Tag Archives: Netflix and chill

Miss Me This Christmas

Regina (Erica Ash) and Franklin (Redaric Williams) were married on Christmas at the beautiful Chesteron Hotel. But that was 6 years ago. When Regina realizes she doesn’t trust Franklin, this Christmas the two are set to divorce. But they will not go gently into that silent night. Regina is whisked to a penthouse suite at the hotel by her best friend Trish (Eva Marcille) for some cheering up and drinking down but she keeps bumping into Franklin and the two are fighting an escalating war of making each other jealous.

Then Regina bumps into Ulysses (Allen Maldonado), a nerdy and somewhat eccentric millionaire who happens to live in the hotel. Things between them heat up very quickly, and when he proposes, Regina has to decide if this is just another stunt to make her ex jealous, or if she’s actually ready to move on.

Sean is at his work holiday party tonight. The roads are paved with black ice and breath comes out in clouds. I stayed home to watch Christmas movies and wrap gifts (the two go hand in hand) beneath the comfort of my faux-fur throw.

Miss Me This Christmas is nobody’s new favourite classic. The plot is predictable and clunky, the dialogue is as natural as Santa’s polyester beard. But the cast is doing its best to look good and entertain, and if you like your Christmas cheer with a side of syrupy romance, then you can do worse than this one. I have and I will again. But when you’re wrapping presents, you don’t want anything heavy while navigating your tape and scissors. I lose my scissors at least every third minute, so anything “good” would just be a hazard. Ya know? But on the off chance that you want to keep the party going (or you’ve got as many presents as I do), it has a sister movie, You Can’t Fight Christmas, part of the same cinematic universe, because apparently that’s a thing now, with holiday flicks.

48 Christmas Wishes

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Just when it seemed that Jay had reviewed all available made-for-TV Christmas dreck, 48 Christmas Wishes was suggested to us by Netflix. Netflix obviously has not been reading Jay’s reviews of similar fare. After a quick check to make sure we really hadn’t seen this one we pressed play, because we couldn’t leave our job unfinished.

48 Christmas Wishes deviates a bit from the standard formula because there is a dead dad who has not come back as a ghost, and a grieving widow who does not feel the need to latch onto the first available big city wreath salesman. Instead, it has a family of three who lost their husband and father six years ago on Christmas, who are helped by three misguided elves-in-training to rediscover the Christmas spirit.

One might give credit to the writers for mixing up the standard formula for these films, but I suspect to the intended audience these changes came across as missed opportunities. Awkward romances, it turns out, are preferable to children’s shenanigans that felt ad-libbed due to their terribleness but the more we saw the more it felt they were part of the script. It’s just that the script was thrown together with no thought or care whatsoever.

As you’d expect, Christmas is saved by the end, thanks to three child-sized elves who literally ruin everything they touch. All part of Santa’s plan, as it turns out. Santa doesn’t take the time to explain why the fate of Christmas rested on fulfilling 48 Christmas Wishes from a small fictional town unfortunately named Minnedoza, but I’m sure there is a perfectly logical reason for that too.

I’m still waiting for one of these films to go dark and have the creepy ex-boyfriend turn out to be the serial killer he comes across as. 48 Christmas Wishes is not that film, though I think the adult elf (supervisor of the child-sized elves) came close to torching Santa’s workshop a few times. But maybe that was just me making my own Christmas wish, for the sake of decent movie-lovers everywhere, that this movie would disappear.

A Christmas Star

As I Lay Dying

Escape From Tomorrow

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The great thing about Netflix is that you get to watch free movies online. Okay, maybe not exactly free, but once you’ve paid your negligible monthly fee, there’s a whole buffet of movies just waiting for your fat ass to partake – and it’s all you can eat! Some movies are more salad bar, and some are more sundae bar, but if you take a little of each, you’ll end up with a nicely rounded meal.

I happen to have a soft spot for independent film, but those are like the shrimps of an all you can eat buffet in Vegas. Tempting, but dicey. You never know if you’re going to score with cheap and delicious seafood, or win a free trip to the nearest toilet, where you’ll stay for the rest of your vacation. But since I like to live on the edge, I gave Escape From Tomorrow a go.

A debut for writer and director Randy Moore, it’s a black and white fantasy horror that recounts the last day of a family vacation where the father has just learned that he’s lost his job. It was shot guerrilla-style in the Disney World park without Disney’s knowledge or consent. They kept scripts hidden on iPhones and used only handheld cameras that other tourists might use. They were never discovered.

The family vacation is not like a trip to Disney that I’ve ever been on. The rides and animatronics are familiar, they seem the same parades of characters, but poor unemployed dad starts to have some really disturbing visions. Like, super disturbing.

The film makers plotted the sun’s positioning weeks in advance since they knew they couldn’t bring it lighting, but chose to render it in black and white to help ease the issue. To avoid detection, Moore felt he could risk 3 or 4 takes of any given scene at most, and he had his actors wear digital recorders taped to their bodies rather than have visible mics. The cast and crew bought season passes to both Disney World and Disney Land, and despite the fact that they rode It’s a Small World over and over wearing the exact same clothes, they never attracted attention from park staff.

Moore was so paranoid about Disney finding out, he took the film to South Korea for editing. It debuted at Sundance under shrouds of secrecy – and you can understand that a film that shot illegally in its parks and depicted the princess characters who pose endlessly for photos with your kids as high-priced hookers for Asian businessmen might be frowned upon by the house of mouse. Reviewers encouraged people to “see it while they could” but a Disney lawsuit never materialized. They have widely ignored the film, choosing not to add to the hype machine that was quickly gaining steam.

At the end of the day though, I think this movie is more fun to discuss than to watch. Yes, it’s audacious and ballsy and possibly the future of film-making. But it’s only sometimes successful in its execution, and the surreal stuff pushes the boundaries a little too far. There’s an intermission an hour in (I could have sworn it was more like 3) – and I was ready to be done. Turns out, the worst was still to come. So did this little Netflix experiment turn out to be bad shrimp? It may have made me a little queasy, but I’m glad I gave it a chance.

The Truman Show

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The Truman Show came out before the reality TV craze really set in, so its prescience is commendable and chilling.

Truman Burbank (Jim Carey) is a man who’s been filmed since birth, and for 30 years, the world has watched him round the clock. The only person who doesn’t know that Truman’s a big, big star is Truman himself, who believes himself to be living a normal life. An entire town has been hired and created to convince him of this, but everyone’s in on it, everyone’s an actor with their own motives and agendas. When Truman does begin to catch on to the ruse, no one is more keen to stop his leaving than his director of 30 years, Christoff (Ed Harris).

When Sisken and Ebert reviewed The Truman Show, they gave it an enthusiastic two-thumbs-up, but also gave an unprecedented on-air apology to Jim Carrey for having said that he would never have a career when they hate-reviewed Ace Ventura: Pet Detective just a few years earlier.

The Truman Show wasn’t just a hit at the box office, it became a cultural phenomenon. In 2008, Popular Mechanics declared it one of the 10 most prophetic science fiction films ever. Big Brother debuted just a year after The Truman Show hit theatres, and the popularity of other shows like it probably predict the downfall of humanity, but the fact that so many people flocked to the movies to see that same thing satirized has to be a good sign, right?

The Truman Show is studied in lots of Media Ethics courses. Of course they look at Truman’s creator, Christoff, the director who stalked unwanted pregnancies and eventually trapped an unwitting human in a very big but very fake bubble. But they also look at Marlon, Truman’s best friend, and Meryl, his wife. These of course are simply actors playing a part – Meryl (Laura Linney) basically prostitutes herself for the role and is willing to bear Truman’s child, who will be a star of a spin-off.

Even more interestingly, psychologists are reporting real people experiencing the “Truman Syndrome” or the “Truman Show Delusion”, basically people believing they are the unwilling stars of their own reality TV shows. Some people may be happy about this fake fame, others tormented. But they believe cameras are secretly following and filming them around the clock. One such person traveled to NYC after 9\11 to check that the towers had indeed fallen; this person believed that it was perhaps just an elaborate plot twist in his personal storyline. Another such person climbed to the top of the Statue of Liberty believing his long-lost high school girlfriend would meet him there, and he’d finally be released from the show.

I’m betting\hoping The Truman Show was a little less life-altering for you than it was for some of these poor people, but doesn’t that just go to show the effect the media can have on our lives?