Stars Fell on Alabama (2021)
(On Cable TV, January 2022) By now, the Hallmark Channel romantic comedy formula is not only famous enough to have been dissected in thorough detail, it’s being imitated across an entire swath of low-budget films all going for that same market audience. I keep waiting for the genre to become self-aware and poking fun at itself, but that may have to wait a while. Until then, we get exercises like Stars Fell on Alabama that play with subgenre convention without quite giving in to them entirely. Here, our male lead is a Hollywood agent who, in order to impress the Alabama locals during a class reunion, brings back a Hollywood starlet to town and pretends that she’s his girlfriend—something made more difficult by a local ex-flame still having an interest, and the superstar ex-boyfriend of the starlet not being happy about the paparazzi shots coming out of Alabama. You can see an inversion of clichés in Stars Fell on Alabama, but it’s half-hearted at best—the local ex-flame barely has one scene to make her case before going back to her local husband, while the rest of the film clearly settles into the “fake-it-till-you-fall-for-it” subgenre rather than wholly committing to the small-city romance angle. The low production values and slapdash script are most obvious in an awkward prologue set in Los Angeles—fortunately, things get more credible and interesting once the film settles in Alabama. Stars Fell on Alabama doesn’t amount to much, with a very obvious conclusion handled in the most obvious way possible, but it’s generally watchable and not offensive at all. Its portrait of small-town Alabama (while shot in South Carolina) is more affectionate than you’d expect (although, once again: target audience) and gets a couple of passable leads in James Maslow and Ciara Hanna. The supporting characters are usually more fun to watch as the film monster-trucks predictably from beginning to end. Not good, but not terrible either if your expectations stay low. But it’s certainly not the film that will make fun of other films like it.