Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Satisfyingly un-Hollywood feelgood movie, 20 Dec 2007
Looking for yet another Rom-com to cheer you up, where you know exactly how it will end...? Apply elsewhere! This is a movie that takes its good time in getting to the feel-good part, but does so with such a compellingly dysfunctional family of characters that you'll feel enriched for staying on board to the end.
The stalls are set out from the get go, when we meet each of the principal characters of the family, as different as could be. When the young daughter has a chance to compete in the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant (scary that such events exist), they all up and leave en masse in the yellow VW minivan for a memorable road trip. The worldly and outspoken grandpa, the suicidal brother, the relatively normal mother trying to keep the family on track, the father obsessed with success but unable to grasp it himself, the rebelling teenager in a vow of silence.. all are thrown into close proximity for the journey to California. Add a seriously temperamental VW minibus, and the stage is set for some soul searching, reality checks, pathos and humour.
As a comedy, this is certainly no exercise in hilarity or slapstick.... but it will leave you smiling, and it WILL leave you talking about it after the DVD is back in the case.. what better compliment could there be.
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75 of 83 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Don't apologize. It's a sign of weakness.", 20 Dec 2006
In a movie with some of the most beautifully drawn characters I've seen in a movie this year, Little Miss Sunshine proves that being a success in life often comes from deep within the heart and that love can come where you least expect it. It doesn't take long to figure out that dysfunction is the order of the day in Hoover family of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Grandpa (Alan Arkin) is a bitter old hippy who swears profusely and does heroin. Dad (Greg Kinnear) has hopes to publish a dreary nine-step program that asks people to banish their inner losers and be winners. Chubby little Olive (a lovely Abigail Breslin) is determined to become a prepubescent beauty queen, the winner of the Little Miss Sunshine.
Olive's sullen brother (Paul Dano) wants to join the air force and hasn't spoken for nine months and his uncle Frank (Steve Carell) is America's most renowned Proust scholar who has just tried to commit suicide after his boyfriend dumped him.
Leave it to Mom (Toni Collette) the only one of this weird bunch who seems to be grounded yet who gravitates between simmering resentment of her husband and an aching desire to keep her family together. She obviously loves them all but she's too distracted to cook; it's all KFC and Pepsi night after night.
But when the cute owl-eyed Olive finds out that she has a serious chance of winning the Little Miss Sunshine contest in California, no one can decide who should go with her, so the whole Hoover bunch piles into a Volkswagen bus so that Olive can take her shot at the crown.
Thus begins their wacky road trip, which full of trouble, where death lies just around the corner and some family secrets are better left unsaid. Beautifully acted by this superlative ensemble cast - the timing of all six leads is impeccable - Little Miss Sunshine sort of gravitates between black comedy and a kind of benign sadness.
Obviously these are all frustrated people, their lives up until now seem to have peppered with frustrations and disappointments, and none of them have really achieved their dreams, which makes their desire to get Olive to the pageant in time, all the more auspicious.
For all the exaggerations in Michael Arndt's script which has been dashingly directed by the husband-wife team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris - the movie comes closer to the truth about the way people really live - on the edge of fantasy-driven desperation - than any other film to be released in recent years. Perhaps this is why the film has managed to touch so many hearts.
Obviously, the beat-up and broken down old Volkswagen is a metaphor for this family, who when we first meet them seems to be breaking apart at the seams. Yet they seem to struggle along and cope, even though, as with they're likely their means of transport, only the third and fourth gears are functioning. Their trip is indeed peppered with many disappointments, but in the process they do indeed discover what it really means to be a family. Mike Leonard December 06.
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32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sunny, funny joy, 30 Nov 2006
Little Miss Sunshine is an appropriate title for a film which burst onto the independent cinema screens like a surprising, welcome and thoroughly enjoyable slice of art-house comedy. This is a tightly written, well scripted, excellently acted and hilarious film, at turns darkly and self-assuredly black and then riotously slapstick and self deprecating.
The storyline centres around the trans-American adventures of a less than ordinary American family. With Transamerica, the unconventional road trip is obviously the comedy medium of choice in the independent cinema world. The film's very own Little Miss Sunshine is the gloriously unglamorous, vivacious and joyous Olive (Abigail Breslin), the youngest of the family. She wins the opportunity to attend the final of the Little Miss Sunshine pageant after the state winner is disqualified for diet pill abuse.
This should send warning bells for the type of contest she is entering. This is the very dark, very disturbing world of American beauty contest. Eventually the truth is revealed, but first the family have to get there. This involves the suffering rock-like figure of the mom Sheyl (Toni Collette) and the can-do go getting, but ultimately failing author of a self-help book and seminar, the nine steps, dad Richard (Greg Kinnear) eschewing air travel for cost reasons, and loading the family in to a VW camper van.
Along for the ride, and in perfect comedy unison, is the drug snorting, care-home evicted grandfather (whose eventual death provides the central slapstick, and whose last gift is a dance routine for the talent segment of the show that has to be seen to be believed), the mute, difficult teenage brother, who hates the world, his family and loves Nietzsche, and just wants to escape to flying school. Sheryl's brother is also brought, mostly because after a failed suicide attempt he can not be left alone. He provides much of the dry, darker humour that is very reminiscent of the best of the Royal Tennenbaums. He is a homosexual expert on Proust, who grates against the dad but eventually seems to come back around to enjoying life on the trip.
The film is at once a wonderfully life-affirming slice of an atypical American family, and a refreshing change from the dysfunctional middle-class families that have obsessed Hollywood for the past decade. It is also a masterpiece of characterisation and casting. The characters are honed to comic perfection, and the casting of each actor and actress is a masterpiece for the roles. Of especial note and perfection is Breslin as Olive. To find a child actor so able to play this role without self consciousness or precocity makes her extremely endearing and an easy character to root for in the bizarre world of child beauty pageants. But each of the other main characters is also extremely well executed.
The darkest elements of the film come in the portrayal of the pageants. They seem to suggest a sickness at the heart of middle America, where these children, none older than eight, are sprayed, preened, brushed and made up to be like miniature dolls. They wear their sickly smiles, their horribly suggestive outfits and are paraded in a pageant that features the oddly paedophilic compare and the horrendously competitive mothers.
In short this is an extremely enjoyably film, and it would do it a massive disservice to simply label it as `feel good', but it does have this effect. Together with a brilliantly talented cast and a tight, wonderfully executed script this makes the surprise comedy hit of the year.
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