As seen at the 2009 Los Angeles Film
Festival: It’s telling of Weather Girl’s
quality that standing five feet from supporting actress Kaitlin
Olson on the movie’s Los Angeles Film Festival red carpet was
more exciting for this “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” fan
than anything in the movie itself. After a small theatrical
release, Weather Girl will premiere on the Lifetime
Channel in October and, boy, will it be right at home there.
The title
newscaster is Sylvia (Tricia O’Kelly). In the opening sequence
of the film, she has an on-air eruption, deciding she’ll call
out quintessentially moronic anchors Dale (Mark Harmon) and
Sherry (Olson) on numerous character flaws on the air. Most
notably, Dale weaseled his way into a sex-based relationship
with Sylvia, only to leave her for his bumbling idiot of a
co-host. While the scene leaves Sylvia without a job and all
over the Internet in embarrassing form, things slowly but surely
turn around for our heroine, as they always do in this type of
movie. Circumstance forces her to move in with her brother, Walt
(Ryan Devlin), who allows his web-designer friend and Sylvia’s
soon-to-be love-interest Byron (Patrick J. Adams) over to use
the Internet while his is down. On the emotional rebound, Sylvia
once again faces a tough decision when she’s inevitably offered
her job back at the station to improve sweeps ratings.
While
Weather Girl is not a painful sit, it never fully realizes
itself as a romance, a comedy, or a combination of the two. This
problem stems from the way Sylvia is written. In the opening
sequence, she is established as a caricature rather than a
character, grand-standing in climactic fashion as if only to
make the audience hoot and holler at the drama. While very glib,
this technique would be OK if writer/director Blayne Weaver’s
only goal was to make the viewer laugh at Sylvia the
entire time. But instead he targets a more sympathetic
portrayal—especially as the movie goes on—and his expectation
that we simultaneously treat her as an over-written ploy for
laughs and a real human proves impossible. Needless to say,
Sylvia’s ensuing lack of authentic emotion means her romance
with Byron comes off as artificial, not sweet or compelling.
Actress O’Kelly is a champ throughout and tackles the role as
best she can, but her attempts are futile within the confines of
Weaver’s script.
Yes, there
are select enjoyable moments in Weather Girl, most of
which involve actors Harmon and Olson hamming it up for the
camera as all-too-realistic news anchors. But given Will Ferrell
and Adam McKay’s legendary Anchorman already stands as
the definitive broadcasting comedy, this disjointed melodrama’s
attempts to engage the audience that way seem unnecessary. If
you’re bored one day and find Weather Girl on Lifetime
when channel-surfing, it’s an acceptable time-killer, but there
isn’t any other reason to see it.
-Danny Baldwin,
Bucket Reviews
Review Published
on: 6.21.2009
Screened on:
6.19.2009 at the Majestic Crest in Westwood, CA.
Weather Girl is rated R and runs 93
minutes.
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