Little Miss Sunshine
From the trailers I thought this film might annoy me more than enjoy me. My New Yorker mother and I are usually keen on picking up the scent of some manufactured Hollywood family construct. I am thinking Grand Canyon, Magnolias, Life as a House, and the more contentious Crash last year, a movie so manipulated that I felt like a puppet on the director’s string; all these movies are so grandly phony and Holier Than Thou. Anyhoo I was wrong with the Little Miss Sunshine, which is one of the richest and smartest comedies I have seen since Alexander Payne’s brilliant Election, my vote for best comedy of the 90’s. LMS skates emotion in a wise way that reminds me most recently of Ms. Streep’s character Yolanda in a Prairie Home Companion. The cast is wonderful, the story is all around poignant, hysterical and real enough, and I couldn’t help loving this film. Here is a movie on the Acadamy radar that is word of mouth worthy and ought to be seen like the Illusionist, another best of 2006. A quick, choppy review but run don’t walk to the theater to see this movie. Conventional minds need not apply, as this is a weird but funny one. There are numerous moments that may stick to the slippery wall of American culture and will become iconic references that people in the know have in their drain pipes along the lines of Napolean Dynamite, which was a completely different film but is regurgitated daily and for good reason.
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