The movie is about a family trying their best to get their little love Olive (Abigail Breslin), a very normal 7 year old girl, who somehow wins her entry into the finals of the Little Miss Sunshine pageant. The family decided that they all should accompany her and to cut on budget for the air tickets for the family members of six, they decided to drive down to California on their old Volkswagen bus. Well, what follows is an eventful journey of tearful joys, depressing but life changing events, laughters and even the demise of their jolly but lovely grand-dad.
In the 2007 Academy Award, the Movie won two of the “Best Performance by an actor in a Supporting Role” by Alan Arkin (the grandpa) and Abigail Breslin (the little girl Olive in the Movie). The Movie also took away the Best Writing, Original Screenplay and was nominated the Best Motion Picture of the Year.
Little Miss Sunshine is the kind of oddball comedy that everybody loves to see. The Hoovers family is some sort of a uniquely troubled American family in Albuquerque, N.M. Their gay uncle Frank (Steve Carell) have recovered from a suicide attempt and is staying with them sharing the room with Dwayne (Paul Dano), who have sworn to be mute till be becomes a fighter pilot. He communicates with his family, whom he utterly hates, through pen and paper. Of course, we have the grouchy grandpa (Alan Arkin) who was dismissed from his retirement home for taking drugs. He somehow loves little Olive (Abigail Breslin) very much and I suspect the final act of her in the Little Miss Sunshine was his doing. Despite being pudgy and bespectacled, she wanted to compete in Beauty Pageants.
Of course, the Hoovers have the Man of the family, Richard (Greg Kinnear) whose 9 step self-help-never-fail program somehow didn’t make the cut with the publishers because he is just nobody. His part with this 9 step program reminds me of David Allen and his Getting Things Done. Shery (Toni Collette) is the strong house-wife who strikes a perfect balance between the children, the grandpa, her husband and her suicidal brother.
Hmmm, are we forgetting someone; yes something in fact - the VW bus. The family’s VW microbus trucks down the whole family to California. The bus even had a break-down but somehow they learn that they can pull along if they don’t use the first and second gear shift but push the bus every time they start and jumps to the third gear - that’s awesome. You’ll see many a times when the family had to race after they pushed the bus to ignition.
The tit-bits of amazing slow pulsating comedy continues all along but its comedy reaches it height when the bus reaches Redondo Beach. The emotional grill too started to crept in when the family realized that the pageant was a cutthroat competition; they saw the sharp contrast between Olive’s amateurish commonness and the other participants’ professionalism.
Little Miss Sunshine has lots of those little gems of moments in it that it would be injustice to let all of that here. I would like to leave that for you to find them and enjoy the sheer pleasure of watching it. This movie is more than just a road-trip comedy and is much more than an average comedic episode. There are lots of humor, smart funny bits and they are all tinged with just the right amount of pathos making all the characters seem truly human. Life is really like this awesome short 90 minute movie.
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