New in Town

Year 18, Day 44 - 2/13/26 - Movie #5,244

BEFORE: Let's get back on track here, just a simple rom-com that will set me up for Valentine's Day. No heavy lifting here, I think, just a typical fish-out-of-water with a mismatched couple that turns out to be a better match over time. Frances Conroy carries over from "The Tale".

THE PLOT: A Miami businesswoman adjusts to her new life in a small Minnesota town.

AFTER: We've got the fish out of water in Lucy Hill, a Miami businesswoman who's trying to advance in her career, she gets sent to Minnesota to automate a food manufacturing plant and also "downsize" (aka fire) half of its workers. But first she needs to get them to install the new machinery before they're let go. Gee, you don't suppose she'll be won over by their folksy ways, do you? It's a bit hard to take her seriously because at first she's so dumb that she didn't realize it was going to be COLD in Minnesota in the winter? Come on, she brought 17 bags of luggage with her but she didn't pack a winter coat? How can someone so business-savvy (supposedly) be so stupid that she didn't check the weather in the city she was flying to? 

And similarly did she somehow expect a warm reception from the people that she's there to fire? She thought it was going to be easy to trick everyone into working themselves out of a job? What the hell, if you're going to make this character a smart businesswoman, you can't make her clueless at the same time, that's just not going to work, but yet it's where we're going to find out comedy tonight. The plant foreman tells her that "Gopher Day" is a state holiday and his crew needs to get the day off, and she FALLS FOR THAT? Give me a break...

Sure, it's a different world, one with ice fishing and potluck dinners, snow days and fish frys and sure, there are going to be some culture clashes.  Lucy starts making a list of the people who cross her path or seem weird to her, and those are going to be the first people fired. I'm sure that making that list and leaving it where people can find it won't have any possible repercussions at all... In the same fashion, she manages to bad-mouth country music, pick-up trucks and beer during her welcome dinner, and these are all the things held sacred by Ted, the guy she thought she was being set up with, only he turns out to be the union rep, somebody she needs to deal with on an almost daily basis at the planet. Whoopsie. Yeah, when you're "New in Town" you should probably not try to piss off so many people, especially the local waitress at the diner. 

It's a long turn-around for her to appreciate this town's people and their way of life, and things get worse when she swerves to avoid hitting a cow in the road during a snowstorm and getting her car stuck in a ravine. That union rep also happens to be the guy with the snowplow who rescues her, she kept warm by drinking alcohol (not recommended) and then said some more things about him while she was drunk. But she gets back in his good graces by giving his daughter a make-over before her first high-school dance. She and Ted start a romance, only it's probably a very bad idea for the plant executive to be dating the union rep, right? RIGHT? 

Christmas comes and goes, and so does Valentine's Day (seasonally appropriate!) but before the spring thaw, Lucy's corporate overlords want her to close the plant because the yogurt line is not selling well and is going to be discontinued. So now rather than laying off 50% of the staff (or perhaps because she sort of never got around to DOING that...) she's tasked with laying off 100% of the staff. But instead of doing that, she goes rogue and has the workers re-tool all the machines to make tapioca pudding instead, based on her assistant's family recipe, which they also somehow test-market and promote in just a matter of weeks, all without corporate's permission. Surprisingly, the new product is a hit and Lucy is somehow not fired outright for disobeying her bosses. Only in a movie, right? 

In a possible similar fashion, the director of this movie quit halfway through post-production. It sounds like he has just as many disputes with his producers as Lucy had with her company's executives. So you kind of have to wonder what sort of product he was trying to put out, and how that might have differed from the film that did get released. The end result isn't terrible, but it's hardly one of the best romance films out there either - still, it does conform to all of the standard rom-com techniques. 

Directed by Jonas Elmer

Also starring Renee Zellweger (last seen in "Bob Fosse: It's Showtime!"), Harry Connick Jr. (last seen in "Basic"), Siobhan Fallon Hogan (last seen in "Daddy Day Care"), J.K. Simmons (last seen in "The Accountant 2"), Mike O'Brien, Ferron Guerreiro, James Durham, Robert Small (last seen in "Transporter 2"), Wayne Nicklas, Hilary Carroll, Nancy Jane Drake, Stewart J. Zully (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Marilyn Boyle (last seen in "Elvis Meets Nixon"), Dan Augusta, Jimena Hoyos (last seen in "The Devil Wears Prada"), Suzanne Coy, Ordena Stephens-Thompson, Devin McCracken, Leif Lynch, Adam Cronan (last seen in "They Cloned Tyrone"), Tom Wahl, Christopher Read, Peter Jordan, Vanessa Kuzyk, Matt Kippen, Ben Beauchemin, Kristen Harris (last seen in "Nobody"), Blane Cypurda, Brett Sorensen

RATING: 6 out of 10 scrapbook photos