I saw Little Miss Sunshine twice this weekend, after it opened in Boston this past Thursday. Although I have thoughts on it, it doesn't disappoint. Interestingly enough, I also picked up Swann's Way this weekend--Steve Carrell's character is a Proust scholar [sic].

But back to the movie (spoilers may ensue)--

Yes, it's good. In fact, it's probably the best one I've seen all summer. To be an old man about it, it's got gumption. The stories of each of the characters is somewhat complex and their psychoses are interesting--of course, Frank Hoover, and Olive, and Dwayne, &c. What I wish, of course, is that they'd go into the stories a bit more--it came as a shock to me to hear midway through the movie that Sheryl Hoover was a remarried divorcee (was Dwayne her first child with her other husband?). But the movie didn't really go into all that--we hear it once (that she's a divorcee) but that's it. There's nothing more. Frank Hoover is a gay literature professor who runs into his love interest, but his history never really plays a role in the rest of the story.

It's both good and bad. Of course, after spending an hour and a half with these characters, I was stunned to realize how little I knew about each one of them. But maybe that's where I want to leave things. Maybe the light dark comedy (okay, you saw through me: pun intended) was light because we didn't delve into the characters.

That said, there was some sort of uncomfortable detachment that won't make this film as meaningful for me as, say, the Royal Tenenbaums, which gets at the crux of all its characters' problems and still manages to stay funny. Then again, Royal Tenenbaums aimed much less at being a realistic comedy and more a mockery of this family.

But Little Miss Sunshine is good. Very good, in my humble opinion.

Joking aside, apparently there is a drink called "Not a Very Good Manhattan"-- well, actually it's called a "French Manhattan,M/a>" and it involves orange liqueur, and it looks horrifying. In the spirit of science I will try it when I get my hands on some triple sec. (Link via PG.)

Anyway, I remain unimpressed with PG's defenses of my bartender. It is true, as one Friend of Crescat writes via email, that the real culprit here is the irrational pricing system of a bar. It appears that drink prices usually incorporate both fixed and variable costs for real estate and for materials-- so an imported beer costs more than a domestic, and a beer in an expensive location costs less than one in a dumpy dive. But mixed drinks that indeed take a great deal of time to make do not cost a large amount more than beers that simply need to be pulled or opened, which is why places are understandably grumpy to serve them. Of course, the blame should not be placed on the patrons who simply attempt to buy things at the listed prices, but on those who offer things they hope not to sell.

Still, none of this explains A, why the bartender was out of triple sec, or B, why he thought it was the default ingredient in a manhattan.