Product Description

Take a hilarious ride with the Hoovers, one of the most endearingly fractured families in comedy history.

Father Richard (Greg Kinnear) is desperately trying to sell his motivational success program...with no success. Meanwhile, "pro-honesty" mom Sheryl (Toni Collette) lends support to her eccentric family, including her depressed brother (Steve Carell), fresh out of the hospital after being jilted by his lover. Then there are the younger Hoovers?the seven-year-old, would-be beauty queen Olive (Abigail Breslin) and Dwayne (Paul Dano), a Nietzsche-reading teen who has taken a vow of silence. Topping off the family is the foul-mouthed grandfather (Alan Arkin), whose outrageous behavior recently got him evicted from his retirement home. When Olive is invited to compete in the "Little Miss Sunshine" pageant in far-off California, the family piles into their rusted-out VW bus to rally behind her?with riotously funny results.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #703 in DVD
• Brand: LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE - WIDESCREEN (DVD MOVIE)
• Released on: 2006-12-19
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Color, Dolby, Dubbed, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French
• Dubbed in: English, Spanish
• Dimensions: .20 pounds
• Running time: 103 minutes

Amazon.com
Pile together a blue-ribbon cast, a screenplay high in quirkiness, and the Sundance stamp of approval, and you've got yourself a crossover indie hit. That formula worked for Little Miss Sunshine, a frequently hilarious study of family dysfunction. Meet the Hoovers, an Albuquerque clan riddled with depression, hostility, and the tattered remnants of the American Dream; despite their flakiness, they manage to pile into a VW van for a weekend trek to L.A. in order to get moppet daughter Olive (Abigail Breslin) into the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant. Much of the pleasure of this journey comes from watching some skillful comic actors doing their thing: Greg Kinnear and Toni Collette as the parents (he's hoping to become a self-help authority), Alan Arkin as a grandfather all too willing to give uproariously inappropriate advice to a sullen teenage grandson (Paul Dano), and a subdued Steve Carell as a jilted gay professor on the verge of suicide. The film is a crowd-pleaser, and if anything is a little too eager to bend itself in the direction of quirk-loving Sundance audiences; it can feel forced. But the breezy momentum and the ingenious actors help push the material over any bumps in the road.-- Robert Horton

Beyond Little Miss Sunshine

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On the DVD
Two separate commentary tracks give directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris plenty of opportunities to describe how they shot the VW bus scenes and how Alan Arkin improvised a nose-blowing during the early dinner-table sequence. One breezy track has the directors only; another has them joined by screenwriter Michael Arndt. A music video, DeVotchKa's "Till the End of Time," is a standard cut-and-paste with clips from the movie. Amongst these rather slim pickings, the biggest draw for bonus-features mavens is a chance to look at alternate endings, narrated by the co-directors. Dayton and Faris frankly describe different stabs at getting an ending right: the first concept was deemed too sentimental, and subsequent variations on a different idea didn't hit quite the right note. Four (very brief) alternate endings are here, and without a doubt the filmmakers were correct in ultimately shooting--at a date just before the film's premiere--an entirely new finale. --Robert Horton

Customer Reviews

fun
Now this film is a bit on the odd ball side, it is funny, and I like it, I don't think it was Oscar worthy, but then I didn't think the Movie "Babe" ( the pig one ) was best Movie and it won, "Apollo 13" was much better for that yrs Oscar, but Hollywod didn't want Tom Hanks to have 3 in a row..politics...lol Anyway as I was saying it's a cute film but NOT for kids.....The "F" word is used a lot.

Little Miss Sunshine
This movie turned out to be a sleeper! It started out slow and I wandered if I hadn't made a mistake. As the movie continued I started laughing and didn't stop till the end. The ending also touched my heart for the underdogs of this world. You didn't know whether to cry or laugh. This is why I purchased this movie. I own very few dvd's. Another good movie I highly recommend is "Secondhand Lions" with Robert Duvall and Michael Caine. This movie is also like "Little Miss Sunshine" in that it will make you laugh and cry.

Little Miss Sunshine
Most families will enjoy this because most families aren't mental about making their young daughters look like street women for a beauty contest. I found this movie refreshing and I loved the family. Each member was developed exceptionally well. We see the typical family with it's highs and lows. The underbelly if you will of a realistic family and not some reality show which is more made up than the charaterizations in this movie. I recommend this if you enjoy melodramas. After all what is comedy without some drama? Good quality DVD with minimum extras. Decent replayability. If you enjoyed this catch "Best in Show" and "As Good as it Gets".

CA Luster