Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

You do not realize how much I love this movie. It is probably impossible for you to comprehend the amount of love I have for Little Miss Sunshine. Because if you have seen the film, you probably like the film a lot. I don’t like this film. I don’t think this film is good. This is an amazing film, on the edge of perfect, one that will stick with me for just about the rest of my life. The first chance I get, I will buy it, and then watch it over and over again. I was going to buy it today, before I got a chance to write this review, but they did not have. And that is why they invented Amazon.com. But, back to the film, Little Miss Sunshine is one of the single best movies I have ever seen. Every single aspect of this film is amazing. The screenplay (which I read a couple months before watching the film)is the first one written by Michael Arndt (whose second screenplay was a little film known as Toy Story 3), is one of the best screenplays I have ever read, and is even better with this transition from script to screen. I am so glad that the movie won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, because if it hadn’t, I would be angry beyond belief. The film is directed by first-time directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, a husband-and-wife team who direct the film with a sense of wise understanding and childlike innocence. And the cast of the film is one I can never praise enough. I consider the cast of Little Miss Sunshine to be one of the single best casts in a film in movie history. Greg Kinear plays Richard Hoover, a down-on-his-luck, hyperactively stubborn motivational speaker from Albuquerque, trying to get his ‘The 9 Steps’ program out there, with little success, and little help from his overworked wife Sheryl (Toni Collette), her brother Frank (Steve Carell), a gay Proust scholar staying with the Hoovers after an unsuccessful suicide attempt, his addict foul-mouthed father (Alan Arkin), and Sheryl’s son from her first marriage, Dwayne (Paul Dano), who has stopped speaking until he can get into flight school. He hasn’t spoken a word in nine months. The only innocent person in this already dysfunctional family is Olive (Abigal Breslin), the seven-year-old girl who wants nothing more than to win the Little Miss Sunshine pageant in Redondo Beach, California. When Olive learns that she is able to enter the pageant (she was second place, but-I quote-“The winner had to forfeit her crown, I don’t know why, something about diet pills, but now she has a place in the state competition in Redondo!” I probably misquoted that, and I do apologize for that), the entire family travels in their Winnebago to California, hilarity and wonderful drama ensues. There is a scene in the film, where one of the characters says (and I’m sorry I’m spoiling some of the great lines in here, but there are a lot more)-and I use the Cee Lo Green method censorship here-“You know what? Forget beauty contests! Life is one forgetting beauty contest after another…Just do what you love, and forget the rest.” That is probably one of the single most honest statements I have ever seen in a movie. So listen to me here people-do what you love, and forget the rest.
9.5/10