Little Miss Sunshine -- 2006 -- R

When I first saw the poster to this one, I rolled my eyes. When I heard about the plot, my eyes rolled again. I hear about this little film that everyone just loves at all the festivals, and it does really well with audiences too, so I figure I should probably watch it. Then it got into IMDB's top 250, and again, I figured I should watch it. So I did.

We get this family with a bunch of unique characters and personalities and the youngest finds out that something happened with the reigning Little Miss Sunshine in their area, and she had won this competition (or that's what I understood). So now she wants to head to California to compete in the national version, but the family cannot afford to fly there, they can't leave the suicidal member home alone, etc., so they decide to load up the big yellow VW us and go to CA for this beauty competition. Along the way, we get a lot of madcap misadventures that serve to up the comedy factor over and over, and somehow, the comedy stays pretty fresh.

The strength in this one is in the characters. Dad is a wannabe motivational speaker with his "9 step program to success." Mom is...well, she's the mom. Ok, nothing special there, but she can't drive a stick and she holds everyone else together. Mom's brother tried to kill himself because his lover dumped him for his colleague, and he got fired. Older son doesn't talk because he wants to be a pilot. Grandpa is a foul-mouthed porn addict. The youngest wants to be a beauty queen. Toss all of these in to a bright yellow VW bus with a personality of its own, and you've got this movie.

The actual competition is the smallest part of the film at the end, but it also shows that this little girl doesn't belong there (even before her memorable talent performance). You have all of these china dolls with more makeup than your average hooker, and then our little heroine looking cute, but not...one of them.

I would say the only weakness in this film was an only sort of kind of ending. When I listened to some of the commentary, I learned that they wanted to go for a not quite happy ending, and in my opinion, while it's good to listen to your characters for the ending that is right for them, it seemed like most of the movie was going for the "not quite normal" idea. Sometimes this worked, and at other times, it was obvious they thought through the situation and took a different way out than the norm.

Overall, it was a really good film, especially considering my doubts going into it. They constructed a solid plot, some good characters, and some great comedy.