Little Miss Sunshine tells the tale of Olive, a seven year old girl who dreams of being crowned a beauty pageant, and of her family who shares her journey towards that aspiration.

The film is one of those movies that is so spot-on about human nature and its failings. Take Olive's uncle, Frank (played brilliantly by Steve Carell of The 40 Year Old Virgin and The Office fame), the country's #1 Proust scholar; he attempts suicide after a series of events which involve losing to the country's #2 Proust scholar. As Simon Cowell once noted in a radio interview, "Other people doing well just naturally makes me unhappy". It pisses Frank off too apparently.

Little Miss Sunshine is funny, has a great cast, beautiful cinematography (the yellow VW bus on top of a slope and against the blue sky is brilliant) and, at its core, an appealing anti-conformist premise: it makes fun of our obsession with winning. It even has a quasi life-affirming line which goes, "Life is one fucking beauty contest after another. School, then college, then work... Fuck that... You do what you love, and fuck the rest".

Life is indeed a series of beauty contests; you get judged, competition is stressful, and you get crowned or you don't. It's kind of nice to have a movie come along once in a while and point that out and tell us to fuck all that.