Feel Good Hit Of The Summer

If you're going to the cinemas, you must watch Little Miss Sunshine. Great, great movie. Simple but great.

A story about a somewhat dysfunctional family on a roadtrip to a beauty pageant for little girls, in which the characters don't seem all that oddball after you get to know them better.

I feel that a large part of the film's success stemmed from good writing. The characters were written brilliantly. Most of them had some quirky trait - gay intellectual, angsty teenage poseur, annoying motivational speaker, junkie womanising grandfather. But as the story progresses, it's not difficult to understand the characters. In a way, their quirks are not "over the top", and the balance is actually maintained between interesting but not unbelievable, which is what i like best about it.

Most of the characters were unlikeable at first, especially the motivational speaker father. But the events that followed gradually changed him. One by one the family members get their turn at a fuckup point.

Although they seemed too different to be family (how similar are we with our family members anyway?), they're strongly connected by love, for the young daughter (cos she's the sweetest, without any agenda), if not for each other.

Besides great convincing acting, the offbeat humour also made the movie so very enjoyable. Unexpected moments, LOL dialogue. It made me laugh and cry. There was this scene that that particularly touched me, and at that point i hadn't realised the significance of the scene, yet it had such an impact on me. I thought that was quite something.

So go watch it. It'd be worthwhile i promise, definitely beats Lower City.