Little Miss Sunshine-A Movie Review

You know that feeling you get, when you are sitting in a movie theater, anxious for the latest Blockbuster to start showing...and then, just to really annoy you...there's like a million adverts for upcoming movies and like usual, most of those movies just look stupid and you are this close to standing up and shouting at the pimply teenager running the projection to get on with the movie already...

Or maybe you don't. Maybe the adverts don't bother you at all, and weirdly enough, you find them more entertaining than that actual movie.

I can't remember what movie I was going to see when I first saw the advert for "Little Miss Sunshine". Most likely, the advert for "Little Miss Sunshine" was much better than whatever movie I had originally gone to see. But that's not important. The important thing is that when I saw the trailer for LMS I knew I would like this movie. Unfortanately, when the movie was in theaters...I missed it. It never played in my town and at the time I just didn't have a whole lot of extra time to be galavanting over southern NJ trying to find a theater that WAS playing it.

So, fast forward last Wednesday. I went shopping with a friend and while browsing the local record shop (what's the hip term for those type of stores now?) when I saw that LMS was now on DVD, and even better...it was onsale.

Now, typically I don't buy movies unless I've seen them before. I don't watch movies too often as it is, so for me to buy a movie without seeing it first is a pretty big gamble. But, as I was so sure I was going to like it, I bought it.

And I was very pleased to see that it has met and exceeded the hype. It seems like such an insignificant story line...a family taking a cross country trip so the daugher can compete in a pagent...well, really, that doesn't seem too exciting.

But mix in the characters on this little journey, and well, I don't think you'll ever look at roadtrips the same way ever again. There the Dad, who's running a failing motivational speaking seminar (oh the irony), Mom...just trying to hold everyone together the best she can, grandpa...who, well, don't expect him to be a sweet old grampa...there's the uncle who's fresh out of the mental hospital after a botched suicide attempt...the teenage son who has taken a vow of silence until he is old enough to join the air force...and of course the beauty queen herself, Olive...a very precoucious seven year old.

The humor in the movie is first class, leaning heavily on irony and dark humor...the type that will probably having you saying to yourself...omg, I cannot believe this! And even, jeeze, do they have any feelings at all? But then there are some very pivitol scenes in the movie that are are really touching and very human and changes the tone of the movie (at least for me it did). Instead of just being a comedy about a messed up family, it became a movie about a family learning how to be a family despite their shortcomings.

The movie is rated R. However, I didn't think it was "that" bad. Yes, there were a liberal amount of F-bombs thrown around, but the content was fairly tame compared to other R movies I have seen. There's some mention of sex and a brief view of the front of a porno magazine, and two brief scenes of one of the characters doing snorting drugs but it wasn't that bad.

Little Miss Sunshine Trailer