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December 9, 2008

Cliche-ridden movie set in New Ulm

Zellweger film not actually shot in Minnesota Town

By Brian Ojanpa

NEW ULM — Over the years, Hollywood has done a bang-up job portraying Minnesotans as a perpetually snowbound lot one step removed from a Sven and Ole joke.

The film “New In Town” appears to be no exception, and this time around it’s New Ulm’s turn to get painted with stereotyping’s broad brush.

Due for a late-January release, the movie stars Renee Zellweger as an up-and-coming young Miami executive assigned to restructure a butter plant in, as movie production notes state, “the middle of nowhere.”

That would be New Ulm, depicted in all its non-glory (none of the movie was filmed there) as a backwoods hinterland badly in need of a good defrosting.

The screenplay was written by Minneapolis native Kenneth Rance and subjected to a rewrite before director Jonas Elmer began presiding over scene visuals such as this:

In the movie’s trailer, the “Welcome to New Ulm” highway sign is fashioned from a huge snowplow blade.

Shannon McKeeth, for one, sounded resigned to the fact that the tradeoff for Minnesota locales being featured by Hollywood is the clichéd portrayals they typically receive.

“Yes, we do eat hotdish, and we do go ice fishing,” she said. “But it’s tough. You want to accept the recognition, but it’s unfortunate that it’s not portrayed accurately.”

McKeeth runs a New Ulm bed-and-breakfast, where Elmer and a researcher stayed last year to get the feel of New Ulm and the dialect of its denizens.

Those were the only people associated with the production to set foot in the city.

Zellweger and co-star Harry Connick Jr. did their emoting in Canada, where most of the filming was done due to that country’s lower production costs.

As for characters’ speech in the film, the trailer would suggest they simply aped the over-the-top accents from another Minnesota-as-tundra movie, “Fargo.”

New Ulm Chamber of Commerce President Sharon Weinkauf is obliged to put a rosy spin on it all.

“We can only hope the movie is positive and piques enough interest for people to check out New Ulm,” she said.

But she acknowledges the cumulative affect of Minnesota being stereotyped in movies doesn’t do any favors for tourism and commerce.

“It’s a struggle. Businesses have a hard time getting people to come here because that’s the perception that’s presented — that this is in the sticks, that it’s a barren wasteland.”

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