Little Miss Sunshine

There are a lot of bad movies in the world, a lot of extraordinarily bad movies, and I find myself being forced to write devastating attacks on only a very few of them. Watching the Academy Awards this evening (all right I'm lying; I wasn't watching the Academy Awards this evening, I never watch the Academy Awards. Outside of being strapped into a chair Clockwork Orange style I can foresee very few instances in which I end up watching the Academy Awards.) it occurred to me that the banal mediocrity of Little Miss Sunshine was one of those films deserving of such a barrage. Not because it is an exceptionally bad movie, but because it represents a new trend towards 'quirky' filmmaking. A genre identified by lazy characterizations based upon a handful of attributes utterly unrepresentative of any actual human being and plots consisting of a series of events so contrived, so painfully unrelated to anything even resembling reality, that it would shame Oscar Wilde. Assuming of course that a man who spent several years in a British prison on charges of sodomy could be shamed by crappy writing. Note to readers; spoilers follow, the biggest of which being that Little Miss Sunshine is pure feces.

Little Miss Sunshine, as I am often told by any of that tragic plurality of Americans utterly lacking in aesthetic sense, presents a family (the Hoovers) which is somehow real, which reminds them of their own in a way which most cinematic families, maudlin and preposterous, do not. This is true in so far as the family in Little Miss Sunshine is unhappy, a condition which most families throughout the world suffer from to a greater or a lesser extent. But I am reminded of Tolstoy's oft-repeated quote, that 'all happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Your family and the Hoovers may both be unhappy, but they are unhappy in a different way, as the Hoovers are a family composed of almost comically unrealistic individuals, and your family is almost certainly not.