little miss sunshine

I recently watched "Little Miss Sunshine" on DVD, after hearing many good reviews, including a recommendation from my parents. Boy, was I disappointed. LMS is truly one of the most over-rated movies ever. I thought I was the only one who thought so, but the very perceptive Gene Healy agrees with me:

Look, I know a lot of quirky, maladjusted people. I know quirky people related to other quirky people and/or married to them. I am a goddamned expert on quirk. So believe me when I tell you that LMS is Phony Quirk. In LMS, like Garden State and Napoleon Dynamite before it--and unlike in real life--the quirks are randomly selected, as if the movies' producers developed a computer program to weird up a nothing script.

The phony quirkiness was bad, but what really bothered me was the fact that several key plot points hinge on the fact that one or more characters doesn't know something obvious. I see this in movie after movie and it really destroys a plot for me. In this movie, the climax depends not only on the parents (and son) having never seen a child beauty pageant before, but also never having seen the routine that the daughter has been practicing for ages with her grandpa. Isn't that just a teensy bit implausible? A second plot point hinges on the fact that fourteen-year-old son (and entire family, actually) is unaware of a physical condition that he's had since birth. How is that possible?

Big thumbs down.