Not your everyday thriller

This weekend, without meaning too, I had sort of a movie-fest. It started with the movie Little Miss Sunshine and was followed by the surprisingly similar Off the Map.

I thought to write about them because neither of these movies were your "everyday thriller." Both movies focused around an unordinary family with many issues of thier own and how they dealt with it. Little Miss Sunshine was about a little girl who was a finalist in the Little Miss Sunshine pageant and about how she gets there and what happens when she arrives. The problems she encounters involves her suicidal uncle, coke-head grampa, wacked-out dad, depressive son, and mom who is just trying to hold the family together. What starts out as a shockingly blatant tale of this family turns into a funny, heartwarming story about how one little girl can pull together even the most unlikely of people and they call all live together as a family.

Off the Map was a story about a family in the middle of no-where, New Mexico. The dad is in a deep state of depression and has been for the past 6 months and the mom likes to take strolls naked in the garden. It is in this state that she is found my a tax-auditor for the IRS. He because so infatuated my thier way of life that he stays with them until the day he dies. The daughter, a young girl, has never gone to a proper school but craves knowledge. She gets her hands on anything she can from the modern world and reads and memorizes everything. They have very little, but they have a wonderful life: no debt, enough stored food for years, a most importantly, a life of their own.

After watching these movies, I fell in love with thier simple charm and their underlying messages. Sometimes it's not about the glamorous things, or about how much money you have, but about the love you have in your family. It made me feel blessed to have a normal family, in terms of these other two families at least. Love really is greater than anything else you can have in your life.