Wednesday, August 30, 2006

My Review: Little Miss Sunshine

My wife and I both love going to the movies, so we go as often as we can. She enjoys the whole experience and only seldom is she overly disappointed. She's very good at tempering her expectations. I, on the other hand, often go into films with extremely high expectations, and am very often extremely disappointed. I would say that 6 out of 10 films I see I think are rather awful. 2 out of ten are decent, and 2 out of ten are really, really good. Forgive my math, but occasionally, once in a great while, a film is so exceptional that it reminds me why I love going to the movies. Little Miss Sunshine is not one of those films, but it is really, really good.

Little Miss Sunshine is blessed with a great cast, and a terrific script. Steve Carrell, who we love from The Office and The Daily Show, is very funny, almost as much as Alan Arkin as Grandpa. Greg Kinnear is perfectly cast as a motivational speaker who can't even convince his son (Paul Dano) to speak or his wife (Toni Collette) to not look at him like he's a schmuck. But the real stealer of the show is Little Miss Sunshine herself, Abigail Breslin, as Olive. The whole film is great, but the last fifteen minutes of the movie are downright classic.

Yes, there are plot holes in Little Miss Sunshine. But it is a comedy, after all, and you're not supposed to analyze comedies for things like that. But probably the best compliment I can give this comedy is that it is so good that it makes you want to analyze it like an art film.

Grade: A-

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