Balloon Fiesta Fiasco

I’ll keep this fairly short since it’s been 4 days since I saw this movie and have no desire to see it again to refresh my memory. There was nothing there to elevate it above the usual hackneyed TV romance playbook. It was a long string of oft-used cliches starting with a mean bully of a (female) boss and ending with one half of the couple flying off the handle after hearing one side of a conversation and not letting the other half explain. The whole premise of our heroine being sent across the country to Albuquerque to do a 5 minute piece on the annual balloon fiesta and then pressured into getting some dirt on an obscure balloon wrangler made no sense. Who in the world would care about him or his past unhappy love affair and business troubles? Knocking it down further was my pet peeve of miscasting middle aged actors in roles more appropriate for 20 or early 30-somethings. Highlighting this age un-appropriateness was casting actors as their parents who could well be their siblings, age-wise. To make it worse, I did not have access to my DVR so I was forced to watch it in real time when it was replayed the next day. I was literally pacing the floor waiting for it to end through the last half hour. Never have I missed my fast forward button more. 

And now for the elephant in the room. The majority of commenters on this movie had something uncomplimentary to say about the lead actress, Mckenzie Westmore’s, face, which has seen some noticeable nipping, tucking, and injecting. There’s actually a sad story behind all that work. As a young woman, barely out of her teens, she won a main role in the daytime soap opera, Passions. Like so many aspiring actresses of that time she was told she was too fat even though her dress size was a 6 or lower. As a result she lost a lot of weight and developed an eating disorder. Sound familiar? As a result of her weight loss, her face became too thin and gaunt looking which she fixed by injecting fillers. Since she started this so young and did it so frequently, the fillers started to sag under her skin, migrate, and form lumps on her face. A couple of years ago, she went to a renowned plastic surgeon to dissolve the fillers and do a deep plane facelift to remedy all of the damage. So to my mind, she doesn’t deserve to be criticized on that front. Unfortunately the hair and makeup department for this movie did not do this attractive woman any favors. Which is weird because Ms. Westmore is founder and creative director of her own cosmetics company and is descended from a long line of Hollywood Makeup artists who are legends in the industry. She is the last person I would think could fall victim to bad movie makeup and hair. Which to me, is make-up and hair you notice before you notice the person underneath.

The balloon shots were impressive but the green screens when the actors were supposed to be in the air were not. Paul Greene was as reliable as usual, but unfortunately the make-up department got their hands on him as well. Definitely an orange tint in some scenes. The way she was “fixed up”, Gail O’Grady looked like she thought she was cast as Paul Greene’s sister, not his mother. And who could blame her with an only 11 year age difference? There were a lot of distractions in this movie, including 67 year old Lorenzo Lamas who looked great.