影片對白  So who do you hang out with? No one? What about your family?

影片簡介

Little Miss Sunshine陽光小美女

Little Miss Sunshine is a 2006 Academy Award-winning dramatic comedy film about a dysfunctional family's road trip to a child beauty pageant. The film, which was directed by the husband-wife team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, was nominated for a Golden Globe and won the Best Feature - World Cinema Audience Award at the 2006 Sydney Film Festival. Produced by IMPACTS Entertainment on a budget of $8 million, distributionrights for the film were bought by Fox Searchlight Pictures for $10 million, which is reported to have been one of the biggest deals ever made in the festival's history. The movie was released in the United States on July 26, 2006, and had its continental European premiere on August 12 at the 2006 Locarno International Film Festival.

The film was nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Picture and won two: Best Original Screenplay for Michael Arndt and Best Supporting Actor for Alan Arkin. It also won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Feature.

Plot summary

Little Miss Sunshine is the story of the Hoovers, a fictional dysfunctional family from Albuquerque, New Mexico. The characters are introduced in the opening sequences: Sheryl Hoover (Toni Collette), a stressed and over-worked mother of two, picks up her brother Frank (Steve Carell) at a hospital after the depressed, gay Proust scholar has recovered from a failed suicide attempt. Richard Hoover (Greg Kinnear) is a manic go-getter striving to sell his motivational nine-step technique to becoming a winner. Dwayne (Paul Dano), is an angst-ridden, avowedly mute, Nietzsche-reading teenager who has dedicated his life to joining the Air Force Academy in order to become a test pilot. Richard's father, Edwin (Alan Arkin), recently evicted from a retirement home for snorting heroin, is shown to have a strong bond with his seven-year-old granddaughter Olive (Abigail Breslin), and coaches her to perform in a child beauty pageant.

After an expository dinner sequence, Olive learns she has qualified for the "Little Miss Sunshine" beauty pageant that is being held in Redondo Beach, California in two days. Olive is asked to be in Little Miss Sunshine after placing second in another beauty pageant. As soon as Olive hears the news she gets up from the table and starts screaming with joy, hurrying down stairs to keep practicing her routine that her grandpa has been teaching her. While Olive is partying downstairs her parents are forced to plan how they are going to get there. Since their relatives are out of town and the family cannot afford other alternatives, the family realizes they must pack all six family members into their yellow Volkswagen Type 2 mini-bus for a two-day road trip to California.

The family's tensions play out on the highway and at stops along the way, amidst the aging VW van's mechanical problems. The characters suffer setbacks: Richard's hopes for his motivational technique business sputter out; Frank encounters his ex-boyfriend who is now dating Frank's scholarly rival; Grandpa dies from a heroin overdose during the family's overnight stay at a motel; Dwayne discovers that he is color-blind, which means he cannot become a pilot (this causes him to speak his first line of the movie - 'fuck'); and Sheryl's obsessive manner impels her to attempt to keep everyone, including herself, calm and sane. Amidst all this, the family races to get to the pageant on time, traveling in the VW van with a broken clutch (requiring them to push-start it after every stop) and a faulty horn that won't stop honking on its own.

The finale takes place at the pageant, in which 6- to 7-year-old girls model swimsuits and evening wear, as well as performing elaborate dance numbers. Olive is out-classed by the other girls' emulation of Barbie dolls, but the family reluctantly allows her to continue the competition and pursue her dream. In the talent portion, Olive scandalizes and horrifies the audience and pageant judges with a striptease-style burlesque performance (to the tune of Rick James' "Super Freak"), taught to her by Grandpa, which she performs unaware of its risque nature. When her family rises to defend her from the pageant organizers and shield her from the humiliation of being removed from the stage, the ensuing chaos brings the dysfunctional family together in a shining moment of triumph over all of the many obstacles that littered their collective journey spanning time and interstate highways. By dancing on stage together they find what is really important in life; each other.

To placate the irate pageant organizers, the family gladly agrees to their demand that Olive never ever participate in another beauty pageant in the state of California. They return to their van, push-start it, jump one by one into the side door, and head home smiling.

考考你

用今日所學將下面的句子譯成英語。

1. 把眼睛蒙起來作畫，這可真夠前衛(wèi)的。
2. 他們又吵又鬧，餐館的主人把他們攆了出去。
3. 我們得不時檢查一下他的工作。

A Walk in the Clouds《云中漫步》（精講之三） 考考你 參考答案

1．這件事除去枝節(jié)不管，可以歸結(jié)為你們倆誰也不喜歡誰。
The whole matter boils down to the fact that you two don't like each other.

2．我希望你能留在這里直到結(jié)束。
I hope you'll stick around till the end.

點擊進入: 更多精彩電影回顧 

(英語點津Annabel編輯)