Totally joyous, funny, fun, fast, and more mainstream than indie overall

Rating: 7/10 (13 May 2013)

Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
What a wacky, funny, sweet, feel-good movie. It's fast, well made, well written, and fresh faced all the way through.
What else do you need from a warm comedy? The star has to be the little girl, who is in fact the title character, Olive, played by Abigail Breslin. She is the real deal, a great little kid with a heart and with smarts and cute and talented, too. And for some reasonable reason she wants to compete in a beauty and talent contest, and her loving and doubtful family give her total support. Of course, the genuine things that Olive represents are the exact opposite of what is encouraged by beauty pageants, so a kind of crisis is inevitable.
But you know it'll be a funny crisis, and not quite like the comedy in the adult version of the film from six years earlier, "Miss Congeniality," with Sandra Bullock. Because Bullock has the goods to win, despite her outsider sensibility. Olive is set up to be a geeky, cute but not a bit glamorous or fakey kid.
Her grandfather, played by Alan Arkin, is also the real deal, a nutty caricature, for sure, but funny and a great perk in the movie. The parents are fun but for me in a more expected way, and the brother of one of them is fun and funny in a Ben Stiller kind of way.
Production involved some quirks in filming, such as the use of five different yellow microbuses, and the genuine use of headphones by the little girl (as shown) when Arkin is swearing his head off. And the whole thing was a fairly well budgeted indie with a debut at Sundance. And a huge rise to the top of critical and popular charts.
So it's easy to like this movie and even to love it. For serious movie lovers you might find it like other feel-good, well made, but in some ways "in-the-box" movies (another that comes to mind is "Shawshank Redemption") so it won't strike some people as exceptional. Just exceptionally fun. Don't expect anything truly moving or thought provoking or experimental or probing. It is what it is, which is pretty much self-sufficient.