Little Miss Sunshine

I love a good road trip movie. Vacation and Tommy Boy come to mind. I never saw Road Trip, the movie, but in my imagination it was a big Crap-a-saurus Rex. Little Miss Sunshine is a GREAT road trip movie!

Directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris created a wonderful little film. You wouldn’t expect such an understated, touching film from the guys that made Paula Abdul’s Straight Up music video in 1989. But, I was just barely getting through my senior year of high school by the skin of my nether parts in 1989 so I really have no room to judge. Now, however, I have this super powerful website that broadcasts my every whim across the whole Earth and China. I will use this power and influence thusly, “GO SEE LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE”!!!!

This fun little film follows a family in various stages of dysfunction on a road trip to see that little Olive (played perfectly by Abigail Breslin) makes it to the Little Miss Sunshine finals. Only after I checked her IMDB profile did I notice that Abigail was the cute little girl in M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs. She was so good in that too!

Side note: The Little Miss Sunshine pageant is one of those beauty pageants for grade school girls. As fate would have it, the news was all aflutter with Jon Benet best-of-the-worst-of-news-ever reports right before I saw this film. It was a bit distracting but the film does not suffer for it.

I won’t make you read me gushing for this cast; you still have other things to see on this wonderful website. Suffice it to say that my movie buddy Roger has this film getting Oscar nods, come January. Roger is usually quite good at this. He’s like the Oscar Whisperer. He has Gaydar, except that it senses Oscar statues instead of gay dudes. He may also have the regular kind too.

In LMS, the family makes their trek in an old Volkswagen bus. My mom had one of those when I was quite young. It was sky blue with a deer decal on the side door. We drove it to Priest Lake, Idaho to visit my Aunt Jan and Uncle Randy. About 5 minutes after we left for home, the bus got hot. Mom went to check the engine and flames shot out at her! Yipes! Needless to say, we spent some more time in Idaho. I do NOT hate Aunt Jan or Uncle Randy and I didn’t hate Little Miss Sunshine!