JonBenet Ramsey: Not ready for Prime Time

You've may have heard about that new movie Little Miss Sunshine. In case you haven't, it charts the comic misadventures of "one of the most endearingly fractured families ever seen on motion picture screens" (taken from the film's own website) as they make their way across the country. So, basically National Lampoon's Vacation but without Chevy Chase, the geek from Sixteen Candles and that really hot 80's model who inexplicably married Billy Joel. Seriously, it is exactly the same right down to the "let's hilariously cart our dead relative across the country in the boot of our car" sub-plot.

However, despite having three strikes against it (being overrated by its own website, being exactly the same as a pre-existing movie and suspiciously not having Chevy Chase in it at all) I actually thought it was very good. But this blog entry isn't a review for Little Miss Sunshine. You should probably go pick up a newspaper or a magazine for that because those people are actually paid to review movies and like write things and stuff.

Anyway, the film in question ends with a thirty minute sequence damning that great American tradition of painting small children up like prostitutes and forcing them to dance about like malnourished monkeys attached to organ grinders. I am of course talking about creepy child beauty pageants. Surprisingly, considering the film's fairly hostile stance on the practice, the film features real life beauty contestants. In an article I read on Saturday, the co-director of the film Valerie Faris revealed that all the parents decided to let their children be in the movie because they believed that appearing in a Hollywood Film meant their daughters had somehow made it.

Personally I think these stage-parents get a bad rap. For example, the thought of some idiot famewhore housewife thinking that her daughter will get a ten million dollar/five picture deal with Disney on account of her role as "hideous woman-child #3" in Little Miss Sunshine gave me a much needed belly-laugh.

Okay, so I'm still working this one out; appearing in a modestly successful indie film for a few seconds apparently constitutes making it for the beauty pageant set? Oh my god, did infamous tarted-up murder victim JonBenet Ramsey make it then or what!

You'll remember who JonBenet Ramsey is on account of how her picture has been published on the front of probably every magazine ever created and has featured heavily on 24 hour news networks more devoted to slightly interesting old murder cases than, you know, famines, droughts, political insurgencies and other boring words. She has also been the subject of multiple totally not exploitative at all tele-movies and once on Entertainment Tonight I saw this creepy montage of JonBenet tarted-up like a store mannequin while Mary Hart rambled on about how she was the most beautiful child ever and in between vomiting in my mouth a little I remember being convinced that Mary Hart probably wanted to have sex with her. Because you know you've made it when you've been lusted after by Mary Hart.

JonBenet was back in the news recently when alleged really creepy guy John Mark Karr (middle name included by the media because he is like totally on the same level of infamy as John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald) claimed he was probably behind the murder but then it turned out he probably wasn't, shocking even beauty pageant mothers with this excessive act of famewhore-ness.

I could make some pithy observation here about American culture but I'm sure you're already thinking it.