well, a sweet indian, through the request that i return DVDs for him, had allowed me to chance upon the movie titled little miss sunshine. it's about how family and love and all the togetherness you can imagine that can only from family, for lack of a wittier expression.
well, just in case you hadn't clicked on the link provided, here's the general summary:
Sheryl Hoover (Toni Collette) is an overworked mother of two. Her brother Frank (Steve Carell) is a homosexual Proust scholar, temporarily living at home with the family after having attempted suicide in the wake of a failed relationship. Sheryl's husband Richard (Greg Kinnear) is a Type A personality striving to help support the family as a motivational speaker and life coach. Dwayne (Paul Dano), Sheryl's son from a previous marriage, is a Nietzsche-reading teenager who has taken a vow of silence until he can accomplish his dreams of becoming a test pilot. Richard's father, Edwin (Alan Arkin), recently evicted from a retirement home for snorting heroin, lives with the family; he is close to his seven-year-old granddaughter Olive (Abigail Breslin).
Olive learns she has qualified for the "Little Miss Sunshine" beauty pageant that is being held in Redondo Beach, California in two days. The family, wanting to support her, quickly realizes that they all must accompany Olive to the pageant, getting there via an 800-mile road trip in their yellow Volkswagen T2 Microbus.
Family tensions play out on the highway and at stops along the way, amidst the aging VW van's mechanical problems. When the van breaks down early on, they learn that they must push the van until it is moving at about 20 mph before it is put into gear, at which point they have to run up to the side door and jump in...
and that's not spoiling it for you. one part that touched me in particular was how the foul-mouthed ole rogue (grampa) told olive, his grand-daughter that she's the most beautiful girl in the world, and that he's madly in love with her when she asked him if she's pretty the night before the peageant when she was getting cold feet. and this is coming from someone who tells his grandson to fuck as many women as you can. fuck many women.
suffice to say, i totally bawled my eyes out during this movie and ...and understood the power of a good writer. don't fuck with a writer. seriously.
as for war... there're too many lives and too many bombs on legs these days. it's all solved with mortar and suicides. take the most recent assassinations: there are the guns, there are the attempts with knives wrapped in flags, suicide bombers - it sure looks like there is a culture forming. i must've been slow to actually realise this only now but hey, i just started reading the newspapers recently. it's scary, this world. the more i read, the more freaked i get.
i was about to ask "why can't people just be content with living" only to understand immediately that what i consider acceptable may be the kiss of death to some. then again, that just brings me to the idea that humans are evil because evil feeds upon itself. and that's what we're doing. we're a cancerous race, in all senses of the word.
..then again, who's to say what's right and what's wrong, until someone close to you gets croaked and affect you enough to howl holy hell? reminds me of the book lord of the flies written by william golding.
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