Little Miss Sunshine

I’ve just watched Little Miss Sunshine and i must say that this movie is my favorite to win the Oscar Best Picture come March 2007. Although the Oscar nominations are yet to be announced, i have a gut-feel that it will be one of the 5 best movies of 2006 to get nominated for the top award. Little Miss Sunshine is a dark comedy about a dysfunctional family’s road trip to a child’s beauty pageant. Although a dark comedy, it is delightful to watch at the same time. The last dark comedy that won the Oscar Best Picture was American Beauty and i hate that film. But ‘Sunshine’ got me at the trailer pa lang. The acting of the whole cast was just superb!

Synopsis:
[Warning: If you plan to watch this movie, don't read this]

Little Miss Sunshine is the story of the Hoovers, a fictional dysfunctional family from Albuquerque, New Mexico. The characters are introduced in the opening sequences; Sheryl Hoover (Toni Collette) who picks up her brother Frank (Steve Carell) at a hospital after the depressed, gay Proust scholar has survived a suicide attempt. Richard Hoover (Greg Kinnear) is a manic go-getter striving to sell his motivational nine-step technique to becoming a winner. Dwayne (Paul Dano), their son, is an angst-ridden, Nietzsche-reading teenager who has dedicated his life to joining the Air Force Academy in order to become a test pilot. Richard’s father, Edwin (Alan Arkin), recently evicted from a retirement home for snorting heroin, is shown to have a strong bond with seven-year-old granddaughter Olive (Abigail Breslin), and coaches her to perform in a beauty pageant.

After a lengthy expository dinner sequence in which the characters are developed, Olive learns she has qualified for the “Little Miss Sunshine” beauty pageant that are being held in Redondo Beach, California in two days. The family decide that they have no choice but to pack all six family members into their yellow Volkswagen Type 2 mini-bus for a two-day road trip to California.

The family’s tensions play out in highway rest stops amidst the sputtering mechanical problems of the aging VW van. Each character, except Olive, suffers setbacks along the way. Richard’s hopes for his motivational technique business sputter out, his father dies, Frank meets an ex-lover who has jilted him to go out with Frank’s scholarly rival, and Dwayne discovering that he is color-blind, which ruins his dreams of becoming a pilot.

Several comedic situations arise during these crises. A discussion about ice cream and body image provides food for discussion later in the film; Grandpa’s pornography collection helps the family out of a jam with the police, and the family races against the clock in the VW van with a broken transmission, trying to get to the pageant on time.

When the family arrives for the pageant, the family questions whether the trip and Olive’s goals of becoming a child beauty queen were worthwhile. The finale of the film presents a scathingly satirical depiction of child beauty pageants, in which elementary school girls model swimsuits and strut onstage to dance music. In the talent portion, Olive scandalizes the audience and pageant judges with her mock striptease-style burlesque performance, taught to her by her heroin-snorting grandfather. When her family rises to her defense, the ensuing slapstick chaos brings the formerly dysfunctional family together.

Note: I will upload my favorite scenes from the movie later. The bandwidth problem is still bad due to the Taiwan earthquake sitch and uploading is taking ages at the moment.