Our reviews and thoughts on the latest releases, classics, and nostalgic favourites. Things we loved, things we hated, and worst of all, things we were ambivalent about.
Maddie (Jen Lilley) has avoided the traditional Christmas Tiger Cruise her whole life. A Tiger Cruise is an opportunity for civilians to ride a ship the last few days of its deployment. Usually, the ship pulls into a port near their homeport, picks up the “tigers” (family of the servicemembers aboard the ship) and sails the last few days home with them on board. It’s a chance for servicemembers to show their families what they do at sea, and for civilians to see firsthand what the navy does on deployment. The tigers may be sons or daughters if over the age of 8, mothers, fathers, sisters or brothers – much like a Hallmark film, there is no sex aboard a Navy ship (ha), so spouses are not allowed.
Maddie’s father was in the Navy, but she never felt the pull to cruise with him. Now that her sister’s in the Navy, she still doesn’t care to board a ship, but she’s a reporter for a Norfolk newspaper, and her editor thinks there might be a story there. Inevitably she meets Lt. Jenkins Billy, a handsome naval officer who claims not to like Christmas. But when they stumble upon a mystery in the ship’s archive room involving a historical Tiger Cruise hookup, the two spend a lot of intimate time together, and I’m pretty sure the magic of the season just overtakes him.
Am I surprised to learn that a ship that has shared bathrooms also has an archive room? Yes I am. Am I even more surprised that despite shared bathrooms, Maddie somehow has perfectly coiffed hair every day? YES I AM. But if deployment romances are your jam, USS Christmas offers a double bill.
FYI: Shipboard scenes were filmed on the Battleship USS North Carolina, permanently moored in Wilmington, NC.
Chicago, 1927. Welcome to a single recording session of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Ma (Viola Davis) is running late, of course, cause she’s the star. The band is rehearsing in the “studio,” a dank basement room that’s not big enough for the egos it’s asked to contain. Levee the horn player (Chadwick Boseman) in particular is testing everyone’s nerves with his outsized ambitions and his new $11 shoes.
When Ma arrives, tensions mount. Levee is trying to rearrange her music, and she’s got to show him his place. But she’s also battling the (white) management, who are subtly trying to push her in different directions, disrespecting her status as the mother of the blues, trying to control a product they don’t fully understand. The other band members – Cutler (Colman Domingo), Toledo (Glynn Turman), and Slow Drag (Michael Potts) – try to run interference, but they know their place and are loathe to stray from it.
Ruben Santiago-Hudson adapts from August Wilson’s excellent play. You may know that Denzel Washington intends to bring all 10 of Wilson’s “century cycle” plays to screen, starting with Fences, for which David received an Oscar, and following this one with The Piano Lesson, for which he’ll cast his son, John David Washington. Of course, he wasn’t far off in casting Boseman for this one; Boseman was his longtime protégé; Washington had sponsored him at Howard University, paying his tuition so he could take Phylicia Rashad’s coveted acting class. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is Boseman’s last role. He was secretly receiving treatment for the colon cancer that killed him earlier this year while filming.
As far as legacy goes, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is about as good a final role as you can hope for. He’s magnetic, vital, crackling with suppressed rage, electrifying and dangerous. Opposite him, Viola Davis’s Ma can afford to be a little more confident, a little more sedate. Perhaps because of her career she has more experience dealing with the white man’s power struggle, but she holds her own, knows her worth and insists on it.
August Wilson’s play is urgent and alive (I personally prefer this one to Fences). Director George C. Wolfe does an excellent job of making us feel every inch of that tiny recording studio’s claustrophobic walls. It’s hot, it’s crowded, there is little room for maneuvering (physically and symbolically) and plenty of potential for mistakes. Egos and tempers are bouncing off each other in desperate and menacing ways. Meanwhile, the white managers and producers sit comfortably upstairs, dictating how the session will go, depriving even their star of a 5 cent bottle of Coke.
This recording session is a microcosm of the Black experience in America in the early 20th century. Generational trauma, informed by racism, religion and violence, is evident in every note sung in the blues, and white men stand by to monetize and profit from it. It is no wonder that this session may turn explosive at any moment, and very telling that when that escalating pressure so carefully cultivated finally does release, the lateral violence is just another heartbreaking blow to an already wounded community.
Sophia (Chelsea Hobbs) produces a reality TV show called Extreme Christmas. It takes a little convincing, but she finally gets Will (Christopher Russell) to appear. His schtick is that he celebrates Christmas 365 days a year (he’s “Mr. 365”, according to the book upon which this is based); his appeal is that he’s desperately sexy.
I’ve never seen a Hallmark Christmas movie with so much shirt removal – his of course, repeatedly, while the camera lingers lovingly over his abs. Now, if you’re wondering how a tall, handsome, gainfully employed, not overtly crazy, (straight) dude in a V-neck t-shirt is cuckoo for Christmas (I have never known an unattached man to put up a Christmas tree unprompted), don’t you worry, you can be assured that reality TV will also be asking such questions, only not as nicely.
Yup, Will’s about to find out that reality TV tells its own version of reality, and doesn’t really care about his feelings. And Sophia’s going to learn that her job kind of sucks when you actually care about the person who’s life you’re mocking. Can their love possibly survive mean-spirited editing? Would you feel safe at night, sleeping beside a man obsessed with Christmas year round? And most importantly, is there a director’s cut of this movie that edits around all the humans and just stars that cute dog? As always, the answers, my friend, await you at Hallmark.
Sarah’s (Lacey Chabert) been away from her firm and her life for a while now, wrapping up loose ends from her mother’s death a few months ago. Before she returns she plans to spend the holidays at a very quaint little inn. The inn is owned by the very handsome and luckily single Ben (Stephen Huszar) and these two are about to have a very good reason to spend lots of time together, apart from already being under the same roof for Christmas. Sarah and Ben have discovered that like, her, all of the inn’s five guests received a special invitation to be here over the holidays, and no one knows where these invitations came from. Not from the inn itself, certainly, and of course the inn can’t find any booking and reservation information that would indicate who the mysterious benefactor is. But the invitations do bear the town’s postmark, so the answer must be local. What a fun little mystery to solve, although, strictly speaking, if it was me in Sarah’s shoes I would have wondered a little harder if the Snowflake Inn was really about to become the Murder Inn. It seems reminiscent of a horror movie plot if you ask me. Also: that’s 5 grown ups who did not question a bossy piece of paper that came anonymously in the mail, ordering them to spend Christmas at some inn. Ask more questions, people!
This is the third movie executive produced by Blake Shelton and based on his song “Time for Me to Come Home” that he wrote with his mother, Dorothy Shackleford. The first movie, 2018’s Time for Me to Come Home for Christmas, and the second movie, 2019’s Time for You to Come Home for Christmas, and now this third one are all independent of each other and have a different story lines, actors, and settings.
Will the mystery be solved by baking cookies? Will the guy from Cool Runnings come out of his shell? Will Sarah and Ben’s budding relationship withstand her being better than him at chess? And would anyone believe that these 5 strangers turn out to have some connecting event in their past? Test your knowledge and your faith at the good old Hallmark channel. Get it while it’s hot.
Wren (Alicia Witt) is started one day at work to find that her ex-boyfriend Owen (Shane McRae) has hired her firm to do work for his wildly successful company. Her firm has suffered some financial setbacks and has recently had to downgrade its offices to keep running, so there’s no question of turning this down. They need the money, and a win. But Wren and Owen haven’t spoken in years – things ended badly, and you can’t exactly blame Wren for not wanting to relive the relationship in front of her coworkers.
While trying to avoid Owen, Wren gets to know his right hand man, Sam (Dominic Rains), who is handsome, sensitive, and still tending his own wounds from a rather bad breakup. He’s basically irresistible. But Wren’s aunt Vanessa (Bebe Neuwirth) is pushing her toward someone else – Tyler (Christopher O’Shea) is handsome and fun and pushy enough to insinuate himself to the head of the pack.
Who we are and how we’re feeling colour the way we watch movies – they way we interpret any story, really. And the way I’m colouring things these days is in red and green. It’s Christmastime and I’ve been watching Hallmark movies nearly round the clock, some of which even star Ms. Alicia Witt. So I confess that a) I assumed I knew which of these suitors she’d end up with, based on the tried and true Hallmark formula, and b) at one point I got disoriented because I realized that none of the sets were decorated within an inch of their lives. It brought me back down to earth, where I spent the rest of the movie reminding myself that this wasn’t a Hallmark movie, and it didn’t owe me the ending I’d expected, or indeed a happy ending at all.
Of course, as a lover of books, I was also familiar with Jane Austen’s Persuasion, upon which this film is loosely based, in theme anyway, if not in faithful plotting. But I never did shake that Hallmark feeling. Is it possible that Jane Austen is the prototypical romance writer, and Hallmark’s just be cribbing her style this whole time? In fact, it is very possible, and Modern Persuasion might be the greatest evidence of the fact.
Overall, the movie is a pretty light affair. Its modernity is rather unsubtle and at times cringey, but you can always see where it’s coming from and how it got there. It’s not adding much to the genre, as undemanding as cinema gets, really, a big flimsy and forgettable, but I do see its use: in just a few days, the 2020 Christmas season will be over, and with it goes Hallmark’s slate of holiday romance movies for another year. This piece might be a welcome transition so you don’t have to go cold turkey. It should help with your Hallmark detox and bridge that gap between Christmas romance and Valentine’s romance, and we all know that January is indeed an overwhelming and icy gap, so warm your cockles with a dose of Modern Persuasion.
AVAILABLE DIGITALLY AND ON DEMAND FRIDAY, DECEMBER 18TH 2020 AND IN SELECT CANADIAN THEATRES
Dr. Zoey (Holly Robinson Peete) was a military doctor for 15 years, but when it was time to move on, a decision perhaps made in part with the loss of a favoured patient in mind, she chooses to keep up with her nomadic lifestyle and becomes a travelling locum doctor, which means she gets assigned to different cities to temporarily fill in for other doctors, either at their hospital or medical practice, typically for a few weeks to a few months at a time. Zoey seems to enjoy it, but she hasn’t spent Christmas with her sister in many years and this one’s not going to be any different. After finishing up a big city job in a big hospital, she’s going to the small town of Willowbrook in upstate New York where she’ll be replacing the town’s only doctor. Dr. Ray (Fred Henderson) is beloved by the community but needs surgery. Zoey is a competent replacement, but the townsfolk need time to warm up to her – and she needs time to adjust to small town doctoring, which means doing a little of everything, including knowing which patients are just lonely, and which ones need a patented Dr. Ray home visit.
While in town, Zoey meets Luke (Adrian Holmes), and repeatedly causes him to bump his noggin on things. She’s not trying to drum up business – it’s just kind of their thing, the thing that precedes their falling in love. Falling in love while learning to make recipes with Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup. Something tells me there MIGHT be a touch of the product placement in this movie. Anyway, the locum goes smoothly, the falling in love goes smoothly, but Zoey will be moving on once again – pretty much right on Christmas day. How can a new love survive such a schedule? Can a rootless doctor develop a sense of home? Have a little faith, guys. Love finds a way, and I will confess that by this movie’s end, even this cynic had tears in her eyes.
Jack Radcliff (David Oyelowo) is a detective who’s about to stumble upon the biggest case of his career and you’re not going to believe how he solves it.
A simple visit to his brother’s home reveals 3 corpses – those of his brutally murdered brother, his brother’s wife, and his brother’s daughter. The house is soaked with blood and reeks of violence, but what happened here, and how did things get this bad without Jack noticing? He’s racked with grief and guilt, utterly devastated to have failed the only family he had, and feeling acutely alone in the world when he gets a call from his niece, Ashley (Storm Reid). His dead niece Ashley, the one who was just murdered along with her parents. Ashley and uncle Jack have always been close, but this is ridiculous. Is it a ghost, a rip in time…or is Jack just losing his mind? You’ll have your theories, and the cops at Jack’s station will have theirs as well. What to do with a detective who won’t let go of his own brother’s case, who’s working something with a conflict of interest so big and so bold that no one knows how to tell him to stop? Crazy or not, Jack’s determined to work with the evidence he has, even if it’s coming from a dead girl – but is he trying to solve a crime, or stop it from happening in the first place?
Obviously you’re going to have to deal with a certain paranormal aspect to this film that doesn’t make much straight-up sense. Before you stream, ask yourself this: can I let go? Can you deal with something non-linear and non-logical? If not, there’s no shame in just walking away. There are other movies for you. But if you think you might be interested in a detective with a ghost sidekick and a magic smart phone that receives calls from the dead, then the good news is, Don’t Let Go‘s on Netflix, where you can give it a try, risk-free. If you can let go, this movie is not half bad. It’s not great, it’s a bit uneven and writer-director Jacob Aaron Estes doesn’t have the technical prowess to shoot it in a more interesting way, but the cast, including Brian Tyree Henry, Alfred Molina, and Mykelti Williamson, is talented, and they sell the mystery, the urgency, and the thrill. The big, philosophical questions remain unanswered – this is a murder mystery at its heart, not science fiction, but it does manage to combine different genres into an enjoyable and compelling watch.
Matt Larson (Michael Rady) is both the owner of a cozy little inn and the mayor of a cozy little town called Homestead. Since you’re watching a Hallmark Christmas romance, you might guess that the town of Homestead goes all out at Christmas – it’s their thing. But this year, their festivities will be disrupted by a movie shoot that’s come to town to capitalize on their unrivaled small-town Christmassiness.
Jessica McEllis (Taylor Cole) is the movie’s producer, as well as its star. She’s kind of a big deal, actually, a movie star that even Matt’s young daughter Sophie admires, and has a poster of her on her bedroom wall. Jessica’s costar Vince (Jeff Branson) is also her ex-boyfriend, though he’s eager to turn that around and be her current boyfriend once again. The paparazzi that have followed them to this small town seem hopeful on this count as well. But Jessica’s heart is pointing her more toward Matt, who is stable and humble, and everything her Hollywood lifestyle is not. So how would that even work, logistically? It wouldn’t, and when a photo of a kiss between the two is published, leading to increased invasion of privacy, that’s pretty much the final nail in the coffin.
Basically, Jessica just wants to get this movie in the can, and walks a fine line as a producer who has to prioritize the work, and as a decent person who wants to allow the townspeople to get back to enjoying their Christmas – and especially not upset a certain handsome mayor.
Will Vince scheme his way back into Jessica’s heart? How many paparazzi will inevitably fall out of trees? Is it weird that Matt’s dead wife was a Jessica fan? And how many cupcakes can one film crew eat? Hallmark has the answers to all of life’s most pressing questions, and if you hurry, you can view to your heart’s content right now, and until Christmas. Enjoy.
According to critics, I really shouldn’t like this movie. They make some pretty valid arguments, yet I’m going to stray from the path and mow one of my own, over the green, green hills of Ireland, which provide such lusty landscape porn over the opening credits alone that I need very little further convincing.
Neighbouring farms belonging to the Muldoons and the Reillys have supplied friction as well as friendship over the years, and if this was anywhere else this might have made them enemies, but these two generational farming families are wise enough to know not to completely estrange the very people who will be counted upon in a pinch should the need arise, and the need is always arising. Rosemary Muldoon (Emily Blunt) and Anthony Reilly (Jamie Dornan) have known each other their entire lives, and since there’s not exactly an excess of options, it’s been assumed by locals that they would someday marry. Now their elderly parents are dying off, but the relationship hasn’t deepened much beyond “Good morning to ya'” because Anthony is terminally awkward and believes too strongly in a family curse. And he’s always at odds with his father (Christopher Walken), who decides to pass over bachelor Anthony in favour of keeping the family name and the farm’s inheritance alive and well. Enter Anthony’s American cousin Adam (Jon Hamm), a Yank in every sense of the word. Arrogant, showy, with no real concept of farming, Adam’s worst crime is of course this his eye is immediately caught by the girl next door, Rosemary, who is understandably growing antsy waiting for “shy,” “slow” Anthony to come around.
Writer-director John Patrick Shanley adapts his own play for the screen and gives us a unique love story specific to a corner of Ireland just outside Mullingar. Rosemary and Anthony remain separated by a gate and a silly family feud, but they’re emotionally separated as well, never really able to connect. Since we spend privileged time with both, we’re privy to them each burning up from wanting the other, which makes their failure to connect all the more frustrating.
You’ll need three things to even have a hope of enjoying Wild Mountain Thyme: 1. patience; she’s a slow burn, folks 2. a willingness to overlook some pretty dodgy accents, and 3. a willingness to let go of convention and embrace its offbeat charm. Wild Mountain Thyme isn’t just set in Ireland, but set in its own time and place, a place that looks Irish and a time that seems like the 21st century, and yet is so rural and insular not only have modern conveniences barely touched them, our grown-ass protagonists also seem almost child-like in their (lack of) lived experience. They’re naïve. The film has its own rules and internal logic but doesn’t feel compelled to share them with us, things just are how they are and you can either love it or leave it, and honestly I won’t blame you either way. Like all truly quirky movies, this one is not meant for everyone. For those of us whose souls thirst for the truly eccentric, it is a puzzle not to be solved but to be admired for its opacity. When things come out of left field, we should merely note what a lovely field it is, and remember to admire the right one as well, while we’re at it. I know first hand what it is to spend a movie yelling “WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING” at the screen and checking wild-eyed with our co-watchers to see if they, too, are experiencing the brain melt. But this one simmered just above that level for me, an enjoyable stew of lyricism, unconventionality, and idiosyncratic story-telling that exists well outside the normal realm of romance I couldn’t help but admire its bold posture.
The last time John Patrick Shanley adapted his own work for us, we got Doubt, a small film with big impact. This is not Doubt. It is very much its own thing, without comparison or peers. Emily Blunt, of course, could make me watch almost anything; every performance seems to find some new undiscovered corner of her essence as she stretches to reach corners of the human spirit she hasn’t shown us before. She’s the best thing in this, and reason to watch all on her own, as long as you’re up for some uncommon trappings.
Wild Mountain Thyme is in select theatres now, and will be available on digital and on-demand Dec 22.
Melody (Janel Parrish) has just moved in next door to a single mom with two adorable daughters, the eponymous Holly and Ivy. Melody and mom Nina (Marisol Nichols) are fast friends, and the girls love Melody too, particularly because her car is an unofficial book mobile and the girls are avid readers. Soon (very soon), these two households are inseparable; Melody pitches in with watching the kids, and the kids are eager to help Melody settle in – although, to be fair, Melody has just bought a ‘fixer upper’ that feels more like a crack den than a home at the moment.
Sadly, Nina has just learned that her lymphoma is back, and even though it’s a really big ask, she has no one else, and Melody, friend of just a few intense days, is asked to be the guardian of dear sweet Holly and Ivy should mom Nina pass. In order to be approved for adoption, Melody is going to jump through some hoops, and fast – getting a job, for example, is probably item #1, and proving much harder than she’d anticipated. But getting the house up to code is also pretty crucial. Luckily, she meets a handsome young construction worker who’s surprisingly eager to lend a hand. I say surprisingly only because Melody and Adam (Jeremy Jordan) are younger than our typical Hallmark protagonists. Since Hallmark’s love stories typically emphasize love, commitment, and family over hot sex and passion, their love interests are always firmly in their 30s and ready to settle – at the youngest. Often they’re already widowed or looking for a second chance at love. Melody and Adam are in their 20s – can they possibly be ready for an instant family when they only just met days ago?
Well, in the same Hallmark universe where a young woman impulsively agrees to adopt a virtual stranger’s children, yes. But the first rule about parenting is that Adam and Melody will have to come to grips with some sacrifices, both professionally, and, gulp, romantically. Are they ready to face such tests? Is anybody?
Holly & Ivy is a bit of a surprise. It’s more about Melody’s relationship with the kids, and her promise to Nina, than any budding romance. Luckily by the movie’s end she’ll learn to embrace offers of help and support because hooo boy is she going to need it. Does this sound like the kind of holiday movie you can groove to? Then boogie on over to the Hallmark channel and enjoy the show.
ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES 