Top 250 Challenge: 245

Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
Number 244 on IMDb's Top 250

Olive (Abigail Breslin) is a little girl with a dream: winning the Little Miss Sunshine contest. Her family wants her dream to come true, but they are so burdened with their own quirks, neuroses, and problems that they can barely make it through a day without some disaster befalling them. Olive's father Richard (Greg Kinnear) is a flop as a motivational speaker, and is barely on speaking terms with her mother (Toni Collette). Her uncle Frank (Steve Carrell), a renowned Proust scholar, has attempted suicide following an unsuccessful romance with a male graduate student. Her brother Dwayne (Paul Dano), a fanatical follower of Nietzsche, has taken a vow of silence, which allows him to escape somewhat from the family whose very presence torments him. And Olive's grandfather (Alan Arkin) is a ne'er-do-well with a drug habit, but at least he enthusiastically coaches Olive in her contest talent routine. Circumstances conspire to put the entire family on the road together with the goal of getting Olive to the Little Miss Sunshine contest in far off California. Hilarity ensues.

Trivia: The movie took five years to make, mostly due to financial reasons. While filming in a convenience store in Arizona, a Paul Dano look-a-like walked in. Dano was late and unaccounted for so everyone thought the look-a-like was Dano. After he explained that he was not Dano, they took some pictures and sent him on his way. All the girls in the beauty pageant, except Abigail Breslin, were veterans of real beauty pageants. They looked the same and performed the same acts as they had in their real-life pageants.

Although known to Comedy Central viewers for many years as a correspondent on the high-rated satirical news program The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Steve Carell, at the time he was cast for Little Miss Sunshine, was a relative unknown in Hollywood. According to an article in Entertainment Weekly, the producers of the film worried that he wasn't a big enough star and didn't have much acting experience. However, between the time the film was shot in the summer of 2005 and its release in the summer of 2006, Carell became a huge success as the star of the high-grossing film The 40-Year-Old Virgin (I need to see this one) in August 2005 and the leading character of the popular NBC Emmy-winning television series The Office, which premiered in March 2005 and for which Carell won a Golden Globe in 2006 for best lead actor in a comedy television series. In the span of just one year, Carell had become such a star that the producers had gone from protesting his casting to tapping him to do prominent promotion for the film.

This movie was pretty funny. The basic premise is time tested, a disfunctional family on a road trip, but the acting is fresh, and the characters work off of each other very well. I like Greg Kinnear better every time I see him. Steve Carrell is at times deadly serious and at other deadly hilarious. But the two that really make this movie are Arkin and Breslin. Arkin is an oversexed, drug addict grandfather who got thrown out of his retirement home but you can really see that he loves his granddaughter, and Breslin is the slightly frumpy little girl with a dream and dogged determination to fulfill it. The talent show at the end, by itself raised my rating a full star. And while we are talking about the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant, I would just like to say...Man was that creepy. Every time I see stuff like that (child beauty pageants) with these 4, 5, 6 year olds strutting around in more makeup then Tammy Faye Baker would feel comfortable with, I get the creeps. This is still a business in America? The worst thing is that these were real pageant girls!

Up Next: Harold and Maude, an unconventional love story.