Let It Snow

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A tin-foil-sporting Joan Cusack spells it out: snow brings us together.

She’s lying of course. Snow forces us apart. It keeps us warm in our own houses, or trapped behind walls of hard-packed snow. It keeps us isolated behind layers of scarves, unable to get to work, spinning our wheels in our own driveways. Snow makes us miss our flights and cancel our plans. But for the sake of Netflix let’s say it brings us together, unless in this one small town, in which a bunch of young people have some loosely connected stories going on, including:

a) a teenager desperately in love with his best friend but completely unable to tell her

b) a lonesome popstar

c) a young woman about to defer college because of a sick mother

d) as aspiring DJ

e) a young waitress with feelings for a customer

f) an attention-seeking adolescent with a thing for pigs

Netflix is releasing a steady stream of holiday movies to warm the cockles of your holiday heart. This is one of them. Christmas rom-coms are perhaps even more formulaic than their rest-of-the-year counterparts, but since we don’t demand much of them, it’s hard to be disappointed. And though bland and vanilla as heck, Let It Snow is sort of charming in its way, buoyed by some non-sucking performances by Isabela Merced, Shameik Moore, Kiernan Shipka, Liv Hewson, and Jacob Batalon.

If this movie was a recipe for Christmas cookies, you’d have some fine, and even promising ingredients on your hands. Blend hard as you might they won’t come together, but maybe you’ve heard that cookies aren’t the only end product anymore. Our teeny attention spans have given way to the marketing of cookie dough; you can lick those raw, wet ingredients and get a hint of what might have been. It’s not as good as cookies, but it’s good enough, with only a small chance of salmonella. That’s what Let It Snow is: if you can let go of the warm gooey goodness of a chocolate chip cookie right out of the oven (say, It’s a Wonderful Life), or even the semi-satisfying snap of an Oreo dunked in milk (The Santa Clause), you might enjoy scraping the bottom of the bowl with Let It Snow.

13 thoughts on “Let It Snow”

  1. The busy shelf

    I just got home early from work because I seem to have a hardcore version of the flu. I don’t really know what to do with myself right now and I think I will watch this. Seems like the kind of thing that works with being miserable in bed and needing something to distract you from the ever growing pile of napkins :))

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  6. Rosaliene Bacchus

    I love Christmas movies so I’ll definitely be checking it out this weekend. Based on the underlying theme that Christmas is a season of goodwill towards others, Christmas movies are usually designed to portray the best in the human spirit.

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