Little Miss Sunshine of a bitch

I'm still not talking about California, yet. Sorry!

But I had to mention that I saw Little Miss Sunshine over the week off, among other movies (The Wedding Crashers, Borat, and a couple of others I've already forgotten). I had a very Elaine-watching-English-Patient moment with Little Miss Sunshine (LMS). I hated that fucking movie. Wow, I don't even know where to begin with it. It's like a big dungheap of contrivances passing for funny, and empty windbagging passing for meaning. Overrated! Overrated! J'accuse!

There's some general thematic thread about winners and losers that runs through it, but the pat ending kind of cheapens that, I guess. But the setup for it, lordy -- like anybody would even want their daughter to try out for a beauty pageant at all, let alone a little chubby, cherubic girl like Olive Hoover was. C'mon. But they go with it because otherwise there's no movie there. Grandpa snorts heroin -- why? I guess so he can OD on it later and end up carried out of the hospital to make the trip with them (hey, National Lampoon's Vacation did it better -- the minute Grandpa turned up in the story, I was like "Oh, I bet he'll die en route and they'll have to transport him. Wow.) Why is Steve Carrell's (sic) character a gay suicide survivor? How does that actually serve the plot in any way, shape, or form? In no way, except for him to whine about being the world's foremost Proust scholar (overlooked by the guy who stole his man from him, but that's incidental to being passed over for a MacArthur Fellowship gained by his rival). Why is the freak Nietzsche-reading misfit deliberately mute in his quest for the Air Force Academy? Just something quirky for him to do, which is cast aside when, quite by accident, he discovers he's colorblind. Meh. Greg Kinnear's character is asshole du jour, another failure (reminded me a lot of my stepdad, actually -- even how he dressed), but that's not really very relevant -- I mean, he has an epiphany that a girlie beauty pageant's not good for his kid? No shit, Sherlock. And the mom realizes it, too, I guess -- she's mostly a cipher, filling in the Shelley Duvall (sic) role, I guess. And why does the bus crap out near the beginning -- oh, because it's a quirky thing to happen, gives the characters something to do.

The actors did well with the parts, and the girl playing Olive was cute as a button, in her geeky way, but Arkin was given a freebie for his teensy, largely pointless role in that movie -- I mean, he won an Oscar for that, didn't it? Didn't that movie with a bunch of Oscars?

Sure, the family comes together at the end, but it's all so much tinsel masquerading as gold. I know like 90% of the country/world loves this movie, but I was shocked by how much I didn't like it. I was searching for explanations, like trying to see what else the writer and directors did -- turns out, not much (they've directed music videos, the writer wrote a couple other things, but not much). And it showed. Spousette didn't like it much, either, although she was gentler with it than I was. I guess I write too much to cut a writer any slack in a story. But I'm very glad I only saw it on DVD, didn't pay cash-money for it.

For those who love it, what do they love about it? What are the lessons in it? I want to look it up on Wikipedia, see what people say about it. I remember deriding Donnie Darko as a "deep movie for shallow people." LMS had that kind of quality to it, like awkwardness pretending to be funny, and emptiness for depth.

The Wedding Crashers was somewhat more amusing, although it was surprisingly thinly written. I want my comedies served up with thick slabs of Funny, and while TWC had some bits that I liked (including Rachel McAdams -- drool), but overall it was pretty weak, went on a trifle too long -- but it still managed, in its own slobbery way, more depth than smirking LMS clearly thought it had.

And that's my piss-and-vinegar film review for today!