Afterthoughts: Little Miss Sunshine

Mr. and Mrs. Buce watched Little Miss Sunshine the other night and okay, it pretty much lived up to its hype. But, some afterthoughts:

• What’s the vulgar, knockabout, five-o’clock-shadow father doing with that failed-up WASP of a son? Oh, it’s a comedy? Well, all right, then.

• We’ve got a genre now, haven’t we, of what you might call “Lisa Simpson” movies, aka “Meadow Soprano” movies, where a horrendously dysfunctional family throws a daughter with the culture, maturity and balance of a Radcliffe dean. Life with Father for the new millennium, I suppose.

• It was funny. I laughed. I paused the play while I went to the bathroom. But I gotta tell ya, it hit kind of close to home. No, no, I never lived in a family quite so Olympic-style and clapped-out as this one. But I did spend some of The Best Years of My Life living from paycheck to paycheck, one steel-reinforced boot tip away from the street, driving crap cars and gnawed by the constant awareness that all kinds of people were depending on me and I hadn’t a clue how, or even whether, I could pull it off. My, those were the days—and it’s a bit of a stretch to think of it as “ entertainment.” Yech. What time is Reno 911!?