What I Did for Love

Typical Hallmark movie fare...not very good...with canned, repetitive music. Only reason to have this movie on is the scenery in Lone Pine, California. This is the setting of so many great westerns. It is just beautiful.

OK, it's just a Hallmark movie, I shouldn't take it too seriously and a lot of the production crew will be on autopilot, but I wanted more nuance than this. I'm a little surprised at some of the "pro family" reviews as well. The main theme seemed to be "be as obnoxious to your unfamiliar guests as possible and maybe your daughter will marry someone like you".

This hardly seems the stuff of Christmas sentiment (unless you count The Grinch). I just couldn't buy into the bigoted hick stereotype as being gruff but lovable, just unpleasant. The daughter's role seemed to consist of smiling weakly while her boyfriend was metaphorically spat on from all sides. If the roles were reversed and the boyfriend's parents made her take ice cold baths every morning and strip naked to serve drinks to their society friends, somehow the family friendly motif would be put into sharp relief. Everybody's family could be this loathsome to strangers if they really tried, but why would you celebrate it? Why would you reward their climb from boorish vindictiveness to grudging acceptance as attaining a state of grace and forgiveness?

I know that TV movies tend to have broad-brush plot lines with little room for subtlety, but the creative contempt and continuous humiliation that the daughter's family put him through just irritates after a while and is too obviously there simply to hang the sub-plots from. No one would keep putting up with this level of abuse with little or no help from their partner and the unreality reminds you that this is just a product. You can't lose yourself in something this caricatured.

Obviously some people care more about the acting than the whole point of the movie.

This is a VERY positive movie showing that one does NOT have to be set in their ways and can change. The father DID NOT like Sadie's boyfriend until he saved him from a wolf and survived outside overnight in the cold mountains.

The theme of people being able to change is a theme which is positive and is more important than how great the acting was. I didn't care to observe the acting critically because I was drawn into the movie.

After all I thought that's what good acting was .. being able to draw your audience into your story. At least that is what our director told us...a director who does this for a living.

I recommend this highly for those who are fed up with the normal Hollywood fare and want a movie that your whole family could watch and admire.

This is the story of a big city doctor (Sadie) bringing her lawyer boyfriend (Travis) home to the ranch where she grew up to meet her family (widowed dad and brothers) for the first time.

The boyfriend wants to marry her. She wants to take it slower and for her father to meet him first, even though she is convinced her dad will love him. He is a city boy and wants to make a good impression, and the family is rural as they live on a ranch. Sadie has an ex-boyfriend back in the town she grew up in who really wants to reunite with her. Everything goes wrong for the boyfriend until everything goes right in time for a happy ending with life lessons learned.

A terrible movie, even for a TV movie. The actress playing Sadie is awful. At no time did I believe Sadie was a doctor, nor did I believe she grew up on a ranch. Sadie seemed to me to be a spoiled city girl with no clue. She was a totally unlikeable character. Now, I know the movie's plot called for the boyfriend to do some stupid things out of ignorance of ranching life, but I was thinking if she was my girlfriend, knowing I was ignorant and a fish-out-of-water, and didn't take a moment to explain some things, is she the right person for me?

The boyfriend, Travis, was hapless and pathetic. A lawyer, yes. A successful lawyer, no.

Sadie is an only daughter and supposedly the father is protective of his only daughter, but mainly he came across as crusty. At least the actor playing this character had a little charisma and tried to act in his limited role.

Sadie's brothers were throwaway characters.

Sally Struthers is an Aunt who wants Sadie to reunite with Sadie's ex-boyfriend. Why? Because the plot needs a reason for the obvious one-note loser of an ex-boyfriend to show up to be the story's bad guy. The Aunt also had a slight subplot which... who cares!

Throw in some mumbo-jumbo about environmentalists and grazing rights and wolves. The writer doesn't seem to understand the issues, and if she did, she didn't let that get in the way of the story. The writer seemed to not want to offend anyone and her solution of the environmentalists buying instead of taking the grazing rights, and then the ranchers buying grazing rights elsewhere had the problem that grazing rights are associated with land and they don't make new land or new leases. I shook my head in disbelief when the solution was to take the money and buy new grazing rights somewhere else. And where would that be?

So the grazing rights solution should tick off the ranchers watching the movie. The environmentalists should be ticked off as someone in the movie is threatened by a wolf and needs to be saved. I live in Montana where the government is re-establishing wolf packs in the area (Montana, Idaho, and Yellowstone Nat'l park). What wolf supporters are saying is that wolves don't attack people. Livestock, yes. People, no. This movie and its portrayal of wolves should upset the environmentalists.

I kept thinking the movie couldn't get any worse but then they wrapped it up with a 'can't we all just be friends' happy ending. The boyfriend at the last minute was able to save the day, win a fight, bake a fretata everyone adored, and win over everyone. Surprise.

Now, I can like a clichéd movie as much as the next guy, but to ignore the clichés one needs interesting actors. The dull actors in this movie couldn't overcome the heavy handed and terrible story. The only thing I liked about this movie was a couple scenes of a sunrise/sunset that was pretty.

Avoid this movie!

Weak and predictable. I love the Sierra Nevada's so I continued to watch so I could see the Mountains and Mt. Whitney in some background scenes. The movie was kinda bad though. "Dad's" acting was horrible and so was Sadies. It got old fast because it was not believable at all. The night in the cave was useless and added no benefit to the film at all. Come on - Ranchers come home and unsaddle their horses and they don't notice the only horse left behind is gone - with a house guest also missing but his car is still there..And she calls and leaves him a message at this apt...Just hooky and corny. A sequel - I sure hope not. Again, the mountains were the best part of the picture! Absolutely beautiful.