Cow Belles

While lazing on the couch to rest and recuperate recently, we watched one of our Netflix videos. The summary of the plot interested me, but I wasn't so sure what it would be like when we popped it into the dvd player and discovered it was a Disney made-for-tv movie.

Gary said he liked it. I thought it was fairly decent. As Disney tv movies are wont to do, it was a bit preachy in its attempt to teach teens to care about somebody other than themselves. But nevertheless, it was an okay way to spend some time while I was crashed on the couch.

There was one thing that bugged me to pieces, though. There are little things that show up in movies that betray the writers and producers and directors as being clueless about parts of real life, particularly things in nature. For example, we recently watched Bella. In one scene, there were comments about the forsythia and hyacinths blooming, but later in the day you saw people in tanktops at the beach and it was still light in the evening. There weren't many of those errors in Bella.

There were lots of them in Cow Belles. The movie is set in July, and the main characters protest about having to get up at 5:30 in the morning when it's still dark. In July? I think not. And then the cow barn had no manure. There was a scene were the main characters were doused in blueberries and blueberry juice. So they laundered their own clothes, clothes that didn't appear to be machine-washable in the first place, and certainly not something that could be washed in the kind of machines that they used.

But the error that bugged me most was the idea that money could buy anything. Now, part of the message of the movie was supposed to be that money is limited, to help teens understand that even rich people must limit what they spend so that they can be of service to their fellowman. And yet, there was a point in the movie where someone had sabotaged the cooler on the milk tanks so that the milk spoiled. The dairy couldn't fulfill their contracts with the stores unless they came up with some milk to use for cheese and yogurt and other products. The problem was coming up with the money to buy it. So the daughters of the dairy owner sacrificed some of their stuff to be able to buy more milk. But just where were they going to come up with this extra milk? Having the money to pay for it doesn't mean that hundreds of cows are suddenly going to give an extra milking that day. Mothers who nursed their babies know what it's like when you suddenly have to come up with extra milk because of a growth spurt in the baby, and it doesn't exactly happen immediately!

Similarly, later in the movie everyone had to come together to fix a problem with erroneous dating on some packages. They couldn't just put the correct date on the dairy items, but had to make more. Where'd they get the extra milk for that? And just how did they manage to make yogurt in only an hour or so?

There were so many things in this movie that just didn't make sense. I think the people who made the movie didn't care, though. They had a message to promote, and they could promote it without accuracy as to how cows are born, how cottage cheese is made, or that having enough money cannot make plants grow or animals produce milk.