Little Miss Sunshine
Yes, Abigail Breslin's character pretty much looked the way I looked when I was 8. Poochy tummy and all. Since I was a little girl into the theatre (as opposed to beauty pageants) I can relate wholeheartedly to Olive Hoover. There's nothing like wanting to perform but not being "right" for it. Showing up for auditions in a roomful of stick-thin blondes while being round-bodied and four-eyed was certainly character-building. The way I see it is you have two choices; either make your peace with it and be at home with yourself or become crippled with self-loathing. I picked option A, as did Olive Hoover.
Still, I hated this movie. H-A-T-E-D it.
The pageant talent routine is a moment of gold, but I'm ticked at having to sit through the rest of the shrill, unlikeable movie to get there. I do wonder what's wrong with me because everyone else in the world seems to think LMS is the second-coming of movies.
When an ad campaign tells me that a movie is funny, I sort of expect to laugh. Instead I spent most of this movie cringing with discomfort. At one point a character yells "I f-----g hate all you people." I wholeheartedly agree. Wallowing in misery for 85 minutes only to have 4 minutes of comic payoff is not a fun experience for me.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to eat some ice cream.
posted by Kat Coble @ 8:18 AM
9 comments
9 Comments:
It was a harsh movie. And yet, I found myself laughing out loud all the way through it. I bordered on not liking it, but ultimately, enjoyed it.
Go figure.
Kat, I didn't see this, so tell me if my impression from reviews and clips was correct:
I LOVE movies about quirky, strange families (While You Were Sleeping, Moonstruck), as long as the stories are filled with love and hope. I have absolutely NO use for nihilistic stories about dysfunctional families. From what I could gather, that was this movie.
No hope, no spirit, just dysfunction for its own sake.
How close was I?
Slarti, you've pretty much got it right. There was a wee bit o' tacked on "we love each other" at the end, but 2 minutes of forced congeniality don't make up for 90 minutes of yelling, screaming bitterness.
LMS was not what I expected at all, but I still liked it. Well, most of it. I like indy movies that have one main point, and I like the point this movie made. Getting there, though, was painful in parts. I rarely want to bitchslap somebody so badly as I wanted to bitchslap Greg Kinnear's character (I suppose that means he was convincing, though). I loved Steve Carrell, Alan Arkin and Abigail Breslin especially.
I thought that the dance part was the most painful part of all, though. I got so embarassed for Olive. The special features on the DVD were real disappointing too.
I remember when this played at the Belcourt, I skipped it since Ridley absolutely panned it. So then when it suddenly became popular I wondered if I'd missed something good -- I guess not.
I loved it because the characters are so real. They weren't all perfect looking and didn't have perfect homes (like all these stupid Diane Keaton movies she makes lately) they didn't have perfect clothes or perfect lives. It didn't have a fairy tale ending where everything ended up just hunky dory for everybody. For me, it's sorta like the Napoleon and Deb characters. They mirror our insecurities and imperfections.
That's exactly how I felt about Borat. Apparently I'm the only one in the country that feels that way, though.
jason
My parents were going to rent it when we took the kids down for Christmas. In typical fashion, they thought it looked like a warm family comedy with that likable Greg Kinnear.
I had to break it to Mom that it is rated R and that the grandpa snorts heroin.
This is not the first time this is happened. Thanks, makers of "Bright Lights, Big City" and "Jeffery"!
I liked it. It was real (+really annoying in parts), it was I guess mostly a nice change from a lot of the standard movie making that reappears again and again. I found bits of it funny but wasn't going in to see a full on comedy, bits like the dance entirely not all that impressing but there was an underlying warmth that I could dig from the exaggerated disfunctionality and occasional snort. I liked it's quirk. I like that the movie wasn't entirely perfect our about perfect.
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