Little Miss Sunshine

Today, throughout my work day…. which even on a really really GOOD day, is about as exciting and intellectually stimulating as watching paint that is already dry, dry… yeah, during this day, which was today, I found myself musing upon what might be the funniest moment for me, in movie-watching history.
I thought and I worked and I thought and I thunk…..
And then it hit me.
It would have to be a certain portion of the movie Little Miss Sunshine.
I will never forget one Christmas when we all rented about sixteen movies and then sat around eating popcorn and drinking eggnog and eating chocolates until we very nearly became a sort of Group Bio-Hazard. There were about 37 of us in the living room of my sister’s place, and we were committed to a marathon movie session.

There was a certain portion…. a certain extended scenario, I guess, in the movie Little Miss Sunshine, where I very nearly lost my life due to laughter. I seriously began to fear for my life, or at least felt that I might end up with brain damage or some sort of internal rupture if I did not stop laughing, and yet I could not stop. [In actual fact, my nephew Ernie in the La-Z-Boy yonder, actually DID kick the bucket around the same time as I was laughing, but a later autopsy revealed that his death was caused by choking on half a box of Turtles©!]

The scene in the movie involves the family in their highly dysfunctional yellow van, ripping down the highway and when Dad [Greg Kinnear] hits the horn, it gets stuck…. and continues to let out these plaintive bleats for a long long while. Soon, a cop pulls them over as Kinnear is driving so erratically…. and meanwhile Grandpa is dead and rolled up in a tarp at the back of the van… and something about the way that horn kept bleating as the cop approached the driver-side door of the van…. well…. it’s just lucky I made it to New Years Day!
I thought I was going to die.
Here is a trailer of the movie. The horn just starts bleating, exactly at 1:16 → 1:27.



This is just such a great movie.
Especially if you have been confined to the same room with 36 other people and are not allowed to leave even to go to the washroom and everyone is high on egg-nog and one guy is dead.
Little Miss Sunshine is right up there with the classics of the genre... like My Cousin Vinny, So I Married An Axe-Murderer, and Liar, Liar.

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