Weather Girl (2009)

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Thirty-something frigid weather girl loses it on the air and subsequently everything professionally and personally. She had to move in with little brother and reevaluate her life. Only to find herself falling for a so-called 'rebound'. In process learns that letting yourself to be loved can be rewarding.A charming Patrick J. Adams (Byron) is the fulcrum of the movie. Produced by and starring TV-veteran Tricia O'Kelly who managed to rope in fellow small screen buddies for this quirky romantic comedy.Starts brightly only to sink into predictability and unrealistic climaxes of the genre.

I have often wondered what a movie peppered with sitcom stars (who work WAY harder than "serious" ones) would be like. Now I know. It's GREAT!Containing stars from series like "Two And A Half Men" and "The New Adventures Of Old Christine" (and starring one of the snobby duo from the latter) this movie is better acted than most "rom-coms" that inhabit mainstream cinema today.And while any movie that is written and directed by the same person should ring alarm bells - there are exceptions. And "Weather Girl" is definitely one of them.It is a damn shame this movie got so little exposure in the theatres - but if it pops up on telly or you see it down at your local video-hire shop, check it out.Okay, it's no "When Harry Met Sally" - but it will entertain you WAY more than a lot of the tosh that masquerades as cinematic entertainment these days.

Weather Girl is quick, very funny and full of sharply drawn and excellently performed characters. It has an almost Seinfeld-ian quality, except it's about people who feel real emotions and suffer the consequences thereof and not amoral, impervious sociopaths. The story starts very strong and amusingly sprints through a thoroughly standard plot before getting a little full of itself at the end. By that time, though, you'll enjoy these characters enough not to mind.Sylvia (Tricia O'Kelley) is a 35 year old "sassy weather girl" on an early morning TV news show in Seattle. Things start off with her having a total meltdown on the air. It seems Sylvia has been romantically involved with Dale (Mark Harmon), the superficial anchor of the show, and just discovered he was sleeping with his co-anchor (Kaitlin Olson). After verbally savaging them and the whole pretension of early morning news shows, Sylvia is left without a job and a home, since she was living with Dale.Distraught, she shows up at the door of her younger brother's apartment and Walt (Ryan Devlin) takes her in. At first, Sylvia tries to go on with her life like nothing happened. She starts looking for another job in TV news and even lets her two friends (Alex Kapp Horner and Marin Hinkle) set her up on what turns out to be a horrible blind date. After making such a public spectacle, Sylvia can't even get a job in radio and is forced to become a waitress. About the only good thing she has going on is a no-strings-attached sexual relationship with Byron (Patrick J. Adams), Walt's best friend. But just as she and Walt start to get serious, Sylvia has a chance to get back everything she's lost and more. Will this 35 year old woman compromise her principles for her old life or risk starting over at square one? I think you'll really like watching everything that happens up to that question, but not care that much about what the answer is.Weather Girl is consistently droll and occasionally laugh out loud humorous. Part of that is due to the finely written script of Blayne Weaver. He's not just good with a joke, he's good with the set up to the joke and making it all flow out of the nature of the character and their situation. Part of it is due to the excellent work of this cast, particularly Tricia O'Kelly, Patrick J. Adams and Ryan Devlin. Those three have great comedic chemistry and bring this zest to every moment they're on screen together.The two things I like most about this film, however, are because of writer/director Weaver. He gives every character a depth you don't usually see in this kind of low-budget, light-hearted comedy. Take Dale, for example. He's a "walking haircut" who's as shallow as a sidewalk puddle, but Weaver lets the audience see that Dale's shallowness can also be taken for an upfront earnestness. It not only makes Dale a more interesting figure, it also explains why a smart woman like Sylvia might find him appealing, which also makes her a more believable and sympathetic heroine. Even the co-anchor Dale boinks, though a broadly drawn and over-the-top caricature of a plastic infotainer, gets a scene where the viewer can look through her eyes and realize that there's some validity to her viewpoint. Dale and his co-anchor are mainly in the story to be the butt of jokes, but Weaver makes them worth laughing at.The other especially neat thing about Weather Girl is that there's an almost propulsive speed to it. The plot of this thing is predictable and rather clichéd, which a lot of films suffer from and get dragged down by. One of the best ways to compensate for that is to bring the quick. The scenes in this movie are short, tightly-written and almost always have a point that leads you into the next scene. That generates a kinetic energy that pulls you through all the unexceptional twists and turns in the story fast enough that none of them can irk you. Now, toward the end of things, Weather Girl does try and make out like the relationship between Sylvia and Byron is this great romance and it really isn't. As lovely and entertaining as they are together, it never feels like more than a fling to them or to the viewer. And the moment where Sylvia has to decide if she'll go back to her old life or keep going with her new one grasps for emotional heft that this story never does anything to earn. This is a very good film, but not at all a serious one.Weather Girl is a tropical island in the tumultuous sea of craptastic low-budget cinema. There are just so many indy films out there that range from barely mediocre to flat out horrendous, it's a damn shame that movies like Weather Girl get lost over the horizon. This is definitely worth seeing.

The WEATHER GIRL is partly funny, though with MORNING GLORY in theaters recently, some of WEATHER GIRL's thunder has been stolen. Let's face it, Mark Harmon is no Harrison Ford. But with slightly different plots, some people may find it possible to sit through both of these TV mini-soaps without snoring in either. Tricia O'Kelley seems to have a look which one could picture as a small-market morning weather woman, and Mark Harmon certainly comes off as smarmy enough to be her morning anchor counterpart.With "Behind the Scenes," "Deleted Scenes," and "Outtakes" DVD features, the packing for this movie is not as bare bones as some low-budget home movie editions tend to be. Perhaps the disc bonus highlight comes during the "outtakes," when Harmon says something about being Special Agent Gibbs, a reference to his role on the CBS hit police procedural, NCIS.In rating this movie, the key question is whether the cougar match-up between Tricia O'Kelley's title character, "weather girl" Sylvia Miller, 35, and her little brother's best friend, Byron, 29 (played by Patrick J. Adams) works for you. If you can picture this as a poor man's version of Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, you may see WEATHER GIRL as being sunny side up.