Arkin getting the snarkiest lines as the heroin snorting granddad. Steve Carell proved he had dramatic chops here, even he is forced to play the gay cliché to the max, and Paul Dano gets a heck of a lot of mileage out of not speaking for most of the film.

However, the film never really nails its timing. Funny bits are spaced with long pits of dysfunction, forcing you to deal with the fact that these people are genuinely annoying. The finale is a hoot, but again, every person here loses their dream. The payoff a broad comedy aims at the arthouse crowd...or maybe fans of Carell. Put aside the hype, and you have a stunningly average bit of filmmaking.

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