Little Miss Sunshine - Jonathan Dayton

Little Miss Sunshine is a about an rather eccentric, weird and wonderful family who take a road trip to rally behind their daughter to compete in a Beauty Pageant. However its not an easy ride with many weird and wonderful mishaps along the way.  The youngest is not exactly what you would expect from a beauty queen, the older brother has taken a vow of silence, the mom believes in always telling the truth, the dad is a bit of a looser who is desperately trying to sell his motivation and winning programme with no success. Coming along for the ride is the moms brother who recently got picked up from hospital for suicide attempts and a crazy old grandfather who has been kicked out of the local retirement home.

Little Miss Sunshine is a weird and wonderful film.  Its got a lot of awkward comedy and weird and wonderful story line.  You can tell from the very beginning this family is on the edge of being a little bit short of a few screws but trying desperately to keep it all together.  We follow the family along their road trip, but obviously nothing goes according to plan so we watch all their mishaps along the way. Its a very simple film but this does not make it uninteresting, in fact its probably the simplicity of this film, that means each of the characters have to be very strong for it to come across as well as it did.  Its a bit of a peculiar film, and in some parts almost cring-worthy to watch for the awkward humour and the strange story lines. However it does make some compelling viewing.

I think this is a bit of a Marmite film, you will either love it or hate it. But as i mentioned i do think this is part of the beauty of this film. We follow a family to almost the point that this could be a real family with none of the glossing over that some films do. We don't see the perfect family, we see a real family, with the clash of personalities, weird eccentric behaviours and the rarity of those awkward family moments.