A Carpenter Christmas Romance - 2024, d. Jake Helgrin - Crave
Bach et Bottine (aka Bach and Broccoli) - 1986, d. André Melançon - Crave
Jingle Bell Heist - 2025, d. Michael Fimognari - Netflix
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A Light Toast to HallmarKent: A Carpenter Christmas Romance
HERstory: Andrea Metcalf is a famous romantacy writer who returns to her perfect small town (which is no longer perfect because it burned down after a lightning strike five years ago sparked a rampant blaze) to work on the latest in her successful novel series. Shortly after arriving she runs into Seth, her old high school crush who she has complicated feelings about. Does he run the local hotel with his dad, maybe? I dunno, I missed the first 45 minutes.
She used to tutor him and when she became his place of solace when his mother was dying of cancer, they started going out, but he would only take her out in public in neighbouring towns. He was the popular funny sports guy and she...was not...and he had a reputation he felt he needed to uphold.
Him and Andie have a lovely afternoon together one day, and his neighbours kids show up at the diner and start jumping up and down on him, and then his pretty neighbour turns up and says to them to leave Seth and Andie alone, as it looks like they're on a date. He downplays it and says they're just old friend and Andie goes cold on him. Old patterns are returning, and she was hoping to have outgrown those insecure feelings.
Their romance rekindles when Seth accidentally electrocutes himself in his garage. Andie comes running when she hears his scream and then sees that he works with electricity to do wood burning. He's working on burning a tree into a door to honour his mom, among other projects for the city.
They have a walk, connect again. They make out, and they do it (off screen). Afterwards they do the talking-under-the-covers thing, and Seth tells Andie he like-likes her.
In the years since Seth joined the military, served his duty, and returned home to do carpentry work. He's been a central figure in the community, giving free room and board to neighbours struggling after the fire and feeding the town and doing free repair work.
When Seth's attractive tenant calls and then comes knocking at 2am (bootie call), Andie is upset again, and storms out. He chases after her and explains that he served with her husband in the military and that he was KIA. He's been helping them out since the fire and things got...complicated.
But the big reveal is it turns out the fire that took out the city started because of an old generator with faulty wiring that maybe blew up when the lighting strike hit? I dunno. He's feeling guilty, and not the town hero that Andrea accuses him of being.
But everyone knows it wasn't Seth's fault and Andie and attractive tenant decide to host the town in a celebration of lights that doubles as a celebration of Seth and his efforts as the community's backbone. Andrea says she's going to stay, at least for a while...she can write anywhere, and she gives him the final page to her new book where the male protagonist of her series no longer dies.
The Formulae:Most of the formulaic beats of a holiday romance are around Christmas-themed things. I guess because the town burned down, it's not very Christmassy? Andie is regularly outside without a coat on so I'm guessing they're in like SoCal somewhere? I dunno.
Unformulae: Well, they do it, like two hot adults should. It's not just a chaste kiss, these hotties are gettin' it on.
True Calling? Not a single Carpenters song, never mind a Christmas one, is played.
The Rewind: Post-sex one night, Andie and Seth are each eating out of their own pint of ice cream. I mean, shouldn't they be sharing a pint, sexily feeding each other?
The Regulars: Hot brunette Sarah Pieterse (Pretty Little Liars) stars in her first Hallmarkie, as does hot hunk Mitchell Slaggert...and also Kaley McCormack who plays Andie's sister...as well as attractive neighbour actor Asia King. It's an all-new-to-holiday-romance ensemble... except that it was written by Sarah Drew, star of Hallmark's Mistletoe Murders.
How does it Hallmark? It's sexier than 98% of most Hallmarkies (this one's a Lifetime production...I didn't look into Lifetime's slate at all this year, but this one's from last year anyway, so whatevs) because the leads are soooo hot and you just want to see hot people do what hot people should do. But outside of that it's not very festive and kind of dull and the melodrama is revealed in big clunky ways. The big "festival of Seth" I really wanted to roll my eyes at, but it did get me a little bit in the feels (the actual tree burned into door, though, was not as impressive as I'd hoped).
How does it movie? Lord, no.
How Does It Snow? Not a flake.
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The film opens with a dream sequence. Fannie is in the desolate tundra, wind howling, snow blowing furiously. Along the way comes, I believe, her parents on horseback in pristine white snowsuits. The horse drops to its knees and falls over, and just when you think Fannie's mom's going to pull out a lightsabre and cut it open to put Fannie inside to keep her warm, she lifts up the saddle and there's a keyboard in the side of the horse. She starts playing and Fannie's father starts dancing and spinning her around. In voiceover, Fannie tells us her parents died in a car crash a few years earlier. Fannie wakes up. She does not seem all that bothered by this very strange dream, and she finds comfort in her pet hamster.
Fannie's been living with her Grandmother, but Grandma is now sick and needs to go in a home, so she needs Fannie's uncle Jean-Claude (Jonathan in the subtitles and dub) to take care of her. It's coming on Christmastime and Jean-Claude has just started a year's sabbatical from work and he's focused on practising his organ playing for a big audition he has coming up. If he is selected he could go on tour in Europe for six months. Taking care of a 12-year-old is not part of his plan. So immediately upon Fannie's arrival he tells her it's only temporary and he consults with a fostering system.
Jean-Claude is a loner. He doesn't talk much to his neighbours and the cute woman at work who is clearly sweet on him doesn't get much out of him in return besides awkward smiles. Fannie both helps to bring him out of his shell and tests his patience, especially with her penchant for rescuing strays. Fannie and the neighbour boy set up a hostel for the plentiful strays in the storage shed outside Jean-Claude's apartment.
Fannie wants nothing more than to be loved by Jean-Claude, to be his family, but Jean-Claude is too self-involved to see past his own narrow band of interest, and he keeps putting up walls between himself and this traumatized child. It's quite painful viewing. It's clear Jean-Claude has the desire to love and be loved, but he has no ability to make it happen.
The ending of this film is a real mind fuck. Much like the previous two "Tales for All", Bach et Broccoli is borderline traumatizing. Fannie leaves for a school trip, leaving Jean-Claude home alone, where he learns he dearly misses the poor girl. When she returns from the trip, though, they learn she has been placed with a new family and has one week left with Jean-Claude. Feckless as he is, he doesn't intervene. Fannie runs away from his audition performance, gives all her strays away to neighbourhood kids, and runs to her new foster family days earlier. Jean-Claude turns up at their door. He doesn't know what to say to the girl. In English he tells her he loves her. In French he says "Bonne chance" which is not the same thing.
There's an abrupt cut to the next scene which Fannie narrates, which finds Jean-Claude, his crush from work, and Fannie altogether in his apartment, redecorating, painting the walls stark white, making it a home. But the allusions to the opening, the narration, the blanket of white, does this tell us that it's only a dream? That there's no happy ending for Jean-Claude and Fannie? I have to wonder if the subtitles/dub try to change the melancholy ending for the English market to a happy one... because even with these edits, it's evident that this is not the happy ending we're hoping for. The credits roll over Fannie holding her pet skunk Bottine/Broccoli and smiling for the camera. I'm trying to recall a film that I saw in the past few years that ends with the credits rolling over a character trying to hold a smile, and how unsettling that is (was it Pearl?).
Bach et Bottine is a complex emotional drama that happens to feature a child as one of the lead roles, but it doesn't make it a children's film. I can't imagine being a 10-year-old in the 1980's and finding this that interesting (not compared to the previous two films in the series), yet as an adult I found this guttingly emotional. The film has exceptional compassion for Fannie, and her yearning for Jean-Claude's acceptance, and it does an exceptional job of exemplifying Jean-Claude's fecklessness while still giving us enough understanding of him to root for him to come around (we don't ever dislike Jean-Claude so much as we are constantly frustrated by the slow pace of his evolution).
It's a slow burn film that will punch you in the gut.
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Former Disney teen star Olivia Holt is Sophia, a shopgirl in a British department store called Sterlings, like it's 1954 all over again (see also The Crowded Day). She has her mind set on stealing some stuff, but so too does Nick (Connor Swindells) who apparently robbed the place once before after being hired by Sterling (Peter Serafinowicz) to set up security in the place, and he still has eyes into the store. He spies Sophia getting into the basement storeroom and stealing a bit of cash, and tries to blackmail her into helping him rob the storeroom of its most valuable jewels, but she pickpockets his wallet and turns things around on him.
Partners they agree. Sophia learns that Nick is a dad, divorced, and struggling after his incarceration. Nick learns Sophia moved to America with her mom when she was small after her biological father told them to piss off. Now they're back for the free health care, only her mom is so sick and needs to fast track her stem cell injections, which can only happen in the private sector. Sophia needs money.
They plan their heist and make it into the vault only to discover the jewels are missing. Plan B, steal the 500K Sterling keeps in his vault in his office, which is a lot more work, including an embarrassing attempt by Nick to seduce Sterling's bitter wife (Lucy Punch).
Directed by Mike Flanagan's DP, it actually looks pretty good, and moves along without really any lulls. It has its luminous moments, particularly around the seduction gambit and I enjoyed how the story effectively told us time and again that these two were never really ever going to pull this off successfully with their limited experience and skill set. The only reason they succeed is because they get help from more than one place (primarily because Sterling is such a douche, everyone's happy to take him down a peg).
Even knowing all the beats I still had fun, but I imagine it was more fun not knowing. But the romantic angle was probably the least successful part of the film. Sophia and Seth seem more like buddies than lovers throughout the runtime. As much as this isn't a Hallmarkie, their "romance" feels very by the book Hallmarkie. Perfunctory. It's not that the leads don't have chemistry, there's just not a lot of romantic chemistry there, and much of it has to do with Swindells being too low key and reserved in that very British fashion. This needed much more spice to liven it up, especially if it wanted any rewatch factor.
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Weird. I did not catch even the briefest glances at any Hallmarkies in the wild this year, as in Broadcast on TV. I also burned out almost immediately after a few disappointing fare. While I got a couple of absolute great charmers, I just didn't feel into the lesser ones this year. As I mentioned in a post, I probably need to curate better, find the ones I know will tick some mental seasonal boxes for me. But also, I was more Grinch-ian this year as I had no time off work and hours left were filled with the usual seasonal errands to run, maybe even more so than years prior.
ReplyDeleteI doubt I will be doing an Xmas Leftovers post.