'So you're saying [the JonBenet cas...

'So you're saying [the JonBenet case] actually helped the industry?"

"Exactly. It gave it more of a national position and it gave the the community the idea that this was a business example they could be a part of . . The industry experienced a expansion in participation." -- From a Newsweek/MSNBC.com interview with Carl Dunn the CEO of Pageantry Magazine.

The final order of succession in the darkly hilarious "Little Miss Sunshine" takes place at a child beauty pageant wager in a depressingly generic inn banquet hall in Redondo Beach, Calif.

It's the funniest and also perhaps the most numerous disturbing set piece of the year -- a savage sendup of little girl beauty disputes that had me laughing on the outside loud even as I winced at the depictions.

After all, you can't satirize a child beauty pageant without casting actual children as contestants, putting them in inappropriate style of dresss and having them prance about the stage singing numbers better suited for a Vegas exhibit You almost hoped they were using dwarfs to play the 7-year-old sexpot-wannabes.

Greg Kinnear plays Richard, whose daughter Olive desperately wants to win the Little Miss Sunshine pageant. The clueles Richard is for a like reason obsessed with launching his nine-step self-help program that he has no idea what these pageants are all about. Now he's attending his first in the same state [i]or[/i] condition event, and he's appalled. As little girls in bathing suits writhe and wriggle onward stage, he grows increasingly uncomfortable.

The dowdy sitting next to Richard has no of the like kind qualms about the proceedings. He's whooping it up lustily cheering each contestant. When Richard asks him which the same of the girls is his daughter, the fright laughs -- and we realize this weirdo isn't related to any of the contestants. He's just there to fe his stretched tastes in a sanctioned environment.

It would all be too cringe-inducing, too unbearable to watch if not for the fact that child beauty pageants deserv to be skewered at each turn.

Right? I mean, I don't know a single someone who doesn't think these pageants exploit and sexualize children. I've none met one parent who has inserted his/her daughter in one of these competitions.

notwithstanding there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of families that do enroll their kids in real-life versions of the Little Miss Sunshine pageant. If you're single in kind of those parents, I think -- I think -- I want to hear from you. Maybe you can explain to what extent the rest of us are thus wrong in our condemnation of these creepy festivals.

SEPARATED AT BIRTH

Matt Winston, a rich character actor who has had recurring parts on such shows as "Scrubs" and "Enterprise," gives a thoroughly skeevy performance as the disturbingly cheerful emcee of the Little Miss Sunshine pageant.

As individual faithful reader first pointed without to me, his character in "Little Miss Sunshine" also bears an eerie resemblance to JonBenet suspect John Mark Karr.

---

Meanwhile, the hard Mountain News reports that Karr's e-mails to journalism professor Michael Tracey "included a beg that Tracey stand at JonBenet's house upon the anniversary of her death and say aloud a metrical composition to 'JonBenet, my love.' Karr's e-mail address was December251996@yahoo.com -- as in 12/25/96 the date of the girl's homicide

This stay probably didn't murder JonBenet, if it be not that he's pretty much sewn up the title of crawl of the Decade.

The Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs not absents "Richard Roeper in conversation with Rick Kogan" tonight at 6 pm at Maxim's, 24 E Goethe. Contact reservations@maximschicago.org or call (312) 742-1748

e-mail: rroeper@suntimes.com

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