Tara Cowell-Plain

(On Cable TV, November 2021) As of this writing, Blue Moon Ball is a nonentity of a film. First broadcast on Canadian TV in November 2021 after a world-wide premiere in the small town of Camarillo, CA, where much of the film was shot, it’s still listed at IMDB as a 2022 film (we’ll see if they accept my documented update) and as such has no reviews, no votes, and no measurable commentary beyond various PR pieces written about the film by the filmmakers and exhibitors themselves. (No, the “Dove review” doesn’t count when it’s meant to reassure sensitive viewers that it’s an all-age film.)  As a reviewer, it’s thrilling to be in such terra incognita, writing a review without competing with dozens/hundreds/thousands of other takes on the material. On the other hand, well, Blue Moon Ball is not much of a film. It faithfully follows the usual Hallmark romance plot template of sending an urban professional back to their hometown, where they meet a past flame and they rekindle their romance while finding a reason for the protagonist to remain in town FOREVER. The plot variations are slight. Here, our protagonist is a romance novelist lacking inspiration for her next novel, and moving back to her hometown allows her to reconnect with her first love while working on saving a historical building from being torn down to make way for modernity. There are other disposable love interests that are eventually dispatched to make way for the film’s one true couple. The execution is competent, but that’s not saying much: director Tara Cowell-Plain doesn’t try to do much here except present a straightforward story in a straightforward way. I was drawn to the film because it featured a novelist as a protagonist, but this aspect is handled just as perfunctorily as the rest: it makes being a romance novelist seem like an artistic endeavour complete with writer’s block, whereas your average romance novelist (considering the economic imperatives of the market) is intensely familiar with genre formulas and able to churn them out professionally. But that would be adding more complexity than what the fairy-tale nature of the film would be able to tolerate. The saving grace of Blue Moon Ball, and other similar films, is that even at their blandest, they’re still pleasant to watch: there’s nothing to get angry about, nothing to challenge a predetermined notion of a happy ending for all. That does have some value, even as a break from more challenging fare.