I’ve just read The Guardian’s review by Peter Bradshaw of Little Miss Sunshine, and I wanted to quickly say that it’s so way off base, it’s actually badly wrong.
Bradshaw gives the film a paltry two stars out of five. If he can possibly direct me to a better comedy this year, I’d be really interested. For some reason, the whole subject matter is risky because a little girl who took part in such pageants was murdered ten years ago. But the film really isn’t about the Little Miss Sunshine pageant at the film’s denoument – that would be an obvious and easy laugh, and something the film actually tries to avoid. Yes the whole child beauty thing is a grotesque, and you do think, particularly if you come from Britain, that it’s only a stone’s throw away from actual child abuse. But it really isn’t the point here. This is a comedy about characters and their relationships with one another.
So the film wasn’t dark enough for Bradshaw, and some of the plot’s twists and turns are not quite true to life. Is that enough to damn the film?
Anyway, sometimes Bradshaw’s right, but on a worryingly increasing basis, he’s wrong. Go and see this film.