Brenda Crichlow

(On TV, January 2021) I’m not a natural part of the Hallmark movie audience, but I’m willing to give their romantic comedies a chance from time to time if the title and the premise strike me as amusing. Even if I wasn’t, well, how can you resist a title like You’re Bacon me Crazy? The premise, obviously enough, has to do with the owners of two Portland food trucks falling in love while they are rivals in a culinary competition. Hallmark movies are not exactly known for hard-hitting realism, and that’s their entire raison d’être. Why quibble about the unlikeliness of a glass flower vase and cooking books carefully arranged inside a food truck’s cooking area? Why even mention how a potted plant’s pot seamlessly disappears between two shots of the plan being potted? It’s set in Portland but shot in Vancouver… all right, enough. Frankly, there’s a place for the kind of intensely predictable everything-ends-well filmmaking that is You’re Bacon Me Crazy. It’s perhaps the closest we can now get to the exuberant joy of classic Hollywood romantic comedies. Very little in the film is left to chance, from the homely-cute looks of the heroine (Natalie Hall, unthreatening to female audiences) to the blandness of the hero (Michael Rady, idem), the quirky supporting characters (including the fun Brenda Crichlow) or the schematic nature of the plot (which even includes a dumb five-minute interlude where someone says something to the other and it’s badly received and it doesn’t matter because the next scene has the friend explaining why it wasn’t so bad and they make up in the scene after that). The real fun is in the supporting background details of a food truck heroine, the foodie content, the wild recipes and quasi-clever material here and there. Never mind the obvious dialogue, utilitarian filmmaking or stiff acting: it’s not that kind of movie. You’re Bacon Me Crazy deal in comfort (it actually says, “The ingredient is… love”), and there’s nothing really wrong with that… as long as there are other kinds of movies out there.