Michael Arndt wrote a sick, genius screenplay. I saw reviews for "Little Miss Sunshine" when the movie came out and passed on it. Whatever the descriptions were, they totally missed it. This is a very funny comedy about failure. Epic failure.
"Little Miss Sunshine" was directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, and it stars Greg Kinnear, Alan Arkin, Steve Carell, and Toni Collette, along with others. Arkin won a best supporting actor Oscar for his brief time on the screen, and Arndt won for best original screenplay.
I don't know who did the costuming (I assume Nancy Steiner), but the clothes were wonderfully awful, especially little Olive's choices. (Mom's clothes sucked pretty bad, too.) Dinner seems to have been take-home buckets of chicken all too often, given Grandpa's comments. All the details of a harried, wrecked homelife get nailed in the opening scenes. Nobody has time to think about dress or food, much less be good at anything.
In this family's life, everything goes horribly wrong, and it's so horribly funny that I had to keep backing up the video because I wasn't through laughing when something else happened. Lee Marvin said his horse should have gotten an Oscar in "Cat Ballou," and the family VW van should have in "Little Miss Sunshine."
Although ostensibly about Olive's quest to win a child's beauty contest, this movie is no more about beauty than "Bull Durham" is about baseball. If you liked "The Station Agent," you'll like "Little Miss Sunshine" (and vice versa).