'Little Miss Sunshine'

I remember this film initially being promoted and hyped as "Steve Carell in a serious role." He'd had "The Daily Show" fame on top of Anchorman and The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Therefore, playing the gay, suicidal Marcel Proust scholar was considered a seachange in Carell's career.

However, you come away from watching Little Miss Sunshine completely impressed with the people you weren't aware of like Paul Dano, Abigail Breslin and Alan Arkin.

Dano's on Joseph Gordon-Levitt level with me: I watch anything he's in. He's absolutely awesome in this film and he's fantastic in There Will Be Blood.

Breslin is an actress that had that one fleeting moment. She's gone on to do other films and they all suck and chances are she'll never be in anything worthwhile for the rest of her life. And that's OK. You don't need to set the world on fire twice in a lifetime. Most never do and Breslin happened to do it as a 10 year old.

Why was she so good? It wasn't her acting chops or her performance, per se. It was the look. The tacky clothes, the glasses and that awkward body that hadn't quite gotten rid of that baby fat and hadn't evolved into the slender, longer frame that she's surely adopt with age. They captured her on film at the perfect time. The scene where Dano's Dwayne lifts Breslin's Oliver up a steep embankment and her poochy belly sticking out is accidentally awesome. It sorta makes the film. That you can't teach and you can't script or storyboard.