Monthly Archives: December 2013

Christmas Unleashed

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Becca (Vanessa Lachey) has a pretty good life: she’s a very busy and successful lawyer with a great apartment and a super loyal and handsome best friend/boyfriend combo named Henry. Is Henry her dog? Yes he is, technically speaking. But he’s really the only companion she needs, even if Grandma isn’t quite on board with the notion. Anyway, Gram’s in no position to rock the boat since this is the first time Becca, literally her only relation left in the world, returns home for Christmas in four years.

Unfortunately, Henry goes missing on Christmas Eve, which forces Becca to do the one thing she most abhors in the world: call up ex-boyfriend Max (Christopher Russell), a vet, and ask for help. It’s an awkward reunion, and about to get very confusing since god knows Max is a much better dog name than Henry.

Henry (the dog) is a very good boy, despite his recent escape, but he’s also a bit of a schemer. Apparently this little adventure of his is an effort to play matchmaker; Henry leaves a trail through all of Becca and Max’s most romantic couple spots from when they were together. Which is how we come to learn Becca and Max’s history, through flashbacks – their beginning and their end. But if Henry’s doing his job right, there may just be a new beginning.

It probably goes without saying that the dog steals the show. Big time. I found myself itching to fast-forward through all the human parts. Now, I’ll acknowledge that Henry is a bit emotionally manipulative, but I also felt that his humans didn’t stay on task as much as they should have, sprinkling their so-called frantic search with things like romantic carriage rides.

Anyway, then Henry gets run over by a car and Becca goes back to the city, alone and heartbroken. Just kidding, obviously. This is a romantic Christmas movie and it can be counted upon not to deviate from the formula.

Romance At Reindeer Lodge

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Workaholic Molly is probably the only person at the company who’s actually disappointed when the office closes down for the holidays, paid days off for everyone. She’d be at home twiddling her thumbs if not for a radio contest that awards her a trip to Jamaica. She boards the plane eagerly, wearing her floppy sunhat, though still steadfastly texting clients. The plane’s already in the air when Molly (Nicky Whelan) learns there’s a Jamaica, Vermont, and as luck would have it, she’s going to that one. Oh, and keep your eyes peeled for that jerk at the airport she instantly dislikes – Jared (Josh Kelly) is going to be integral to the romance part of Romance At Reindeer Lodge.

The movie wouldn’t work if she just got on another flight and went home – or to the good Jamaica. No, instead the script conspires to strand her there, but then her time at the lodge is completely unmarred by winter storms (in fact, production seems not even to have sprung for much fake snow), so what, exactly, is grounding her? No, no, it’s rather Scrooge-y of you to ask such things. Where’s your Christmas spirit? They’re “stuck” at the lodge with one other couple who is hanging around rather doggedly to see the reindeer. And apparently the reindeer are shy. But in the meantime, the lodge looks like it was decorated by someone who has Christmas I.B.S. and every second sentence is “We have a tradition here at Reindeer Lodge…” and then something ridiculous happens.

I don’t really appreciate the artifice and trickery, but I suppose it’s difficult to keep coming up with slightly new ways to trap grown adults into celebrating the holidays in a manner not of their choosing.

Also, and this is an honest question: how many houses can really get foreclosed on on Christmas Eve?

Anyway, why wouldn’t 4 complete strangers, some of whom don’t even mean to be there, suddenly devote their Christmas holidays to saving the very lodge they were already lured to under false pretenses and are paying good money to stay at? And if I know one thing about hectic unpaid labour it’s that it’s SUPER romantic. Of course, Christmas movie romances take place almost solely in the heart. The only physical affection allowed is either a dance, or adorably putting flour on someone’s nose during a baking montage – though definitely not both, you ignorant slut. And then there’s the single close-mouthed kiss to close-out the show. Voila: some real Christmas magic, rated G.

Carole’s Christmas

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Carole (Kimberly Elise) and Marcus (Anthony Montgomery) have the kind of relationship that makes their two teenage children roll their eyes. Gross: mom and dad are kissing. But they’re also struggling a bit this Christmas season. He’s recently started a landscaping business that isn’t taking off, and her non-profit’s getting defunded. The bills are starting to whisper rather aggressively from their unpaid corner of the cupboard. Several years ago she gave up a lucrative corporate career opportunity in favour of helping those in need. But now that her family is nearly in need herself, she’s starting to wonder what her life might have been like had she chosen the other path.

Yup, it’s one of those movies. A guardian angel type named Iris (Jackée Harry) takes her under her wing and grants her wish. Poof: new life. Not entirely new, but she gets to live with the dividends of different choices. Of course, we can all see it coming: be careful what you wish for. Sure she’s got a fabulous corner office and big beautiful house, but her new lifestyle seems to come at the expense of family time.

Carole’s Christmas is the Sears portrait of Christmas movies – very staged. Literally, the whole Jordan family gathers around a cutting board so they can watch Carole prepare her “Pasta Puttanesca!” elbow to elbow, feeling each other’s hot breaths on their necks, like they’re piled into an invisible phone booth in their kitchen. Eerie. I expect these movies to be corny but I hope they’re not so stiff. The cast ensemble isn’t terrible but they’re not really up to propping up a soppy script.

Anyway, it turns out money doesn’t buy everything. Is that the MOST popular Christmas theme? It’s such a movie trope. Of course, out here in the real world, we understand that money does buy everything, including but not limited to love and happiness. I mean, money buys puppies and pizza, what else do you need?

Miracle In Manhattan

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The lovely Jewel Staite plays Holly, a woman caring for her nephew Gabe while her brother is deployed overseas. It’s…a challenge. She’s the hard-working marketing guru treated more like an assistant by her dress designer boss (Lauren Holly, for some reason). Holly’s got dreams of designing her own gowns but so far her boss isn’t biting.

Meanwhile, over in Manhattan, Jake (Eric Johnson) is struggling to impress his father at their family-owned department store. His father is all about the bottom line and refuses to celebrate Christmas, which makes marketing the toy department particularly difficult this time of year. His father is dismayed at the inventory’s lack of cheap plastic toys. Jake hasn’t even stocked the Intellytron robot, this year’s hottest toy. Instead he chooses tried and tested stuff, train sets and wooden toys, to line his shelves. But will that cost him his job if the toy department doesn’t put up big numbers?

The real question, though, is: who the heck is Mrs. Miracle? She’s the mysterious old lady who one day has just appeared in the toy department, claiming to have always worked there despite there being no evidence of this being true. Her nametag reads ‘Mrs Miracle’ (Doris Roberts) and it’s possible that’s exactly the business she’s in.

Even in a mediocre Christmas movie, Doris Roberts is a real sprinkle of cinnamon, elevating and enlivening (is that a word?) every scene she’s in.

This movie is very committed to returning to a simpler, more traditional holiday, and I know that’s a popular Christmas movie theme, but I also know my nephews have their eyes on all the lurid plastic toys they see on Saturday morning TV – preferably the kind that shoot smaller, harder plastic toys in the general direction of their little brothers. Can I substitute those with a little wooden duckie you pull by a string? I suppose I could, but not if I want to maintain my status as Cool Aunt Jay (or more realistically, the woman who usually travels with Cool Uncle Sean, who is not much of an ideas man or a shopper or a wrapper, but still somehow gets all of the credit). But my life is never going to look like a Hallmark movie: there’s no cookie baking montage, there’s a cookie baking marathon that leaves my kitchen a Level Orange Disaster Zone and my manicure in ruins. There’s no singing Christmas carols around the old piano, there’s a drunken karaoke attempt and a romantic duet sung inappropriately between blood relatives. No one makes movies about our sloppy paper plate Christmas where the pjs don’t match and Santa gets left Doritos instead of cookies. But it’s our Christmas and if it’s not quite perfect, it’s perfectly ours.

Christmas Matchmakers

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Jon (Andrew Rogers) and Jen (Anna Marie Dobbins) are two harried assistants who bump into each other in their building’s cafeteria fetching coffee for their respective bosses. Although the coffee is expected imminently, they stop to bitch about how overworked they are, how demanding their bosses are. The next time they exchange coffee (not a euphemism), they hatch a plot to set their bosses up without them knowing…because if they’re in love they’ll somehow work less. Which may have some merit but is seriously creepy and crosses great-wall-shaped boundaries. But the scary thing is: it works. Kate (Vivica A. Fox) and Owen (Dorian Gregory) are two type-A workaholics who just get each other.

If this is sounding a bit familiar, well, it should. It is the EXACT same story as the Netflix original Set It Up. Exact same, except this one is set around Christmas. And of course the fact that everyone involved in Set It Up is galaxies more charming and competent than the people here. I’m normally quite skeptical of celebrity offspring, and I was wary of Zoey Deutch (daughter of Lea Thompson), but she keeps surprising me. She was luminescent in Set It Up but has shown a lot of range since then. The movie also stars Glen Powell as the other assistant, and Lucy Liu and Taye Diggs as the two bosses. If you’re in the mood for a rom-com, watch Set It Up instead. If you want to make it feel Christmassy, stick a candy cane in a mug of cocoa and put on a second pair of socks. Ta-da: Christmas!

I don’t think the actors in Christmas Matchmakers are the problem. When you compare the two films side by side, the script is definitely the culprit. It’s like Christmas Matchmakers was done by feeding the Set It Up script into Google translate – converting it to Japanese, and then back again to English, and then editing out anything that sounded suspiciously authentic in favour of cliches and stilted dialogue. Honestly, I didn’t even realize I liked Set It Up until I watched this movie, and suddenly I had a whole new level of appreciation for it. This is my Christmas gift to you.

A Royal Winter

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Maggie (Merritt Patterson) is that special combination of both white and privileged in that even as she’s unemployed and looking for her first job as a lawyer, she gets to go on an impromptu European vacation, to Calpurnia, a veritable winter wonderland.

Maggie is so enthralled with the snow-capped architecture of the tiny kingdom that she nearly gets run over by a dude on a motorcycle. Luckily Adrian (Jack Donnelly) not only runs over her hat but rescues it as well. And with that, a romance is born. But what Maggie doesn’t know is that Adrian is actually crown prince Adrian, future king of Calpurnia. He lies because it’s “refreshing” that she isn’t in to his “celebrity” and stuff like that.

Adrian’s mother is very disapproving of her son’s playboy persona. He wants to do revolutionary things like invite the lowly public to his coronation, and date American tourists, but his mother is having absolutely none of it. But it’s not just the aristocracy that will have to learn to follow their own path instead of the one their parents forge for them. Adrian’s default is to run away, but with his resources, it’s Paris he proposes – except in a stroke of terrible timing, the job Maggie interviewed for is now calling her home, urgently. How will love prevail?

Trust in Hallmark, folks. They will find a way. Obviously this whole marrying a prince at Christmas thing is a really big business and they’re following a time-tested formula to squeeze every last drop from the trope and more.

A Very Country Christmas

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Zane (Greyston Holt, which, being even more ostentatious and on-the-nose than Zane, can’t possibly be the name his mama gave him at birth) is the biggest country music star in the country but he’s had a tough year and one night he just walks away from a sold-out concert. Jeannette (Bea Santos, definitely her real name) is a hard-working single mother and part-time interior designer caught red-handed replacing a broken vase by a home owner who’s literally never been home before. It’s Zane of course, reclaiming his unoccupied home for a little peace and quiet, but Jeannette is too frazzled to keep up with latest gossip and fails to recognize him.

I’m not going to endorse it, but A Very Country Christmas deliver on its promise. It’s a Christmas movie, all right: there’s snow, royalty-free carols, and a romance where the only consummation is a kiss. As usual, he’s monstrously, life-transformingly rich but just wants to settle down and have a family, and has an unusually high tolerance for being strung along by a woman who won’t sleep with him.

A Very Country Christmas was filmed in Sean’s sorta hometown of Barrie, Ontario. Sean moved around a lot of as a kid but his family eventually settled there and many of them are still in the area today, possibly grabbing a Beau’s and some deep fried cheese curds at the Kenzington Burger Bar, which was featured in the film. Canada is increasingly cornering the market in crappy Christmas movies, and why not – we’ve got a perfect snowy backdrop here nearly year round.

The Christmas Cabin

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One dark and snowy night, a strange man shows up on Sammy’s doorstep, demanding to be let in. As only a clueless, entitled white man who’s never been raped can do, he treats her like she’s the criminal when she is understandably reluctant. But he “come on, lady”s her until she gives in. So we’re about 5 minutes into the film and I already hate them both and am feeling completely unforgiving toward this film. Oh, you think you’re going to warm my heart now? Instill some Christmas cheer? Fat chance.

Anyway, Seth Walker (Chad Michael Collins) believes he owns half of Sammy’s (Peyton McDavitt) cabin. Her great grandmother and his great uncle had a ‘fling’ (during which they co-signed on a vacation property?) and how he wants to be bought out. Instead of tossing him out on his rear, she draws a line down the middle of the cabin with twinkly Christmas lights and share the space while weathering a storm that any self-respecting Canadian would describe as “a mild and pleasant night.” Now they’re co-existing in a cabin where I know I FREAKING KNOW they’re going to fall in love and I’m shooting serious rage daggers at the very thought. Sweetheart, I understand your Tinder options are slim pickins up in your isolated little cabin, but you don’t have to settle for the first Yeti who crosses your path. You could live happily ever after with a sturdy vibrator, unlimited batteries, and a pantry well-stocked with cocoa. But instead she’s semi-consensually co-habitating with a complete stranger whom she KNOWS has intentions of stealing her property and him claiming squatter’s rights is literally the best case scenario in what is otherwise and rape-and-kill scenario that literally everyone else seems coming from a mile away. Ugh.

One viewer commented: “Finally, a Christmas movie with a heroine wearing SHORT hair! Such a refreshing change from all those long hair ending in ringlets.” Which, even allowing for the generous use of the word ‘heroine’ is a very low bar with which to review movies. And yet this is the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about this film.

Christmas Town

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Lauren leaves her boyfriend and her whole life in Boston and boards a train toward a fresh start in Springfield. Only an “obstruction” on the track forces an unforeseen pit stop in the lovely town of Grandon Falls where the railway puts her up in a “charming inn” which is yet another tick in the column of travel by train being far more civilized than by air where you’d be dumped unceremoniously back into an airport with the choice of uncomfortable seats or grubby carpets, sitting shoulder to shoulder with other sweaty travelers, with a voucher for a bag of Cheetos if you’re lucky.

Grandon Falls, nicknamed Christmas Town, turns out to be “very serious about Christmas” and the townspeople are unbelievably nice. Travis, for example, doesn’t correct Lauren (Candace Cameron Bure) when she mistakes him for a cabbie. He schleps her luggage around, drives her into town, gives her a little tour, even finds her alternate accommodation when there’s “no room at the inn.” Oh, and Travis (Tim Rozon) is a single foster dad to a kid with a “heart of gold.” Anyway, he recommends the “heart of our community,” the Christmas cafe, where Lauren finds a framed photograph of her late father, taken 25 years earlier, holding the angel ornament he’d once gifted her. Lauren may have arrived by train – but was she brought here by fate?

As you can tell by my liberal sprinkling of quotation marks, there’s a lot of earnestness in this film that I find a little hard to take. But if you can deal with some extra marshmallow in your cocoa, I can tell this movie is otherwise fulfilling all the Christmas movie requirements. After all, Hallmark has this shit down to a science now.

Candace Cameron Bure, who serves as an executive producer on the film, is Hallmark’s unofficial Queen of Christmas. Other than the Netflix revival of her old show, it’s her bread and butter (and meat and potatoes too, I’d imagine). There’s a lot of heart-warming heart warmth to this film – so much so that I begin to suspect that this little heart of mine prefers flip flops and halter tops. A town this full of people so helpful and obliging can only be two things: either it’s a Christmas movie, or an elaborate set-up for a horror movie where one or many of them is about to do a lot of damage with a long, curved blade. The people are nice – too nice, suspiciously nice – but a Christmas movie is filled with the very best of humanity; all sugar, no spice.

Christmas Jars

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Hope is adopted by the waitress who finds her abandoned in a diner as a baby. She’s working as an intern at a newspaper/aspiring reporter when her mother dies and suddenly Hope, now just 22, is alone in the world. And her apartment is broken into! It’s a crappy time, and right before Christmas, but a stranger brightens her day when she finds a Christmas Jar filled with cash left anonymously on her doorstep. It’s not just a ray of light during a difficult time, but a foot in the door of her budding career in journalism. A little digging uncovers a holiday phenomenon of giving.

The movie (which filmed right here in Ottawa during a cold snap last winter) was inspired by the novel of the same, by Jason F. Wright. The book, which came out in 2005, has since spawned actual Christmas jars being left anonymously across the country. Families fill jars with spare change over the year and leave it to a family in need during the Christmas season. The average jar may contain only $200 or so but it’s a gesture filled with kindness and always appreciated.

As the movie makes clear, a jar filled with not just cash but hope and goodwill, is proof that perhaps Christmas magic exists after all. A good Samaritan? A Christmas angel? A good-hearted neighbour? No matter: kindness is contagious, and whether it started with one person, it seems to have inspired a web of altruism.

Anyway, Hope (Jeni Ross) follows the trail of jars and traces their origins back to the Maxwells, a big-hearted family who basically take her in when she shows up on their doorstop pretending to write an article about their business. Of course then she stabs them in the back by publishing the jar story and breaking their anonymity, dousing them with a cold jar of betrayal. Will Hope offer another jarful of apologies? And will they counter with a jar of forgiveness? You’ll have to watch to find out if this movie ever recovers its Christmas spirit, but if you know the first thing about holiday movies, I think you can be fairly confident.