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10,000 B.C. Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
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4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies. |
Little Miss Sunshine
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MPAA RATING: R for language, some sex and drug content
Starring Abigail Breslin, Greg Kinnear, Paul Dano, Alan Arkin, Toni Collette, Steve Carell, Marc Turtletaub, and Jill Talley
Little Miss Sunshine is an American family road comedy that shatters the mold. Brazenly satirical and yet deeply human, the film introduces audiences to one of the most endearingly fractured families in recent cinema history: the Hoovers, whose trip to a pre-pubescent beauty pageant results not only in comic mayhem but in death, transformation and a moving look at the surprising rewards of being losers in a winning-crazed culture. (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
| GENRE(S): | Comedy | Drama |
| WRITTEN BY: | Michael Arndt |
| DIRECTED BY: |
Jonathan Dayton
Valerie Faris |
| RELEASE DATE: |
DVD: December 19, 2006 Theatrical: July 26, 2006 |
| RUNNING TIME: | 101 minutes, Color |
| ORIGIN: | USA |
Received 4 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture.
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
The average user rating for this movie is 7.4 (out of 10) based on 329 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Tania gave it a3:
Mystifyingly bad. Oh, how I wanted to like it. Cliched characters assembled on a screenwriters factory line, with nary a breath of life in them (save Breslin, lovable without ever being cloying), a plot creakingly contrived from start to finish. Not one moment of this film rang true (ok, one - the sweet scene where Alan Arkin's 'foulmouthed grandpa' - i imagine this is what he was dubbed in the screenplay - assures Breslin's wannabe beauty queen that she is beautiful. Really - and this is the film at its most touching.), nevermind tickled the funny bone. Replete with gaping holes in character motivation/ development you could drive a truck through (the son wants to be a fighter pilot, so he took a vow of silence. This leads us conveniently to 'funny,' furious scribbling in a notepad, ' i hate everyone'. Teenage angst has never been so subtle!). Even the supposedly laugh-out loud finale felt heavy-handed and like a desperate, mean, and inexplicable ploy for laughs. Finally, it just felt so slight - at film's end, a great big shrug is all I could muster.
Rick W gave it a2:
There was little humor in this film, in my opinion. I'm all for suspending some disbelief, but how did the daughter's "talent presentation" qualify her for some regional pageant? And how am I supposed to warm up to a family where the parents are so unbelievably (literal use here--I couldn't believe it for a second) that they left her in the hands of the vulgar and inappropriate grandfather, or that they failed to shut the old coot up or even react to his profane rants? If that's a "best picture" candidate, somebody hand me a novel -- quick.
Bernard gave it a1:
That was a pretty bad movie. Humor is overly camp and it was a waste of time. Straightforward and predictable, I am surprised they even got nominated for any awards.
Flo R. gave it a10:
It was a great feel-good film that has that amazing indie-movie feeling.
Arthur X gave it a3:
Watching this movie is the cinematic equivalent of spend 100 minutes with the most irritating people on Earth. The humor is overly camp and the gimmicks are lowbrow and extraordinarily unentertaining.
Jasper V. gave it a1:
Wow. I'm stunned. Every once in a while a movie comes along that is jaw-droppingly horrible to the point that it leaves your mouth hanging open. I lack sufficient terms to express how trite and repellent I find this simpering movie. It's an exhausted "human spirit" movie so cloying that it needs to be taken off life support. From the first time I saw the TV commercial which featured the hackneyed ruse of getting the whole family in one vehicle for the duration of a movie, I suspected the script would have difficulty making that premise believable. It certainly fails there, but that's the least of its problems. But still, the wealth of good reviews drew me to buy a ticket. My initial reservations were right. This script is an inept piece of garbage long before you evaluate it on moral grounds, where it collapses spectacularly. The family here is a mix of characters so drippy and dense that they never realize their dumpy, uncoordinated, bespectacled daughter isn't the Junior Miss type. It takes them exactly one pageant (following a needless cross country trip) to figure that out. The same family doesn't realize that a heroin-snorting, horndog grandfather shouldn't be the one teaching their adolescent daughter her beauty pageant dance number. Why not go all the way and include a "funny scene" of grampa molesting her? The setup is practically there; a scene so distasteful feels like it's just off-screen (or on the cutting room floor) in this wholly objectionable movie. Long after a ridiculously unbelievable "chance meeting" in a gas station, long after paper-deep villains have been thrown at the screen, long after the annoying Murphy's Law plot line is exhausted, comes the most sick, saccharine, crappy moment in all of film history which involves a family attempting to redeem their seven-year old daughters failed, inappropriate talent routine (a strip tease) by joining her on stage. Sexualizing a seven year old girl without her being developmentally able to understand it... mmm, that's comedy gold. This "edgy material" is about as palatable as a cup of bleach. I'm not one to look for messages but here we've got something like "Let's all support each other as we swim up the cr*p river of life!" I'm sure it's supporters think I've missed the point and that the humor is just dark. It's not dark. Making a dark comedy is an art. This comedy has no edge in it's delivery. It's filmed straight. It's acted and presented ineptly. It's about as edgy as a smutty episode of Seventh Heaven. This is the rotten family-values homily to end them all. Drawing big saccharine payoffs to support a family values theme also places this squarely in mainstream whitebread entertainment. It makes perfect sense that idiotic Hollywood would nominate this tripe for a bunch of Oscars, but I can't believe I respect people who like this atrocity. The Oscars have become so gratingly self-impressed, and the nominees so limp, that all you can really do anymore is root against films you don't want to have any further influence on the culture. I am so glad it lost the Best Picture award ; Now it starts a long descent to the bottom of time's toilet, exactly where it belongs, where it will be forgotten.
Jared C. gave it a9:
Michael Arndt's screenplay for the stellar comedy Little Miss Sunshine is tightly constructed, and full of the kinds of characters talented actors kill to portray a pudgy, bespectacled seven-year-old, Olive (Abigail Breslin), voices her desire to take home the coveted Little Miss Sunshine crown at an upcoming beauty pageant, her wildly dysfunctional family sets out on an interstate road trip to ensure her a clear shot at realizing her dreams in former music video directorial team Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris' quirky feature debut, starring Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell, and Toni Collette. Despite early career success as an outspoken motivational speaker, family patriarch Richard (Kinnear) continues to cling to his "Refuse to Lose" philosophy, much to the chagrin of his increasingly annoyed spouse, Sheryl (Collette). Add into the mix a Nietzsche-reading teenage son (Paul Dano) who has taken a vow of silence until he finds his fate as a fighter pilot; a horny, heroin-happy grandfather (Alan Arkin) with a penchant for creative profanity; and a suicidal genius (Carell) and Proust scholar still reeling about losing both his male lover and his MacArthur Foundation genius grant -- and the stage is set for a road trip in which sanity is sure to take the back seat. All of the characters and themes are economically but patiently set up in a funny 20-minute dinner sequence that opens the movie. Throughout the film, characters perform what seem to be throwaway actions that actually pay off later in the film. The fact that first-time directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris know when to keep the story moving and when to slow down for the first-rate character stuff helps make it one of the great debuts of the year. However, it is the actors who make Little Miss Sunshine one of the best films of 2006. These characters, from the suicidal Proust scholar to the heroin-addicted grandfather to the silent, sullen teenager to the failed motivational speaker (a comedy concept worthy of an award in and of itself), could all be played so grandly that the film would collapse. However, everybody stays on the same page emotionally, making them seem like a real family and like real individuals. About a third of the way into Little Miss Sunshine, Steve Carell and Alan Arkin play a simple scene in which Arkin's character makes a frank request that gets a laugh from Carell's character. The scene is unusual because very rarely does anyone actually laugh onscreen in a comedy. Carell's laugh feels utterly genuine and entirely in character, making the conversation one of the moments that best exemplifies the humanism and the humor in the thoroughly entertaining Little Miss Sunshine.
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