Little Miss Sunshine

If you've never woken in the dead of night beneath a car with gravel embedded in your forehead, it's worth doing. A few times. It gets old around the sixth time.

I passed out Friday afternoon while trying to fix a leaky fuel pump on the Falcon. This is the kind of shit I file away as "Fun Project for Next Owner". But gas costs too damn much money to let it drip into the street. So, I bought a $14 pump from the parts store and got under there and got the old pump off. Gas dripped on my face, in my ear, and then I fell asleep with my feet sticking out. Thank God I live in a safe neighborhood. You go down to Wheatridge or Lakewood and the fuckers would steal the socks and shoes right off your feet if they saw you lying there. All they got off me was my wallet, and all it contained was a library card, a suspended drivers' license and a some coupons for Aquanet I was gonna trade to the Harelip. All my money I keep tucked up next to my nuts.

I woke up six hours later. It was dark out and the night smelled like skunk. Or Worm. Or Worm humping a skunk. I was tired. I don't know why. I just had a nice nap, but it made me even more tired.

I still had to go to the movies. The Falcon was inoperable, so I was limited to the local, crappy Olde Town Arvada Cinema. Now, don't get me wrong. Anyone who knows me knows my civic pride. They know I'm all about supporting local businesses. It's just that when they suck, I'm not so big on it. And our local theater sucks the fur of monkey nuts. What a ratty shithole. The best thing about it is that it's never crowded. But then again, neither is a pile of dogcrap, though.

Limited to one theater, and limited to movies starting after ten, I saw Little Miss Sunshine. Far as I can tell, it's a remake of National Lampoon's Vacation designed for the the annoying NPR fucks who listen to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me! and laugh at the non-Lake Wobegon parts of Prairie Home Companion. It's like the movies was written in a parallel universe where the lowbrow comedy of the common man gets a few intemellectual quirks and relabeled as smart and hip.

Like Vacation, Little Miss Sunshine is a cross-country family road movie. In the original, the sadsack dad who thinks the trip will bring his family closer together was played by Chevy Chase. Now, the sadsack dad with the same plan is played by Greg Kinnear. Ah, but the twist is that he's a self-doubting motivational speaker. Good fucking God, that NPR crowd is so clueless they donít know that these types have been punchlines on shitty sketch comedy shows for ten years.

Vacation's crotchety grandma is replaced here by a crotchety grandpa (Alan Arkin), who also dies mid-trip. But, to make it edgy, he's not only foul-mouthed, he's also a heroin addict. Not that either of those personality quirks has a god damn thing to do with the story. Beverly D'Angelo's bland mother is replaced by Toni Collette's, though she's less likely to do a gratuitous naked shower scene. The pudgy teen girl is replaced by a pudgy pre-teen girl with dreams of beauty pageant success. The homely teen boy who was Anthony Michael Hall is respun as mopey, homely teen Paul Dano. Randy Quaid's wacky brother-in-law is replaced by a suicidal, homosexual Proust scholar (Steve Carrell).

The unwacky family pile into a wacky yellow Volkswagen bus to hurry from Albuquerque (why? who knows) to Santa Monica (why? who knows?) for the "Little Miss Sunshine" pageant that the daughter has won her way into. The van breaks down, grandpa dies, and the family that didn't want to be together learns to love and appreciate each other.

What I hated most about this movie was how unfunny it was to a tired, grumpy shit like me. All the character quirks like the Proust shit, or the boy reading Nietzsche have almost nothing to do with the basic dysfunctional family road comedy that Little Miss Sunshine is. All the quirky shit is supposed to make the movie "smart", but in reality, it's window dressing, like putting tinsel on a Church's Fried Chicken at Christmas. It doesn't make it any more festive; and eventually the tinsel smells like grease.

Sure, the characters are quirky, but the quirks are forced, not natural, inserted for the sake of quirkiness. I hate to hold Vacation up as a model of classic cinema, but it fares well in comparison here. The characters aren't saddled with too much personality baggage like a donkey in a discount Grand Canyon tour.

Beyond the quirks, the action is dictated by trite scenarios: Broke-down cars; forgetting someone at a gas station; grandpa dying mid-trip and a mad dash to the finish line. The scenarios were so obvious and the characters so self-absorbed that I wished I had stayed camped out under the Falcon.

Little Miss Sunshine proves what I have long suspected: the NPR crowd may be smart, but they sure as fuck ain't funny. They're too damn busy complicating everything to be. Two Fingers.