LITTLE MISS BLEAAAARRGGGHH

"At the most basic level, it is nearly impossible to dislike Little Miss Sunshine." Not true. Right here, hand raised, dislike in action even as we speak. I've had a little rant brewing on this most overrated of 2006 trifles since I finally caught it on DVD back in December, and I figured I might as well get it down on paper (or whatever) before the Oscars. If LMS wins Best Picture, it'll be the biggest triumph of feel-gooder mediocrity over, y'know, legitimately good moviemaking since...um, last year.

Okay, I will say this: Little Miss Sunshine isn't exactly bad, per se. Everybody involved seems to have put their all into it--I mean I've got no bad words to say about Alan Arkin or Steve Carell (well, I kinda do--see below), and as far as weirdly precocious child actors go, Abigail Breslin is less annoying than most. Directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris made a whole lot of swell music videos before LMS, and they certainly demonstrate a lot of potential in their feature debut. I liked the Devotchka song "How It Ends" before I saw the movie, and it was nice to hear it in various permutations throughout the film. There is a lot to like about Little Miss Sunshine.

But all these talented people are bringing their considerable gifts to bear in service to a story that, in the end, says very little we don't already know. The real-life story of the ordeals writer Michael Arndt went through to bring his story to the screen, and his eventual success (WGA award, an almost certain Best Screenplay Oscar, deal to write Toy Story 3, etc.), are the kinds of things that make you feel warm and fuzzy about Making It in Hollywood, and make people like me a little jealous (full disclosure). It's a movie about the little guys, made by the little guys, and that's the kind of thing you want to get behind. But get behind it I shan't. The script is a mess, an odd mix of broad comedy and emotional heaviness that never gels into anything coherent. It's possible to strike this balance and make it work--see for instance Wes Anderson's Rushmore or The Royal Tenenbaums (yeah, I know I'm a fanboy, but that doesn't mean it's not true--and even he couldn't quite pull it off in The Life Aquatic, though his cowriter Noah Baumbach did in his own The Squid and the Whale). The characters are all broadly drawn types--suicidal gay intellectual, winning-obsessed striver, randy grampa, etc.--and it's only through the excellent work of the actors that they become anything resembling real people. And that would be fine, except LMS isn't trying to be a broad comedy, it's trying to be an insightful portrait of the American family (and, by extension, America). The melancholy yet driving "How It Ends" underscores nearly the entire movie--that ain't comedy music. That's Quirky Indie Drama music. The music is being used to take the audience to a place emotionally that the story can't--and hey, you know, that's filmmaking, but it's also a bit of a cheat. The broadness of the characters and the contrived situations prevent the drama from having as much impact as intended. The family's decision to all take the little yellow van to the beauty pageant is so contrived it reminded me of Lloyd and Harry deciding to go on their road trip in Dumb & Dumber. (Speaking of which, LMS also borrows a scooter gag from D&D, with diminishing returns.) And again, that would be fine for a goofy comedy, but that's not the tone LMS is aiming for. If it was, it would have to be funnier.

The humor in Little Miss Sunshine is, with few exceptions (most involving Arkin), supremely lazy: the repetition of "Did I ever tell you I'm America's number one Proust scholar," which wasn't that funny the first time; the use of the chicken bucket and (specifically, strangely) Sprite as condescending shorthand for This Is What Has Become of the Modern Family; the treading on well-trodden ground in Beauty Pageant Land. "It's quite a high-wire act, the misfit family comedy Little Miss Sunshine," Adam B. Vary writes in the February 2, 2007 Entertainment Weekly, the annual Oscar-nominee-hagiography issue. "The Pollyanna papa, the pragmatic mama, the gay uncle, the disaffected teenager, the horny grandfather, the adorable little girl with a dream--all on a road trip, in a beaten-down VW bus, with a dead body in the trunk, heading to the deeply creepy world of prepubescent beauty pageants. It just about screams 'sitcom.'" That it does. The thing is, Little Miss Sunshine isn't even funny enough to pass muster as a sitcom. It just coincidentally happens to star Steve Carell, who also stars in the sitcom The Office, which in any given episode is both funnier and more deeply felt than LMS, and which more sharply etches the exquisite despair of real life. Take the scene in LMS, for instance, when Carell's Frank meets his former lover in the gas station while buying porn for Arkin. The scene is played for the obvious laughs and the obvious emotions; it works because it works exactly as we expect it to. Contrast this with almost any scene between Michael Scott and Jan Levinson on The Office: the "double date" at casino night, say, or Jan admitting her feelings for Michael. The Office mines these situations for both unexpected humor and for complex emotions; the laugh and the cringe are inseparable, and though we know both are coming, it's always a surprise when they do. The Office forcibly takes laughs from the audience; try as it might (dead body + cop + gay porn), Little Miss Sunshine merely earns the laughter we give it, as a wage.

Little Miss Sunshine gives us what we expect of it, and does so briskly and competently, and that may be why it has earned so much praise. It flatters the audience by telling us things we already know: Your family can be hard to deal with, but in the end, family is all you have. Beauty pageants are creepy. Suffering is a part of life, but if you get through it, you'll be a stronger person. And, of course, the big one, the theme that's hammered hard right from the beginning: Winning isn't everything. "Winners" (i.e. the creepy pageant contestants) can be losers. "Losers" (i.e. the Hoover family) can be winners. The film climaxes with the entire Hoover family joining little Olive on stage to dance to "Super Freak" and show all those "winners" what winning really is, and it's about as forced and hacky an ending as one can imagine. But, as such, it is perfect. We would expect nothing more.

******

Well, that was certainly rambling and poorly thought-out, but at least that bile is out of my system. For the sake of my Oscar pool chances (I won two years ago but was robbed, I tell ya robbed last year), I hope we don't get a reprise of that family dance party on Sunday night. Go The Departed, go! Woo! In case you were wondering, Children of Men was the actual Best Picture of 2006, with Brick in a respectable second place.

HIS DARK MATERIALS UPDATE

Toys!

As much as I'd like to see full-on McFarlane Toys-style figures (which are still a possibility), I think it's pretty cool they're going with the Star Wars 3 3/4" scale, the better for worldbuilding. Also: Asriel vs. Vader! Iorek vs. Rancor! Speaking of Iorek, I'm not fully sold on the armor (especially that Junior Birdman helmet), but action figures are hardly the best way to judge. (My friend Darran Hurlbut, a video game character designer, did a Iorek design that I like a lot, though the armor may be a little too fancy.) But look how cute! Also: AWESOME.

And even though Moriarty thinks the movie's a hard sell, somebody in marketing's got their brain on. Oh, to be four years old again.

HIS DARK MATERIALS UPDATE

AICN's Drew McWeeny visits the Golden Compass set. So does this guy.

Not much new information here, but you takes what you gets. McWeeny's piece is notable, though, for anticpating what is likely to be the thrust of every story about The Golden Compass from now until it's released: the "Can this find an audience?" angle. (There's also the "Will the Catholic League throw a fit?" angle, which McWeeny doesn't explicitly mention, but which is surely just as likely.) While I do understand McWeeny's pessism--five years ago, when I was a development intern, I wrote coverage of the book that essentially said "this is a great book and can make a great movie, but it will be insanely expensive and will probably alienate/piss off a considerable section of the audience, which wouldn't really be a problem except you need those people to buy enough tickets to justify the enormous amount of money it's going to cost"--I can already see this pessism becoming the story, when the story should be the movie itself. This kind of thing happens all the time. Last year the Mission: Impossible III story wasn't "TV genius J.J. Abrams makes a really fun spy caper," it was "Do people still want to see tinfoil hat-wearing Katie Holmes-brainwashing psycho nutbar Tom Cruise in a movie?" The answer turned out to be "not really," and you have to wonder how much of that was a self-fulfilling prophecy. If all anybody says is "Is The Golden Compass too controversial/smart/whatever for the average moviegoer?" then the answer's probably not going to be too surprising.

I also think that McWeeny's not placing enough faith in the audience; I know nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public, but condescending and pandering to them is a recipe for disaster too. One of the great strengths of Pullman's books is that they deal with weighty ideas, but are intended for children, and so these ideas are presented with clarity and no sense that the author is talking down to the reader. So, really, it shouldn't be all that difficult to communicate these same ideas to an audience of adults, especially when they're couched in cool special effects and action. You can get away with a lot of Big Ideas if the adventure is rollicking enough. And who ever sold a $150 million fantasy movie on Big Ideas anyway? You sell it on the story and the spectacle, neither one of which is difficult to grasp. McWeeny's suggested trailer isn't bad, but for some reason he seems to be deliberately ignoring the very basic story at the core of the book: Someone or something is stealing children. When Lyra's best friend disappears, she sets out to find him, with the help of her golden Magic 8-Ball, her talking, shapeshifting animal pal, a cowboy and a witch, and a super-awesome badass armored polar bear king. Seriously, if you can't sell moviegoers on Iorek Byrnison, who's basically Gladiator's Maximus as a polar bear, you need to get out of the movie-selling business. Same with the daemons, which is the kind of idea that anybody who's ever loved a dog or cat should be able to immediately understand (and also want to buy a toy of). If you want to get really creative, you also throw in "Lyra's an orphan whose uncle is James Bond. He doesn't want her hanging around, so she goes to live with Nicole Kidman, who seems nice but is always hanging out with some crazy monkey, so she's probably evil." This is not brain science. This is basic fairy-tale, Star Wars, Harry Potter-type shit.

I recognize that HDM doesn't have the name-recognition of Potter, LOTR or Narnia. I also recognize the possibility that those church groups who helped make The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe a hit could organize against The Golden Compass, once word gets around what it's really about. But at this stage, when the movie hasn't even finished shooting yet, wringing your hands and crying "How are we ever going to get the unwashed masses to come to this movie?" isn't helping at all, particularly when the answers are right there in front of you.