Little Miss Sunshine – or how snorting heroin might kill you

Especially people who are into cinema and films are bombed with pretentious content that some don’t
even know what to say about, watching movies that no one has ever heard of just for the show-off.
Pretentious people would talk to you for hours about some strange or obscure Danish, Thai, Indian, or
whatever quirky film they have seen, while they haven’t understood anything from them, but do it just
to feel smart, or interesting. Shouting aloud that American cinema is made for entertainment purposes
only isn’t a sign of how cultivated you are, but a sign that you cannot find deeper meanings in simple
movies.

Well, Little Miss Sunshine is a movie to remember, a movie that catches your attention in the very first
seconds with that music that gives a feeling of nostalgia, of some lost times that you enjoyed, now being
gone and forgotten. A tragicomedy that not only can make you laugh, but that depicts various topics
ranging from family to children’s beauty pageants, the deranged people from LA, and to even the effects
of snorting heroin.

The story itself it’s not very complicated. A small child wants to compete in a beauty contest as she
watched on TV, ending up getting trained by her hedonistic grandpa, who finds joy in things like drugs
and adult magazines and can only talk to you by shouting, usually sharing his deranged-old-man
thoughts. Her dad, who is a very ambitious man with a dream of making a living out of selling his
motivational courses, and her mom, who just decided to host her brother who eventually tried to kill
himself.

It hosts many interesting perspectives on how we chose to live our lives and many other topics. We get
to see this tackled by Olive’s father and grandad, two characters who happen to be in an antithesis, one
who is a man obsessed with the idea of winning, making it the only personality trait he has and which
doesn’t bring him any happiness, and the other one, who is the drug addict grandpa, who teaches Olive
that to be happy you don’t need to be a winner, but to be yourself. Throughout the movie, we see how
Olive benefits more from her grandad’s philosophy than her father’s, as she sees his life worsening.

Having arrived at her beauty pageant, Olive and her family get in contact with the deprived and
superficial world of children’s contests, having to see some sick people that try to make a living out of
their children’s backs. The others try very hard to make their prodigies convincing to the jury, while
Olive maintains her simple yet so nice aura and decides to stick to her grandpa’s teachings, deciding to
be herself.

Finally, Little Miss Sunshine is an apparently simple movie that depicts a variety of topics, with funny,
simple, and interesting characters together with a unifying message. A good comedy, predictable, just
perfect for when you want to relax.