Cute summer fare

Rating: 7/10 (15 August 2006)

LMS is a good summer-quality movie with most of the humor in goofy sight gags occurring on the family's long and trouble-filled road-trip. The real fun was in the goofy characters and their many Keystone Kops antics.
Greg Kinnear did a great job as The Dad, as his straight-as-an-arrow American Dad looks made him the perfect straight man all the others played off of for laughs. He was annoyingly funny as an unsuccessful, 9 step program motivational speaker, and he drove the family nuts by spouting his 9-steps whenever the family found itself in crunch after crunch on their trip, as he dimwittedly believed that following his 9 steps would solve any problem. Thus, he was the chosen family doofus as they travelled from New Mexico to L.A. in an quirky(typical)VW bus, where they intended to enter their daughter in a really tacky, little girl beauty contest. Those nauseating contests really do exist, believe it or not.
The hilarious Alan Arkin played the off-the-wall, heroin-addicted, and profane grandpa to the hilt as usual, and Tony Collette as the wife and her very odd, vow-of-silence son were good too. But Steve Carell of The Office was outstanding as the morose, suicidally gay uncle taken along on the trip so the family could keep him from killing himself over a failed job and romance. His acidly sardonic remarks were some of the film's best moments. But their 7 year-old Little Miss Sunshine contestant daughter was the real star of this movie. She was a natural and showed just the right spunk and guts for a beauty contest entrant, even though the choice of her talent act reflected more of her sex-obsessed grandpa rather than her normal little girl self.
Sounds really sick, but it was funny in context. I did wonder afterward why our national child protective services didn't comment about the provocative sexual content in her act as it related to a little girl, but guess they considered it "humor" and not serious enough to make a fuss about. But, the creepy pedophile in the contest audience was truly scary, as he could have been based on reality. Uggh. Think of JonBenet Ramsey.
But, aside from that, it was a very entertaining movie.