Hola all. Massawyrm here.

I certainly get where this movie is coming from. Every year Hollywood puts out half a dozen comedies or so – indie or otherwise – that take an educated, worldly city slicker and dumps them in an inbred, backwater, middle of nowhere with the aims of making fun of rural folk. The idea is that when you juxtapose a Starbucks drinking, CNN watching, blackberry wielding urbanite against small town Midwesterners and then make those small town folks dumber than dirt, it’s easy to make very average people feel good about themselves; make them feel…above average. Whether you place the film in the south, West Virginia, or as is most common, somewhere in Texas, there is plenty of comedy to be mined – mostly because a lot of the stereotypes are true. People shop at Wal-Mart, watch pro wrestling and live in trailers. Many of them do all three at once. Hell, I spent a summer in a Texas town in which the only thing to do on Friday Night was sit in the parking lot of Taco Bell. Until 10pm when it closed. Then you were fucked. That’s when the beer and shotguns usually came out.

So the idea that occasionally someone makes the inverse of that, in which a dumber than dirt Starbucks drinking, CNN watching, blackberry wielding urbanite visits a small town and makes a complete ass of themselves, doesn’t seem so undeserved. But it doesn’t make it any good, or any better than any other “learning how the other half lives” crap either. And that’s all this is. Another less-than-charming DOC HOLLYWOOD knock off, this time starring Renee Zellweger. The press release description alone tells you ALMOST everything you need to know.

Lucy Hill is an ambitious, up and coming executive living in Miami. She loves her shoes, she loves her cars and she loves climbing the corporate ladder. When she is offered a temporary assignment - in the middle of nowhere – to restructure a manufacturing plant, she jumps at the opportunity, knowing that a big promotion is close at hand. What begins as a straight forward job assignment becomes a life changing experience as Lucy discovers greater meaning in her life and most unexpectedly, the man of her dreams.

What they forget to tell you is that she’s apparently never heard of The Weather Channel and she thinks it’s totally appropriate to wear a mini skirt in Zero Degree weather. One could easily claim that the plot of this film is about a woman coming to grips with how to live in the cold and they wouldn’t be too far from the mark. That’s where all the comedy comes from. Wearing heels on ice or in a factory. Walking on cold hardwood floors. Driving a car into a snow bank. Funny shit, right?

Sigh. No. No it’s not. But it’s harmless. I’d call it Paul Blart for the XX crowd, but it’s even more harmless than that. It is, for all intents and purposes, a Hallmark movie for the 35 and up crowd filled with all the mindless, goofball, Oh-look-I-fell-down-and-shot-my-boyfriend-in-the-butt comedy that you expect from lowbrow cable television. It is one cold joke after another, when it isn’t making judicious use of the word TAPIOCA, which gets used so often here that it actually gains sentience and forces its way into the film as a game saving plot point. A fellow critic mentioned that this film would have been much better had a drinking game been made out of the word – but I insist that 20 year old college girls have died from fewer shots while on Spring Break in Cancun, and don’t for a moment recommend it.

This film is everything it looks like and everything it appears to be from the above synopsis. It is the cinematic equivalent of eating cardboard – free of any kind of flavor or texture as not to potentially offend anyone. I miss the Renee Zellweger that was in cutting edge comedies and Oscar-bait rather than making rated PG movies made for our Moms. But that’s what she’s been up to, and she is showing no signs of slowing down. If you’re a regular reader of this site, there’s zero reason for you to see this. Ever. If you’ve got someone asking you to take them, distract them, change the subject, feign an illness – because while this won’t kill you, it will hurt for about 85 minutes.

Until next time friends, smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.

Massawyrm

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