Beethoven’s Christmas Adventure

Nowhere Boy

Nowhere Boy is about John Lennon’s early years – adolescence toward young manhood, which as we know is not a normal coming of age tale since the nowhere boy was well on his way to becoming the most famous man in the world.

The film shows the influence of two women on John’s life: his mean Aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas) who raised him, and his absent mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff), who re-enters his life at a crucial bit, extracting pain but also possibly inspiring artistry.

MV5BOTI2MDM0Mzg5M15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNDI0OTQ0Mw@@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,1505,1000_AL_ Lennon (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) knew Mimi wasn’t his mother, but did not learn his mother’s identity until his uncle died and she showed up to the funeral. He was shocked to learn that all this time, she’s lived in the neighbourhood, must have been watching as he grew up. Julia is the younger, prettier, more outgoing, easier to love sister of Mimi’s. John and Julia’s relationship feels a little like a romance as they get to know each other in a little bubble.

But remember, during this time he’s also meeting George, and Paul. The world Beatles is never uttered, though, because this isn’t about the birth of the band. It’s about one ordinary teenager’s life, and the family secrets and tragedies that ushered him into adulthood.

It constricts the heart a little to know that the man who sang All You Need Is Love didn’t always get it. And if he had, we might not have him, or his beautiful lyrics, or his search for truth and meaning.

Sam Taylor-Johnson directed this film, with input from Paul McCartney and Lennon’s half sister, Julia Baird. It is her feature length debut. Her style is unpretentious, and she knows where her focus should be: on John. On the many Johns. The lesser-known Johns. It’s satisfying, as a biopic, because of its narrow scope. We all know who John became; this film tells us how he became. It’s fresh, and that’s very hard to do when we’re talking about one of the most recognizable human beings on the planet. It leaves behind the expected trappings and delivers only gleeful hints of what might be on the horizon. It’s thrilling to watch because of where it does not go.

Casting was obviously going to be a huge part of the film’s success or failure. Taylor-Johnson admits she was most nervous about finding the right Paul, as he’s still alive to see it. Instead of look-alikes, she went with a sweet-faced actor known to us as the drummer kid from Love Actually, Thomas Brodie-Sangster. But John, of course, makes the movie thrum, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson was its beating heart. With no overt mimicry, he embodies John’s spirit. It’s beautiful to watch.

Christmas Wedding Planner

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Kelsey is planning her first real wedding, her cousin Emily’s Christmas Eve wedding, and Kelsey (Jocelyn Hudon) is big-time overwhelmed. She meets Connor (Stephen Huszar) very early on in the movie, when her overwhelmedness is communicated in the opening scene when she bodily runs into not one but two different people in a coffee shop and allows the gentleman to precede her in ordering only to have him nab the last blueberry scone. And that was a very important blueberry scone, meant to appease her fierce aunt Olivia (Kelly Rutherford, it’s come to this), mother of Emily (Rebecca Dalton), and able to make or break Kelsey as a wedding planner.

Cut to the engagement party where Kelsey finds out that Connor is Emily’s ex, and he may be in town to ruin the wedding! Somehow, though Emily is a cousin but more like a sister, Kelsey has never met nor heard of Connor. And he’s also a private investigator “looking into” Emily’s fiancé Todd.

Christmas Wedding Planner blends the best (or the worst, depending on your point of view) tropes in both romance and holiday genres: dress shopping, cookie baking, sleigh bells instead of a real score, charitable deeds, cake tasting, and lots of misunderstandings. This one even has a boy-bander as the PI’s bartending conscience. It’s a weird addition that hardly stands out in a movie that’s not trying to make sense.

Like all of these movies, the acting is either wooden, or over the top, though I dare say our leading lady (Hudon) is not only exceedingly cute, but sort of a good actress too.

Your brain won’t like this film. Your brain will be embarrassed for you, and maybe for your cats as well. If you insist on watching this, turn off your brain. I don’t classify this as a Christmas movie, but as a wrapping presents movie – it’ll vaguely put you in the spirit but you won’t need to give it your full attention. Not even half a brain. Remember: you turned that shit off. Hallmark means enjoying the cheese while sipping some wine.

Holiday Baggage

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Pete Murphy has flown his last flight, straight into retirement. He’s got a beach getaway lined up, where he and his new (young) girlfriend plan to marry and make babies. There’s just one little glitch: he’s not technically divorced. But when he meets with his wife Sarah to discuss details, her berating him about his non-existent relationship with their grown daughters turns into a heart attack for him, and ultimately, a whole burden for her as she agrees to let him recuperate in her home over the holidays.

Starring Cheryl Ladd and Barry Bastwick, this is hands-down the most illogical, nonsensical, rubbish heap of a Christmas movie I’ve ever seen. There’s absolutely no reason for Pete to convalesce at his ex’s place since there was never anything wrong with him to begin with. And though he seems determined to resume his place at the table, he never mentions a change in plans to his girlfriend, who is patiently making plans for them in the Bahamas. Nor does he mind muscling Sarah’s new beau out of the way either. In fact, the film seems to do away with him conveniently by killing him off, which seems a little harsh. The thing about Pete is, he never redeems himself. He just waltzes back into his family and expects to pick up where he left off. And his daughters, who wouldn’t even invite him to their weddings, are surprisingly forgiving about the whole thing.

The script makes no sense. The story doesn’t even really pretend. Not that it would matter much – there’s a mysterious case of worst acting ever, and I couldn’t even imagine how this curly haired dude ended up just smearing his stank all over a movie that really couldn’t afford such glaring missteps. And then I checked IMDB: it’s the writer-director. Oy vey. Vanity pieces aren’t usually so…ugly. But I guess there’s a time and place for everything, and um, tis the season?

The Princess Switch

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Stacy just broke up with her boyfriend so to cheer her up, her dedicated employee and sous-chef Kevin somehow snagged her an invitation to the royal bake-off in Belgravia. Don’t you wish your assistant arranged free European trips for you? Anyway, I’m not sure what qualified her to be in this contest, one of just 6 contestants from the whole world; even back home in Chicago she’s their “best-kept secret” which means most Chicagoans haven’t even heard of her.

Anyway, once they’re in “Belgravia” (with sets and “snow” that remind us an awful lot of the sets used for “Chicago” which in turn remind us of very cheaply sourced sets built shoddily in California), Stacy runs into the reclusive Duchess set to marry the Prince, hence the royal bake-off preceding the New Year’s Day wedding. The Duchess looks awfully familiar – like, an exact carbon copy of Stacy, only with a slightly shorter, flippier hairstyle. Hint hint: easily replicated. Yes! The Duchess has always wanted to explore what it’s like to be “normal” so they decide to switch places for the two days leading up to the competition. Parent Trap, anyone? Cue the princess makeover!

Is Vanessa Hudgens up for two such demanding roles? One might argue she isn’t up for one. One might argue she isn’t up to the European accent. Or the Chicago one.

These Netflix Christmas movies are self perpetuating now; the couple sits down to Netflix (& chill?) in front of the very popular A Christmas Prince (so popular it’s getting a sequel at the end of the month, called A Royal Wedding, sure to bring almost exactly the same thing the first one did). Netflix’s holiday lineup is reassuringly formulaic. They always get together after a lengthy will they won’t they based on them practically hating each other but then witnessing one sweet act that not only negates all the disturbing red flags from before, but allows for them to fall in love at lightning speed. While A Christmas Prince is an anomaly, many of the couples end up married mere moments after determining that they do not, in fact, hate each other – twice now we’ve seen the new couple literally subsume someone else’s wedding when their relationship conveniently falls apart at the altar.

By no standards is this a good movie, but like a pair of old slippers, it’s comforting, familiar, and it delivers exactly what it promises. Only those with high tolerances for cheese and schmaltz should apply: a fatal overdose is entirely possible for those unused to the genre.

Reunited At Christmas

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Samantha’s grandmother was the keeper and maker of family traditions. This year will be Samantha’s first without her Nana, and it feels like it’s going to be a sad one, especially since she’s fighting writer’s block. But looks like Nana left one last surprise: an invitation arrives to spend one last Christmas at her house, with the whole family gathered near (including Sam’s mother, though her parents are divorced). So Sam and boyfriend Simon nix their Aspen plans for their first Christmas together and set out instead for her hometown.

5bf4414a947a1.image Turns out, Nana’s about as demanding as Gerard Butler was in P.S. I Love You. In fact, a whole list of traditions to be fulfilled arrives, and the family has to really come together to make gingerbread cookies, ice skate, trim the tree, all those good things, many of which you probably do yourself. “Traditions are the stories that families write together,” Nana always said.

If you know the Hallmark formula, then you know that the protagonist always has a reason to hate Christmas, and on the journey to embracing the holiday season, they also fall in love. Reunited For Christmas falls a teeny tiny bit outside that comfortable, homogeneous Hallmark box in that Samantha starts out with a boyfriend, and he’s not horrible, or a workaholic, or a secret misogynist. And Samantha doesn’t hate Christmas, she’s just finding the holidays hard as she struggles with grief and loss. I think a lot of us can relate. That first holiday without a loved one feels marked by their absence, and it’s hard to really get in the holiday spirit. At any rate, Samantha is less in the way of her own self than almost any Hallmark heroine before her, and for that, I salute her. I still didn’t love the movie, but feel strongly the need to applaud any of Hallmark’s lineup that dares to stray even the teensiest bit from their very well-beaten path. I mean, what have we come to societally that what we need from Christmas is a bunch of carbon-copied, low on production value movies that are as predictable as they are overflowing with schmaltz? This year a deviation from formula, next year people of colour! LGBTQ+ story lines! A Jewish holiday special! Who knows?

Once Upon A Holiday

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A princess from a small country is visiting NYC when she goes AWOL. Sick of having every moment planned and choreograph, with no time at all for her own pursuits and passions, she evades her crack security team (literally just ducking), and hits the streets, totally unprepared. Within minutes she’s robbed, her purse and heirloom camera stolen. A good samaritan tries to give her cash to get home (not that a princess carries cash anyway…I’m guessing the purse had nothing but lipgloss and loose diamonds) but instead she adopts the name Kate Holiday and resolves to spend as much time with him, learning to be “normal.”

Jack doesn’t know she’s a princess of course, which means to him she looks a lot like a random homeless person. She needs food and shelter and clothes. And for some reason she falls dead asleep at a party. And yet Jack just adopts this strange homeless woman who appears to have zero common sense and who won’t give a straight answer to a question for all the loose diamonds in the world. Not only does Jack take her under his wing, he falls in love with her.

Meanwhile, selfish little Katie doesn’t give one fig for her security team nor her loved ones, who are equally concerned about her safety and well-being. She’s just vanished and they’re left making excuses to all of her commitments while they scramble to find her.

Briana Evigan and Paul Campbell are pretty unremarkable in their individual roles and their chemistry can only be measured in negative numbers. But it makes sense that there’s no heat in their romance; there’s also very little Christmas in this Christmas movie. It’s set “during the holidays” but this is really just a movie about a princess who’d rather not be. This is a very missable, skippable movie, and luckily, Netflix has a million more where this came from. Choose again.

A Heavenly Christmas

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Eve (Kristin Davis) is a workaholic, ambitious stockbroker with no time for family or relationships (in fact, she claims to be in a long distance relationship… with her future boyfriend. That’s REALLY long distance!) and really no time for Christmas shenanigans.

So when she dies, her guardian angel Pearl (Shirley MacLaine), sends her back to Earth as a Christmas angel, to really stick it to her. She’s got the one week before Christmas to make a difference in someone’s life. That someone is a relative stranger, someone she once shared a cab with, a diner owner named Max (Eric McCormack) who dreamed of being a musician before he unexpectedly became a parent when his sister died and left her daughter in his care.

Anyway, it’s difficult to follow the usual Hallmark formula of :
MV5BZDQwYzdhMmQtYjgyMi00ZWJkLWJhY2ItMzljZGI4MjBiOTMxL2ltYWdlL2ltYWdlXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMDYwNTg3OQ@@._V1_ 1. learn to love Christmas; 2. fall in love
when you’re dead. I mean, fraternization between the live and the dead is difficult and frowned upon, and since she’s (hopefully) on her way, this would be an even longer distance than the potential future boyfriend. And there’s that pesky rule about not getting involved. That’s a toughie. And how much are his buddies going to tease him if he tells them he has a Ghost Girlfriend? It’s an awkward situation. God, they’re going to wish they were fighting over cabs again.

But at least there’s plenty of Christmas along the way: cookies, snowfall, trees, pageants, even caroling, and you know how much I hate caroling! And by the way, here in Ottawa, the local radio station is running a very age-ist contest. You have to bring a Christmas Carol (literally just a man or woman named Carol) to the pedestrian mall to possibly win 5k. Except honestly, who under 50 is named Carol anymore? No one, that’s who! This is pretty much the dumbest idea for a contest they’ve ever had, and believe me, they’ve had some doozies.

Anyway. Like all Hallmark movies, you can guess what’ll happen within the first 45 seconds, and the rest is just tinsel on your tree. Of course there two kinds of people: those who put tinsel on their tree, and those who don’t. I think tinsel is largely falling out of favour, but my mother was a tinselaholic. She believed there was a right way to drape tinsel on a tree, one piece at a time, clump-free. And what about your tree? Does it belong in a Hallmark movie, or is it a little more…eclectic?

You Can’t Fight Christmas

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Here’s a surprise: this movie belongs to a Christmas cinematic universe centered around the Chesterton hotel. We’ve seen the hotel and in fact been introduced to these characters in a previous film – Miss Me This Christmas.

You Can’t Fight Christmas is about the hotel’s decorator, Leslie Major (Brely Evans). She’s the self-proclaimed Queen of Christmas, and every year she turns the hotel into a Christmas wonderland to which hotel guests flock. But their robust Christmas season can’t sustain the hotel during the rest of the year, and elderly owner Mr. James (Richard Gant) is ready to pass the torch to grandson Edmond (Andra Fuller). The only problem is Edmond’s business partner, Millicent (Persia White), a stark raving bitch with a power point presentation to win his heart. So that’s a complicating factor when Leslie and Edmund have a meet-cute that literally has her falling into his arms. But can she really afford to fall for the enemy, the man who may be responsible for the loss of her job?

Rebel Wilson recently declared that she was the first plus-sized woman to star in a romantic comedy. She conveniently that black women, like Queen Latifah and Mo’Nique have been doing it for years. Even this throw-away Christmas movie manages to make it work. Our leading lady is charismatic and holds her own on the screen. But make no mistake, this is still formulaic and predictable. It goes how every lousy romantic Christmas movie goes. So if you have time to burn and low-key cheer to achieve, this movie is just about tolerable. Which is just about the nicest thing I’ve said about one of these movies in a long, long time.

Operation Christmas List

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Barney thinks he’s beat the system. After some fool proof research, he’s pin-pointed the hot toy of the Christmas season (a Crabby Mousie) and plans to stockpile them, sell them at a profit, and buy himself a bike with the proceeds (Barney is approximately 12 years old). He recruits his geeky best friend Walt, reluctantly allows his devoted fan Iris in on the deal, and gets saddled with little brother Penn, making for the motliest crew of criminals you’ve ever seen.

At least until they come across an actual gang of thieves, adult ones, led by Forte, in the department store with the very same goal.

Kid robbers vs. grown up robbers means the kids go all Home Alone at the grown-up asses, albeit in an uninspired and low-budget way. This movie is truly not very good, and I can’t imagine that even the director ever thought it would be. The kids are MV5BYTc1ODM0Y2ItMzE1My00OTU5LWEyZGMtMDMyODM2NmJhMmRlL2ltYWdlL2ltYWdlXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNjI4Mzg5OTg@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,1497,1000_AL_ annoying (have I mentioned lately how much I hate fake lisps? Is there anything on earth I hate more? I’d rather eradicate fake lisps than war, I think, such is my revulsion), and the grown-ups are ludicrous. The security guard, an adult, for the record, spends 10% of his time kareokeing and 90% being stuck in his own office, outwitted by kids, of course. And don’t get me started on Forte, the villain. Oh okay, go ahead and get me started! The man sounds like the Swedish Chef but he dresses like he’s ready for a Gotye video. I mean, floral on floral is pretty bold, but who wears that to break in somewhere? And the villain above him (what a hierarchy!), Daphne, is described as a “socialite shut-in” with zero apparent irony. You know, just one of those shut-ins who really loves to get out there and party.

I don’t even know if there’s a hot toy for 2018, but if there is, and if you’re morally obligated to find and buy one for a kid on your list, then whatever hoops and hell you have to go through to get it will be a breeze compared to watching all 80 minutes of this film. So, you know, don’t.