Little Miss Sunshine

I just saw Little Miss Sunshine last week and it was AWESOME. Great story, very interesting characters that grow through the story, and lots of failure and humiliation.
The character Greg Kinnear played bothered me in particular because he was such a jerk and unfortunately all too like me. The movie opens with him teaching a seminar on his foolproof nine step program to success. He judges all the other charchters by his system and his judgments are ugly and offensive. Everyone else that knows him realizes that his system doesn't work except him.
A major part of his system was a refusal to accept failure which I reject utterly. The point at which I saw a connection with me was the way in which I have tried to use Christianity as my own 9 step program that would guarantee success to those around me if they would just subscribe to it. I don't think that is what Christ came to teach us, not a way of avoiding making mistakes, not a way to be right, not a way to correct everyone else, certainly a mirror by which to inspect ourselves for those who can bare to look at themselves.
The weakness of a "9 step system" approach to life would seem to be that:
-It over simplifies life
-It is overly optimistic
-When it fails you have to alienate those for whom it didn't work
-Jesus didn't give us a list of 9 things that would make everything work well for us
-"Success" is not, in my opinion, what Christianity is about. Many passages of scripture give the distinct idea that Christianity will produce a life that looks like a failure in the eyes of the world.
On the other hand:
-9 steps would be so much simpler than daily trying to make sense of a constantly changing life in light of a more or less unchanging holy text
-"Success" feels better than getting knocked around all the time
-9 steps would make it easy to determine if you are accomplishing anything valuable

As much as I hate a "9 step worldview" I still live it. When someone else's kids act up I have the strong urge to go tell them what they are doing wrong. "Earth to mom and dad, he needs a spank." When I see vagrants, homeless, and criminals I judge them as though they all the support that I did growing up. "Pull yourself up by your boot straps damn it!" When my wife or children make a mistake I can't let them learn from it I have to instruct them in how not to make the mistake again. "Everytime you order the pizza you..." I generally think that people are mindless idiots that need me to explain things to them. "This is how you make the DVD player work."

The movie bugged me because I saw myself in a repugnant character, and I, Mr. Fixit, don't know how to fix the broken reflection that I saw. I'd love to hear some discussion, comments, suggestions for me, on this one.