Little Miss Sunshine (Dayton & Farris 2006)
Posted on March 15 at 20.00, 2007 by Eric Mahleb
What was all that fuss about? Little Miss Sunshine being nominated for Best Picture? Winning for best original screenplay? I am confused. Not that LMS is a bad film. It’s cute, entertaining, and a bit funny. But it also feels so much like recycled material, developed at the American ‘indie’ (indie as in the indie divisions of the big studios) film school for moderately gifted youngsters. If we believe Peter Biskind, the death of the American independent film, if there really ever was such a thing as an independent film outside of the work of a few directors from the 50s to the 80s, happened already several years ago. Little Miss Sunshine certainly would seem to corroborate this view. Me, you and Everyone we know, Napoleon Dynamite, The Squid and the Whale, The Station Agent, Little Children, You Can’t Take it with You, The Family Stone, American Beauty…the more of these films come out, the more they resemble each other. We are quite far from the days of Cassavetes, Jarmush, Haines, Solondz and even of Payne and the early work of O. Russell. Whatever freshness and originality some of the ‘indie’ films of the 90s promised have been swallowed by a new mainstream…
My vote: 
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