"Live each day with courage, take pride in your work;
Talk less, say more, and always finish what you start."
Hello everyone!
I may have to apologise in advance, but I think there's going to be an influx of Hallmark movie channel reviews on this blog for a little bit. I've sort of made a mini list of all the stuff I want to see from their lineup this summer, and I started yesterday so I figure I might as well put my viewing to good use.
Of course, not everyone is going to enjoy this, just like not everyone is going to enjoy the fact that Hallmark is pushing out a new movie pretty much every week.
The thing is, when you have such a massive amount of media, there's bound to be some repetition along the way.
It might have happened in my choice for yesterday's movie night as well, though at the very list I picked a new production seeing as it only aired this weekend, but I didn't get the chance to watch it until yesterday, sadly.
And since it's still summer, why not settle for A Summer Romance?
There are obviously other supporting cast members, but these two do stand out the most out of the entire lot, I have to say.
The story itself isn't anything too complicated or what we haven't seen before, but it works much better than a lot of others have because of the two leads. Krakow and Paevey have an undeniable chemistry that works really well on screen, and it made me rethink the Paevey situation. I'd seen him in a previous movie and didn't quite like him so I sort of ignored all the rest of his work, but now I may have to do him some more justice and rewatch some of it.
Anyway!
Richard is a CEO who has big plans to build a resort like nothing the world has ever seen before, or maybe at least the people in America and Canada, and he's found the perfect place, a ranch that's behind their payments and whose owner could probably be persuaded to sell.
He heads off to Montana to meet with Sam, ranch owner, ends up stuck in the small town because the rural airport runway needs to be fixed, and gets taken along for the ride by what he NEVER would have considered a town car back in New York.
Still, we do get to see sparks fly - almost literally - when Krakow's character rides past the car, although it's hilarious to watch Richard pick up on the fact that the 'Sam' he was planning on talking to is actually a woman.
Sam also gives him a nickname, JR (Just Richard), saying she doesn't trust a man without a nickname, and takes him over to the ranch so he can sleep at the guest house because the one hotel in town is full for the summer festival.
Once at the ranch, you can generally guess what's going to happen: Richard tries his best to present his company's offer to Sam, who says she'll look after it but that she has every intention of keeping the ranch which has been in her family for four generations, although she did inherit her father's debts as well as the land itself. Plus, everyone on the ranch pulls their weight, so naturally JR is put to work, and it's predictably funny to see him fumble his way around basic tools like a pitchfork, cook pasta for dinner, eat way more carbs than he normally would in New York, and try to mount a horse wrong-leg up (special shout-out goes to the horse for trying to get to its bucket of feed through the fence instead of over it).
We've seen these scenes before of course, in numerous movies, but Paevey and Krakow sell them a little bit better; Sam takes JR along to her hidden spot and starts to open up to him a little bit, and he learns from Annie's parents that she used to be engaged but it came to an end when her man chose to take a job in LA.
Throughout, JR gets teased by a lot of 'probably' (the horse probably won't kick him, the mountain lion probably won't eat him) and a lot of missed opportunities to kiss Sam while he's at it.
Also, there's the obligatory transformation when she takes him into town to dress him up into actual cowboy clothing.
Slowly but surely, JR finds that the resort idea might not be the best thing for the ranch, especially since his experience (getting up at the crack of dawn, helping around the ranch, etc) has actually been extremely pleasant, not to mention the fact that he's gotten a good night's sleep for the first time in a long time and the chronic pain in his neck also seems to be gone.
He attends the summer festival with Sam where she turns down the town's donations for the ranch, saying she'll figure something out, and throughout the movie fields phone calls from his assistant, and even his parents the one time, where you can see his mother wants him to relax, but it's his father who's driving him to work as hard as he does.
Unfortunately, all goods things must come to an end and so does this story when Sam and JR return from a night out in the wilderness to find JR's assistants both on scene, who explain that the company has gone ahead and bought the mortgage payments from the bank (can they even do that without informing the owner?) and they effectively own the ranch, not to mention will carry on a 'dude ranch' idea JR had off-handedly commented to his father, which naturally comes across as if he stole it from Sam.
JR is made of sterner stuff than that though and he goes after the girl he wants, explaining what happened to the best of his abilities, and that she has 72 hours to make the payments before the company closes on the deal, which he'll help her make.
He'll invest in her dude ranch idea as a business partner, probably get fired from his current CEO position, and move to Montana, because hey, his heart hasn't been in the New York scene for ages anyway.
Moving on ahead to what seems to be a barn dance of some kind where everyone has accepted JR and he actually introduces himself as JR, and not Richard, he shares a dance with Sam and then heads out into the night with her to look at the stars, something they'd done a lot throughout the movie, marveling at how many stars there are up there when you can actually SEE them (honorary mention goes to lightning bugs).
Then, about forty seconds before the movie ends (I had to look at the time stamp), they FINALLY kiss, and we see a happily ever after!
As I've written above, this is a fairly non-complicated story in the sense that we have a down-on-its-luck owner, a city slicker who comes rushing in to the "rescue", learns the error of their ways, falls in love, there's a misunderstanding, and finally it all gets cleared up and the city slicker moves to the country for their happily ever after.
The misunderstanding itself worked a little bit better in this movie than usual because it didn't really take all that long, and Paevey delivered on his side of the bargain where he didn't just stand there and let the misconception continue forever but actively and believably fought against it, telling his assistants where they can shove it (though not in so many words).
Again, however, one should praise Paevey and Krakow both for making this done and dusted trope really work, and the gorgeous scenery absolutely helped, too.
Not to mention the horses. I want to live on a ranch now and learn about the cowboy code, too!
xx
*images and video not mine
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