Movie Rant: Cars and Little Miss Sunshine

Movie Rant: Cars and Little Miss Sunshine
by Vance Macdonald

We saw two movies this week that could not be more different, and yet had much in common, including a VW Bus. We had been looking forward to both Cars and Little Miss Sunshine for quite some time. We both have enjoyed all the Pixar movies, and thought their last one—The Incredibles—was their best effort to date. And since Hot Wheels made their debut when I was 7 years old, how could this film not resonate with my pysche?

Little Miss Sunshine, on the other hand, aspired to be the latest "quirky, dark comedy" that the indie scene loves so much. And while I was let down by recent entries Thumbsucker and (especially) I Heart Huckabees, this had Steve Carell and Greg Kinnear, who both seem to have the potential for a Jeff Daniels-style Squid-and-Whale breakout performance.

First up, Cars. The animation is the best yet from Pixar, as you would expect. They really are getting ridiculously good; human actors and set designers should be afraid. There are many of the car culture nods and cheeky references I hoped for, though somehow they did not excite me as much as the googie design touches throughout The Incredibles. Still, so far so good.

Then came the second act. Possibly the longest and dullest second act in the history of film. And this is supposed to hold the attention spans of children? The writers even exacerbated this fatal flaw by taking such a ham-handed approach with our protagonist. The script played like a film school freshman exercise in exaggerating all of the character's negative traits, making him as unlikable as possible, so that his, oh, what's that word...redemption will be all the more dramatic. By the end of the excruciating second act, my only emotional investment in kid Lightning was that I wanted to see him crushed flat in a car compactor.

Okay, you can almost forgive a family movie for an obtuse and one-dimensional script. So we looked to the new indie crowd favorite (and over 90% on Rotten Tomatoes) for our salvation. Alas, disappointment awaited us in a remarkably similar vein. Except this time it wasn't just one character, but almost the entire cast with an annoying lack of redeeming qualities. Carell's character is the only exception here. And true, you could say the same thing about Squid and Tenenbaums, but in those movies the characters had an endearing quirkiness to their flaws, while the characters in Little Miss Sunshine mostly just grate on your nerves.

In another head-scratcher, I thought the script contained an inordinate amount of slapstick for this kind of movie. It's not a total loss, as Kinnear and Carell rise above the shortcomings of their characters, and Abigail Breslin is exactly as charming as you expect her to be. With a significant re-write, I think Paul Dano's "brooding misunderstood teenager" could have stolen the show, but as it stands, his character is a two-dimensional cutout. Alan Arkin, who should get more roles like this, is mostly wasted with standard issue, "Oh, that's just grampa being grampa, that crazy old (coke-snorting) coot!"

These are not bad movies, by any means. They suffer, in my case, from a combination of a) high expectations, b) seeing them back-to-back, and c) the surprising coincidence of suffering from similar flaws. Oh yea, The Groomsmen: how many times will Ed Burns make the same movie? If you like him, you'll love this version. If you don't like him, this will give you more reason to continue.

Vance can be reached at vance@babblog.com.