Little Miss Sunshine

Dr. Falken: "I could never get Joshua to learn the most important lesson: futility. That there's a time when you should just give up."

Jennifer Mack: "What kind of lesson is that?"

-WarGames

The "snakes on a plane" one-sentence pitch for Little Miss Sunshine would be "Slums of Beverly Hills meets National Lampoon's Vacation...with an edge."

The premise is straightforward, almost obvious: take a borderline dysfunctional family and put them on the road for the sake of the small, cute one. Have everything go wrong and let the characters work in the situation.

Basically, "Apollo 13" minus Tom Hanks plus Greg Kinnear minus the moon plus Redondo Beach.

As with all things, it's about execution more than inspiration. A good many broad, outrageously comic elements appear in the material, but the cast does such a good job that these elements seem almost unnecessary.

What the ensemble achieves is a near epic meditation on the central theme of the comedy of family errors: persistence. Each character has a unique take on persistence.

Greg Kinnear's can-do, win-or-die-trying biz dev dadbot is the second male lead in two weeks to lampoon the tunnel-visioned "stay the course" persistence of George W. Bush. There's a line between persistence and stubborness, between commitment and blindness. Whether it's NASCAR victories, Iraq or the Little Miss Sunshine pagent, we all can relate to putting winning ahead of understand WHAT is at stake.

And as events unfold and reality dawns on Kinnear (especially near the end), I couldn't help be catch a hint of George Bush's face when he first heard about 9/11. The dawning realization that things are not as you imagined.

Toni Collette is his long-suffering wife. She expends a great deal of energy spackling over the damage Kinnear appears to be doing to the family with his judgmental success piety...success which she is starting to notice HE fails to achieve.

At the beginning of the film, she agrees to take guardianship of her brother Frank, who has just attempted suicide after an unhappy love affair and professional setback. From the first few frames, it's clear that she invests MUCH more in Frank's survival than he probably ever did.

Carrell, for all his suicidal nihilism, invests a great deal of ego in being the "number one Proust scholar in America." When that status is challenged, he finds himself without recourse.

Dwayne, the Nietzche-reading angry older son has taken a vow of silence in anticipation of entering flight school to become a test pilot. What the relationship is between silence and flight is not made clear, but who says persistence needs a point?

Alan Arkin as the heroin-addicted, porn-loving, chicken-hating grandfather offers the kind of sage wisdom on persistence you expect from the grandfathers of the world: fuck a lot of women,the only thing stupider than taking drugs when you're young is not taking them when you're old and don't let fear of failure stop you from trying. I basically received this same advice from MY grandmother, so I can relate.

And, of course, little miss sunshine herself, who is ironically the antithesis of the cliched child beauty star: she is not vain, dresses in age-appropriate costumes, spends little time obsessing over the contest itself and takes more joy in ice cream than in winning.

There are a number of literary and cinematic references in the film. The family's name, Hoover, and the eldest son's name Dwayne is a reference to Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions and the potential investor Greg Kinnear is trying to court is named "Stan Grossman," a reference to the money man in Fargo.

But my favorite reference comes late in the movie when a character, reacting to some bad news, jumps out of the VW van and rolls down a dry, weeded embankment. This is a recreation of one of the opening shots in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (which featured the same van), where the wheelchair-bound Franklin rolls down a similar embankment.

That moment reminded me that, for all the hardships this family suffered, things could have gone a lot worse. At least no one ended up being carved up into sausage. Because, hey, winners don't let themselves be carved up into sausage, do they?

Four stars, Jason Bob sez if you don't want to check it out...that's fine...but then you'll be a loser, and that's not very fun...is it? I didn't think so.

Talladega Nights


"Our methods do not differ as much as you pretend. It would take only a nudge to make you like me. To push you out of the light."

- Rene Belloq to Indiana Jones, Cairo, 1936

There's a canard floating around out there that seems impossible to avoid. You hear it on Fox News and Dateline and on all the other media outlets that have a vested interest in keeping us distracted: Americans are more divided now than at any time in our history.

You can call bullshit on this if you want. Point out that the civil war and the civil rights eras were much more divisive. You don't really have majorities or significant minorities of the population saying that blacks shouldn't be allowed to vote. You don't really see the states raising armies to attack the other states.

In fact, public opinion in America is much more homogenous now than at any other time. We agree on so much more than we disagree on. But disagreement makes good press and makes politics easy. Does it really matter that some of us eat yellow mustard and others eat brown mustard? It's all still mustard, isn't it?

Yes, you can point this out, and some screaming asshole on MSNBC will shout you down, because THAT'S infotainment. And, as John Stewart and Stephen Colbert have shown us, you must fight infotainment WITH infotainment.

George W. Bush once ludicrously characterized himself as a "uniter" not a "divider," but that honorific truly belongs to Ricky Bobby.

Ricky Bobby is a NASCAR hero, a man who equates love with victory and who will finish first or die trying.

His nemesis is Jean Girard, a gay French existentialist Formula 'Un' driver who spends his weekends exchanging bon-mots with Elvis Costello and Mos Def.

Ricky Bobby drives for Wonder Bread. Jean Girard drives for Perrier.

The absurdity of the so-called divisions between us, whether between red staters and blue staters or between America and 'Old' Europe are revealed in the competition between Ricky and Jean.

Ricky drives to win, to be loved. Jean Girard drives to lose, to be destroyed and therefore to be freed from the victory trap, to freed to redefine himself.

In their conflict, we see more similarity than difference. Both men drive, both men are arrogant, both men want to go fast, both men are compelled to win yet find growth only in defeat.

Both men are shadowy reflections of each other. When each stares into the other's eyes it is as if they stare into the abyss. When each sees the other defined only by the crude stereotypes foisted on them by the corporate elite, the owners who will pit each against the other so long as profit can be found, the absurdity of their hubris becomes undeniable.

So I call upon us all, red and blue, coastal and mid-western, liberal and conservative to follow the healing path laid down by Ricky and Jean, to cast aside the petty differences sold to us by the marketeers of strife, to demand from our leaders justice, not vengeance, truth, not truthiness, vision, not pandering.

Then, and only then, will we all go fast.

Four stars, Jason Bob sez this film will save America.

Donnie Darko



Alienation is a universal experience. A good amount of art deals with this theme: the one thing we all have in common is that we don't relate to each other as intensely as we do to ourselves.

Our problems are uniquely similar.

Donnie Darko is a blending of two genres: teen angst melodrama and gothic science fiction.

Donnie has the usual teenage problems: emerging libido, emotional alienation, trouble at school, visions of a spectral rabbit telling him the world will end in less than a month. You know, the usual.

But, when a jet engine crashes into his house on the ONE NIGHT he happened to spend sleepwalking on a golf course, well, that's when his trouble REALLY starts.

One of the points of writing science fiction is to bring some aspect of the human condition into sharp relief.

Gender has great meaning to humans, and that meaning becomes clear by contrast in Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness, in which the characters' genders are subject to seasonal change.

Our experience of time is uniform and stable, because we're not orbiting a black hole at light speed. Einstein posed many thought experiments about what it would be like to orbit a black hole at light speed, but Gene Roddenberry showed us what it would be like to orbit a black hole at light speed while making love to a green woman.

After the accident, strange things begin unfolding. The rabbit appear to Donnie again, makes predictions, gives commands and things get stranger and stranger.

On one level, you can just chalk it up to Donnie's mental/emotional problems. We see much of the film through his eyes, and he is an unreliable perceiver.

But that's selling the story short. There is an underlying logic having to do with time travel (an explicit theme of the story.) Time travel may be a framework for Donnie's delusions, but it also appears to be a literal event in the movie.

That idea, that an underlying physical, spiritual or existential truth can generate a madness, and that that madness can actually be the intended, correct response is echoed in The Last Temptation of Christ (which appears in the film double-billed with Evil Dead)

Christ complains in that film that it feels as though God is pushing over the edge of a cliff...and that is what's happening...and it does drive him insane...and that insanity is part of the plan.

Unlike typical science fiction, which embeds humans within a scientific concept (like gender or time), this film embeds a scientific concept (time travel) within a human experience. There is some exposition on the mechanisms involved, but only enough to carry the story along. We spend a great deal of time with Donnie, trapped in his head, trying to deal with the usual array of teenage problems while the universe (literally) closes in around him.

And Donnie articulates three of the great lessons we should all learn before age 18:

1) Just because you'you don't have answers doesn't mean that some well-groomed asshole DOES

2) Nothing is black and white and reducing complex experiences to polar extremes is a bad idea

3) Smurfs don't fuck

What a world it would be if we all voted based on these principles.

Four stars. Jason Bob sez check it out or maybe you're not as commited to Sparkle Motion as you think you are.