A Night at the Movies

I finally got around to seeing Little Miss Sunshine last night. It's easy to see why it was this year's word-of-mouth success. Despite an unforgivable screwball plot twist halfway through and some formulaic indie quirkiness throughout, it's charming, easily digestible (in a good way), and often very funny. The cast is phenomenal, too. Steve Carell is subtle and great, Toni Collette is reliable as ever, Greg Kinnear makes a potential jerk pretty sympathetic, Paul Dano manages to make a character vivid without speaking, and Alan Arkin is as funny as he was in Grosse Pointe Blank, but he gets more screen time here.

It's ten-year-old Abigail Breslin as Olive, though, who steals the show. The movie's most definitely a comedy, but there were two or three scenes where Breslin had me crying, and I'm not a big crier at the movies. It's the best performance by a child actor in many, many years. In fact, I see no reason why she shouldn't be nominated for Best Supporting Actress.

But that movie's old news, so I won't dwell on it. Let's dwell on the future, shall we? A future of dilapidated barns, presumably on other planets, watched over by Billy Bob Thornton. In an astronaut suit. On a horse.

Perhaps funnier than anything in Little Miss Sunshine (and that's saying something) was this movie poster, which I saw on my way into the theater (click on image to enlarge):