I'll skip it.

Admittedly, I've only seen the previews, but this movie seems to be just version of the Anne Heche TV vehicle "Men in Trees" -- exactly same plot: city gal goes to northern climate place and (while making friends with the quirky ladies in town) develops a romantic entanglement with the good-looking, down-to-earth, yet still educated (he's _chosen_ to live the simple life...) plaid-shirted man. Ugh.

You lost me in the middle of the second sentence. The population of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area is 3.2 million people. That's hardly small-town.

i might need to lose a little more brain function before seeing this one

New Yorkers don't seem to realize that Minneapolis and Minnesota are two different entities. Small town Minneapolis?

I don't read that anywhere in the current article. Was there a typo that was changed? Am I delusional? Am I not reading the sentences correctly? Help me please. Even though I live in a small town outside of Minneapolis I believe I can read English correctly.

It's just as wonderful as Stephanie said it was! ;)

Oh well, in these troubled times a paycheck is a paycheck. I won't hold this against anyone involved with this movie. Whoever greenlighted this project ...that's a different story.

Guess we've got, what--two more years of this sexist end-of-Bush-era detrius left before Hollywood gets with the program? And a lot of it seems to be coming out this year (BRIDE WARS, HE'S NOT THAT INTO YOU, CONFESSIONS OF A SHOPAHOLIC, etc.) :P

Some years ago, I was channel surfing on a Saturday morning and came across a cartoon that looked like G.I. Joe. It's a bunch of military guys up in the arctic, riding snowmobiles through wind and snow. They are dressed in gigantic parkas and are wearing full face masks.

The guys come across a woman lying unconscious in the snow (for whatever reason) and one of the men starts to remove his mask and hood to give her CPR. One if his buddies yells at him, "my god man, what are you doing?!? It's fourteen degrees out here!"

Obviously this cartoon was made in southern Florida.

Haven't seen the trailer, am presently ambivalent about seeing the movie. But as a resident of a tiny rural town or less than 500 people (albeit in Canada), I have to say it is absolutely true: a surprising number of city-folk arrive here with innapropriate footwear, especially in winter. And they do condescend, just by saying how quaint everyone is, like we're all extras on the set of a movie they're starring in inside their own heads.

...it's in New Ulm, Minn. (an actual small town), not Minneapolis. It doesn't excuse this film's smug stereotyping and weak characterization. Nor does it enhance my interest in seeing this simplistic drivel.

Can't anyone write a good, intelligent romantic comedy anymore? If only modern-day screenwriters could summon the spirits of Ben Hecht, Robert Riskin or Norman Krasna (three of the greats from the heyday of romcoms) to provide some creative assistance.

This sounds like a cutsied up version of Brassed Off. Been there. Done that. and much better

The guys come across a woman lying unconscious in the snow (for whatever reason) and one of the men starts to remove his mask and hood to give her CPR. One if his buddies yells at him, "my god man, what are you doing?!? It's fourteen degrees out here!"

Obviously this cartoon was made in southern Florida.

LOL! Now if they said something like that in this movie, that would have been funny.

They corrected it. It did say small town Minneapolis originally.

Sounds kind of like a bad variation on "Baby Boom"

...Similarly, I lived in a tiny town in northern Saskatchewan, working for a college based in the "south" -- Regina, Sask. One of the college executives came up fairly frequently, ALWAYS wearing her city clothes, including stilettos. The locals took her moose hunting one trip, and they had to find an entire outfit for her, including snowmobile boots.

I may see this movie just to get a whiff of nostalgia.

Now I live in the Colorado Rockies, where I continue to find amusing tourists who drive up from Denver in May or June wearing shorts and halter tops, only to find a freezing wind (and often snow) up here in the high country.

In the world of "New in Town," Floridians don't seem to realize that different parts of the United States actually have different weather.

to the writers/producers of "new in town": um, we get the weather channel down here.

signed,

floridian since 1951

but will it make them get off of their tractors?

Insert cliched steroptypical charcaters: Lonely Big City Female Executive + Lonely Small Town Blue Collar Worker

Insert cliched situation: Gung Ho + Baby Boom + Men In Trees

Click "Process"

Within 10 minutes you MacBook will spit out "New In Town."

Take directly to any Hollywood produce and immediately collect $1 million dollars.

Not bad! Now if only those hackers could distribute copies of that Automatic Script Composer that pumps out this hackneyed bullshit we could all be million dollar script writers.

Zellweger ... can't help being cute

Well, that's certainly true.

We call them STOCKING CAPS in MN, not toques.

And Rance is from Minneapolis (as opposed to generic Minnesota) and wrote the story based on a conversation he had with a young black woman executive, years ago, about her experiences as a Black, Floridian woman in New Ulm, a town of "13, 675 Germans." (Zellweger has the German part down, anyway.)

Stephanie, I love ya. But your own scorn for people in small towns comes through, loud and clear, when you can't even be bothered to notice the name of the town where the movie is set.

I too was expecting a typical chick-flick, and the trailer made me wince, shaking my head thinking, "Et tu, Renee?"

But, it was a bad Friday for me and I really needed some movie-therapy (as opposed to doing the stereotypical "retail therapy"). So I went to see "Taken" and then this one. Side note: Taken is also extremely good, Liam Neeson does an older Jason Bourne very well, wouldn't mind seeing a franchise come out of this.

But back to New in Town ... this is not just a chick-flick, far from it, and it's not just another "floundering fish out of water" tale.

Rather, it raises some serious questions about just what is considered success and profit in today's business world, especially in light of the economic catastrophe.

I'm not even American (Canadian) and haven't had anyone I know laid off or in dire financial straits, but seeing/reading/hearing about the devastating effects of this crisis on ordinary Americans has disturbed me greatly. I saw the segment on 60 Minutes last week about the town that DHL wiped out by all its layoffs, and the stricken looks of husbands/wives as they explained their new circumstances to the reporter. It turned my stomach.

I read the article the other day by Maureen Dowd and her outrage at the dismissiveness and cavalier attitude (still!) of top execs at Citigroup and Merrill Lynch as they go about their day buying $50M jets and million-dollar office makeovers.

So maybe New in Town was just the thing to see, and I urge others to do the same. Forget the romance for a bit (although it is very nicely developed and the pairing of Zellweger and Connick Jr. had a natural feel to it, in fact there are some laugh-out-loud scenes ... look out for the crow-hunting scene).

Instead see how the typical arrogant exec from the big city starts out in corporate-speak and shrugs at laying off 50% of the plant in New Ulm, saying it's no problem, and watch how she warms to the locals and realizes, hey, they're human too and profit and corporate success is not just about the bottom line and $$$, but, equally as important, putting people to work and giving them a livelihood they can be proud of.

Yeah, this theme may have been done many times before in other (perhaps even better) films, but it needs to be seen again, in this day and age nevertheless. If only to give hope that maybe, just maybe there will be other Lucy Hills out there who come to the dawning realization that what gives the best inner satisfaction and reward is not merely ruthlessly climbing ones way to the top and earning all those perks and bonuses, but rather knowing you did the hard work of saving people's jobs and keeping a town alive with hope and promise, and not turning your back and shutting down a plant because the higher-ups don't have the compassion and business-minded creativity to do something else for a change.