Little Miss Sunshine, like Snakes on a Plane, is one of those totally dependent films that is marketed as INdependent to gain cred with art film snobs like me. It worked: they got my money even though I was reticent to give it based on the amount of recommendations I received. That's the problem with being faux-indie: as soon as the movie starts making the kind of money the filmmakers really want, us snobs have rejected it as "popular and base," which of course this movie is, veneered by traits like "characterization" and "unconventional subject matter." Hey, I'm not trying to be negative. Sometimes even when you try to like a movie you can't bring yourself to do it. I must be too darned principled.

Perhaps I didn't like it because it was ultimately a generic picture. It began with truthfully brilliant character but ended so traditionally that I thought Father Christmas had handed me a tightly wrapped package of sweets. I know some people like their movies easy to swallow, and I am not so pretentious to disagree when the film is artful (You've Got Mail, Prisoner of Azkaban,  Spider-Man 2), but starting a film with bitter anger and ending with an all-family dance scene is just dishonest. This out-of-character happiness reveals the movie's true comedic intentions, something I began to sniff out about two thirds in when some absurdly dark and hard to believe plot contrivances pulled me out of the movie entirely (I am referring to the scenes inside the hospital). These missteps are commonplace in bad modern comedy, missteps that an "independent" film like this should be correcting or removing entirely. What good is it when our independent films are merely highbrow remixes of the big studio pictures?

It's certainly the big studios who are devouring these quirky one-shots: the movie was financed independently but quickly snatched up by Fox Searchlight (the "independent" division of mega-studio Twentieth Century Fox, ten points to them for irony) for a cool $10 million. Fox Searchlight is a money-making arm of Twentieth Century whose sole purpose is to pick out the most marketable independent films and shill them to both snobs and average movie goers, something that has subverted the independent market's flexibility. Numerous studios bid on Little Miss Sunshine at Sundance, mostly because the film poses as an off-the-wall anti-authority genre-buster when in reality it is a pleasantly marketable road trip movie. In short, these "independent" divisions at the major studios are filling our art house theatres with quirky audience pleasers that they're not talented enough to make themselves. The true independent movies are getting lost in the shuffle.

The sad part is that Little Miss Sunshine's rebellious attitude is its weakest link. I don't understand how "Be whatever you want to be" has survived as a modern philosophical concept let alone driven an entire movie. I could hear Cat Stevens' singing the lyric from his "score" to Harold and Maude that went "If you want to be me, be me. If you want to be you, be you." While Little Miss Sunshine is thankfully more understated than Harold and Maude in its anti-establishment theme, it adds no value or complexity to it. The main characters are losers but that's supposed to be totally acceptable - we're told the drug addict lived the way he wanted to, so who should stop him? The movie makes fun of the only guy saying "Stop being a loser and fix yourself," by making him a loser himself, something he learns to embrace (along with everyone else) right before the credits. (The opposite side of this cinematic coin is The Incredibles, a movie about a family who must learn to destroy their dysfunction and improve themselves as people.)

Despite an excellent opening thirty minutes, Little Miss Sunshine is just another quirky studio film that happened to be independently financed but can only pretend to be independently minded. If this is the best that big studios can find at independent film festivals, we definitely need to reconsider where we pay our movie money.