Sunday Afternoon Movie Review

After E&B were scammed into falling asleep last night, Mamacita, Papi Chulo, and I watched Little Miss Sunshine. The Little Miss Sunshine of the title is a pageant for seven year old girls, and Olive, a geeky but darling girl with huge owl-eye glasses, learns two days before the California state pageant that the winner of the regional pageant that she finished second in has been disqualified and that she is eligible to compete at the state level. The problem? She lives in Albuquerque, not California. Not only that, but her family can't afford plane tickets for her mother Sheryl and her to fly there, so they have to drive. But it can't be just Olive and Sheryl because Sheryl's brother Frank just tried to commit suicide and she has to keep an eye on him, and Olive wants her grandfather to come along because he's the one who choreographed her dance routine for the pageant. This presents more problems because the only vehicle the family has big enough for all these people to fit into is an old yellow VW bus, which Sheryl can't drive because it's a stick shift. That means that her husband Richard, a frustrated motivational system-maker, has to come along to drive; and Olive's fifteen year old brother Dwayne, who has taken a vow of silence until he gets into the Air Force Academy, has to come along, too to watch over Frank and because leaving him home alone doesn't seem like a good idea. So this dysfunctional family sets out on an 800-mile trek to get Olive to the California state Little Miss Sunshine pageant; and, predictably, hilarity ensues.

And there is a lot of hilarity. I won't spoil the surprise for anyone who hasn't seen it, but there are a number of gut-busting scenes, in particular Olive's dance routine. This movie won two Oscars (one for the screenplay and one for Alan Arkin, who plays the grandfather); and while I haven't seen the movies that it competed against for those awards, I can say that it is not a travesty of justice that Little Miss Sunshine won. It was the funniest movie that I have seen in quite some time. Highly recommended.