Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Original Screenplay 2006

The Contenders:
Babel
Letters from Iwo Jima
Little Miss Sunshine (winner)
Pan’s Labyrinth
The Queen

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Picture 2006

The Contenders:
Babel
The Departed (winner)
Letters from Iwo Jima
Little Miss Sunshine
The Queen

Family Values

Film: Little Miss Sunshine
Format: DVD from personal collection on kick-ass DVD player.

Comedy is a subjective thing. I realized this yet again recently when I recommended the film My Favorite Year, a personal favorite of mine, to my podcasting partner, Nick Jobe. Nick was lukewarm on the film, liking Peter O’Toole’s performance and not much else. Me? I think that film is riotously funny. But comedy is subjective and what I find funny, others don’t and vice versa. Little Miss Sunshine is a film that only those with a hint of a black soul will really enjoy for the comedy it contains. It’s an homage to the idea that all comedy comes from the pain of others, or pain in general. This film is a wrist-slitter of a comedy, at the same time bleak and riotous, depressing and screamingly ridiculous.

We spend a few days on a road trip with the Hoover family. Mom Sheryl (Toni Collette) is overworked and overstressed, in no small part because husband Richard (Greg Kinnear) is currently jobless. He’s not out of work—he’s just jobless. He’s attempting to pitch his self-fulfillment program called “The Nine Steps,” but is unable to get anywhere with it. Older child Dwayne (Paul Dano) is a devotee of Nietzsche and has taken a vow of silence until he fulfills his dream of becoming a test pilot for the military. Richard’s father Edwin (Alan Arkin) is living with the family because his constant desire for sex and new hobby of heroin snorting got him kicked out of his retirement home. And then there’s Olive (Abigail Breslin), who is obsessed with child pageants.