A prelude to T&K's XMas (2021) Advent Calendar

Toast and I are really, really, really ready to ramp up into Christmas this year.  I mean, I've been in it to win it since the end of October, but as you've seen, Toast is also diving in early.  I've definitely watched more Christmast stuff this past November than any November before in my entire life, and I'm all in.  The Christmas lights have been up for weeks, we got our tree this past weekend,  I've got some mixes for gluten-free cookies, I've filled up the reusable advent calendar with chocolates, and most of my shopping is done.  I'm ready, but Christmas is still 26 days away.  So what else can I do but review (and clean the slate before the Advent Calendar gets going tomorrow):

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I've never been big on tradition, or revisiting the same thing over and over again, even at Christmas, with the exception of the wonderful steak dinner and Community Xmas episodes with the wife on Christmas Eve.  That said, I once had this mixtape I put together from alternative late-night CBC Radio that I listened to every year for years.  And when I switched from tapes to CDs, I tried to assemble as much as I could from Napster (to limited success) and when I moved from CDs to iPods, I ripped one whole side of the tape into a single mp3 that I could listen to.  But as I moved away from iPods and physical music sources, I lost my traditional listen.   Strangely, The Nine Lives of Christmas (2014, d. Mark Jean - Hallmark) I've watched each year for the past four years (twice the first year, as I had to show it to Adj just to confirm that I wasn't wrong in enjoying what should have been godawful).  If we have anything to thank for bringing Hallmark movies into my life, and regular rotation each holiday season, it's this delightful piece of holiday romance garbage.

 

In this'un Kimberly Sustad plays, uh, Marilee...yes she does (makes me laugh every time I watch it, because I forget that's her character's name), an early 30-something woman (actually I think they say something like 28, but...yeah, right) who has gone back to school to become a Vet after having to give up the dream earlier to raise her younger sister after her parents died.  She works at a pet store to bring in some income, while her sister has become a bigwig real estate agent who gets invited to mayoral parties and the like.  Anyway, Marilee (yup, that's still her name), has no time for dating despite her sister and class friend and work friend all pushing her to get out there.  She also has a pet cat, but she shouldn't, because her building doesn't allow it, and her nosy landlady is being such a feral beast about it.

Former Superman Brandon Routh is Dashiel Snow...nah, just kidding (though that seems like the appropriate counter to a Marilee, don't it?)... he's Zachary, a fireman, and the biggest slab of beef in the firehouse.  We meet him getting his picture taken for the fireman calendar, and it's a rare moment of Hallmark beefcake (because we don't get much of that ever in Hallmark, maybe not again until The Christmas House?).  The other boys in the station (and I do mean boys) live vicariously through him as he stumbles his way through one shallow relationship after another.  His latest girlfriend is the hilariously vapid Blair (Chelsea Hobbs), an absolute cartoon of a human being.  Blair is supposed to be a high fashion model, but I think really she's a catalog mode for Sears, or JC Penny or whichever of those department stores is still in business in 2014.  I love to hate Blair, she's the absolute worst, and she's a big part of what makes this movie so enjoyable.  There's nothing like rooting against a truly awful, shallow, selfish, vein, egotistical person.  Zachary rescues a stray cat (Ambrose) being attacked by a dog and the cat takes up residence in the house he's currently renovating himself.

Zachary and Marilee meet cute at the supermarket, where he needs to pick up cat food (and Marilee helpfully advises against him feeding Ambrose dairy, thank god), and she's picking up a 4-litre lonely-lady tub-of-ice-cream-for-one.  It's a friendly exchange but it passes.  Moments later, Zachary rescues her from a runaway shopping cart in the parking lot.  My hero...like Superman... but on a severe budget.  Zachary doesn't think much of it but Marilee can't help but swoon a little.  

 

Out at her birthday dinner with her sister and brother-in-law, she runs into Zachary again (he's escaping Blair and her soulless entourage) and they have a really nice chat that's obviously interrupted.  A little bit more sparking.  Turns out Blair's dad is the owner of the pet store Marilee works and and she gets her fired.  Zachary and Blair break up, finally.  Marilee gets kicked out of her place and goes to live in Zachary's renovated apartment in exchange for helping with the main floor reno.  They start to connect but Marilee feels out of his league.  There's a mayoral party that leads to a misunderstanding but it all works out because of cats.  It's really cute.

Some of my favourite stuff about The Nine Lives of Christmas happens in the firehouse.  The Chief (Gregory Harrison) is a real get-in-touch-with-your-emotions type guy and he encourages Zachary to stop being so shallow and search for happiness over beauty.  And to stop being such a fraidy cat about his emotions.  The other guys just want Zachary to keep slutting around, but once they meet Marilee they're kind of in on the Chief's wavelength that Zachary should just get with the pretty, smart, awkward, nice girl.

It's just delightful.  Sustad has great comedic timing, and there's actually some legit funny scenes here. It's a rare Hallmark romcom that actually has some com.  It's not very Christmassy, I might say, but it's southern states setting means there's no chance of snow or inclement weather so it's only Christmassy by decoration.  This sort of pre-dates the heavy tropification of Hallmark so there's no baking montages or Christmas tree shopping scenes or much hot chocolatification.  So if it lags in peoples rankings of holiday romances, that might be why.

 

The Nine Lives of Christmas is certainly not the best Hallmark movie ever made, but obviously it's resonated with more people than just myself, as there is a sequel - The Nine Kittens of Christmas - that debuted on Hallmark last week (but doesn't air in Canada until this coming Sunday).  It will be in the Advent calendar next week.

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A running joke in early Simpsons was Bart crank calling Moe's Tavern.  My favourite of these was Bart asking for Hugginkis, first name Amanda, and Moe calling out "Can I get Amanda Hugginkis, oh why can't I find [A Man To Hug and Kiss].  

 

Cut to 2020, when A Princess Switch 2 comes out and I start thinking "oh why cant I find a Van to Hudg and kiss", which is wildly inappropriate given that I'm a happily married man.  But it's just what happens in my brain when I watch a VanHudg movie, particularly one that has no less than 3 different VanHudges starring in it.

 

Ok, let's be clear, I don't really want to be kissing VanHudg, it's just the saying going through my brain.  Also, there aren't three VanHudges, but truly just one, and she's freaking amazing in these movies playing multiple roles.  Not only that, but playing those roles against herself.  Not only that, but often playing those roles, as each other, against each other.  It's fucking ridiculous how amazing VanHudg pulls it off, but she does, perhaps even better each time.

 

In A Princess Switch 3: Romancing the Star (2021, d. Mike Rohl  - Netflix), VanHudg is back playing Stacy, her distant relative Lady Margaret, and Margaret's cousin, Lady Fiona Pembroke.  If you will recall, in APS2, Fiona and her little cadre tried to steal Margaret's crown by kidnapping then impersonating her, then selling the country of Montenaro off and getting the eff outta dodge.  She did not succeed.  Here, Princess Stacy and Queen Margaret are co-hosting a Christmas celebration and have secured from the Vatican a priceless tree-topping star, which promptly is stolen.  In order to get it back without causing a fuss, they need someone who can operate in dark shadows, which means Fiona is called up from her penance at a convent (she tried to overthrow the monarchy and all she gets is cleaning duty at a convent...man rich people get away with everything, don't they?)

 

So yeah, Fiona, a royal pain in the ass (haHA!) in the last one is our central character here, and we find empathy for her via a subplot about her avoiding her estranged mother's attempts at reconciliation, as well as her reunion with an old lover who used to be with Interpol but is now a security expert.   

 

This movie takes a long time for any switching to happen (it's almost an hour by the time the first Princess Switch is necessitated, but let it be known there is more than one switch required) but it's essential to both rehabilitating Fiona as a character, and setting up the monstrously ludicrous - but utterly entertaining - plot whereby Fiona and Peter Maxwell (Remy Hill, sort of Henry Golding-lite, which is not a bad thing) need to bust into dastardly villain Hunter Cunard's (a delicious mustache-twirling performance from Will Kemp) place while Margaret, acting as Fiona, distracts him.  They cop a scene from Entrapment as Fiona gets all cat-suited up to lithely slither between lazerbeams in a sort of dance with Peter.  It's so much fun and a little steamy.

This one goes full out ridiculous, where as the previous two were just largely ridiculous, kind of like how the Fast and Furious franchise evolved.  We don't get a fourth VanHudg but what she does here with the three is still immensely impressive.  She is so capable of performing against herself, so amazingly adept at creating distinct characters, that I honestly forget most of the time that it's a single performer, not three different ones.  How VanHudg manages to be one character playing another character and yet you can still tell from subtle physical or verbal cues that it is the original character is so amazing.  

The sets and the settings are all so lavishly decorated, as Toasty noted about the first one, "Gawds it's gorgeous there."  These aren't cheap, these movies.  They splurge on digitally having three VanHudges together in one scene, and they splurge on the sets and setting.  Yeah, there's real Christmas vibes in Montenaro.

 

If they're planning, at all, to continue the Princess Switch movies (and I get it if they don't, because they can't be easy on VanHudg) how would they possibly up the ante?  I say...crossover with Orphan Black...

 

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The only people who say they don't like Bruce Campbell are people who don't know who Bruce Campbell is.  The chin, the myth, the legend has from moment one of The Evil Dead such wonderful presence, there's a warmth and likeability there that he has never lost.  In fact it's only grown over the decades as he's become one of the most affable, charming personas at fan conventions that he's as much known for being Bruce Campbell as he is for any of his on screen credits.

So while it's definitely not out of the range of possibility that Campbell, given his B-list status, would appear in a Hallmark, it's still a surprise that he's actually in a goddamn Hallmark.  I assumed he would be playing the gregarious father figure to some young(er...mid-30's to early 40's) Hallmark starlet who would steal scenes but otherwise be a non-integral presence in yet another bog standard holiday romance, and I was here for it.  But then I saw he was acting against Peter Gallagher, another senior character actor of maybe grander repute as an actor, and wondered just what the hell kind of Hallmark would need two such heavyweights.

One December Night (2021, d. Clare Niederpruem) is not the typical Hallmark, but rather a "Hallmark Movies & Mysteries" product, which means absolutely nothing to me, but I gather it means that there's a separate Hallmark channel for more dramatic or mysterious storytelling, and less romantic cliches?  I really don't know.

The film opens with a montage of photoshopped albums, magazing articles, merchandise of in-world famous folk-rock duo Bedford & Sullivan which gives the movie an instantly different feeling than almost every other Hallmarkie, but then undercuts that by featuring the same, bog standard obligatory establishing shot of "the big city".  We meet Quinn Allan(Eloise Mumford), who works at a music talent agency.  She's been having difficulty getting any traction for her up-and-coming star (who seems to only be busking on the streets, so Quinn must be really, really bad at her job), but is given a prime slot for her if she can get the Bedford & Sullivan televised holiday reunion back on track.  She's being asked primarily because she's Mike Sullivan's (Gallagher) daughter.

 

She ventures to the smallish town which just lives as a popular tourist shrine being the home grounds of Bedford & Sullivan.  Mike still lives there, a hermit in his home/recording studio which is namechecked as being as famous as Abbey Road. He and Quinn have a strained relationship, as Mike seems to have with everyone.

 

She meets Jason Bedford (Brett Dalton) again, whom she hasn't seen since they were teens, maybe.  They grew up together in the trenches of their fathers' shadows.  Jason is now his dad's manager, but Steve Bedford (Campbell) isn't much of an act without Mike Sullivan, and the bookings are drying up.  Plus, it's rather clear from the first moment that Steve forgets something that he's got Alzheimer's (we know how movies work, there, script... oh an older person is pointedly forgetful...yeah, we know this one).

 

So it's about Fathers and children strengthening their bonds, and about those crazy kids falling in love (but did they though?), and about making sure that those grumpy old goats become friends again, not just for the sake of the concert, their kids' careers, but for their own well-being.

 

The romance sub-plot, which tries to shoe-in Hallmark favourites like a decorating montage or Christmas tree shopping, is the worst part of this.  I like how Jason and Quinn relate to each other as old friends with a shared background, and they could have done that with trying to make it so Christmas-cliche.  Dalton and Mumford are both great, but they didn't really have much of a romantic spark.  They had real friend chemistry.

Conversely their relationships with the senior members of their families, and the idea to cross pollinate (where Quinn works on getting Steve to the concert, and Jason works on getting Mike to the concert) works so incredibly well.  Particularly Quinn's relationship with Mike is a standout and all the appropriate, mature feels are there, without taking any shortcuts.  But obviously the show is about Campbell and Gallagher, and the two are so dynamic together.  Campbell is charming and gregarious while Gallagher plays Mike as holding on to something (his authenticity) so dearly it costs him everything.  Campbell entertains while Gallagher is the dramatic heavy hitter, but they both get a chance to switch hit. 

 

I only wish this were a film with better production values, elevated out of the Hallmark generic ghetto.  Stylistically it doesn't do anything flashy, so it's up to the wonderful cast solely to elevate it, which they do.  But a 2 or 3 million more and you would have a real movie, something that would fit beyond the pale.  It's quite good for what it is, but you can so easily see where, and how, it could have been better.

 

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Five-Star Christmas (2020, d. Christie Will Wolf - Hallmark) was never something on my list, but I stumbled into an airing a few minutes in and I was, frankly, quite impressed with the family dynamic of the cast.  I'm always impressed when performers in these things actually have that sibling feeling, the over-familiarity but with a bit of lingering animosity, and a playfulness that intones history.  This cast had that between Lucy (Bethany Joy Lenz), Will (Blair Penner), and Amber (Grace Beedle), as well as Will's wife Suzanne (Barbara Patrick) who joins in just that half-bit out-of-step with the rest of them.

They're all gathered, along with Grandpa Walter (Jay Brazeu), at their family home to find that widower father Ted Ralston (Robert Wisden) has transformed the spacious ranch home into a bed-and-breakfast.  The renovations were more expensive than he had anticipated and he has been struggling to book guests.  He figures his savings have only a couple months to hold out before the place folds.  The kids, already reeling from their home's transformation are doubly worried that their family home might go up for sale.  People in these cheapo holiday romances are always so overly attached to their family home.  People need to learn to fuckin' relax and detach.

Anyway, after all the familial anxiety and hullaballoo around that news, they have word that a famous(?) travel writer is in town (where there are a couple other competing establishments they could be visiting) when suddenly a car rolls up with with a flat tire.  It's Beth Thompson (Laura Soltis) who shares the same initials as the travel writer ( nobody knows what they look like, because we find out later they're actually a collective of individuals writing under the same pseudonym).  Soooo, Lucy, suddenly improvising that she's the hotel manager, invites Beth to stay, and quickly informs the family that they need to act as staff and guests in order to make the B&B look busier and more established.  Will and Suzanne act as erudite, travelers, Amber takes a stab at being the cook, and Grandpa is the desk clerk.  

They fawn and hustle for Beth's benefit (event though it's absolutely clear that Beth is not the review) and it's all B-grade farce, but for Hallmark it works.  Meanwhile another guest arrives in the form of big, brawny geologist Jake Finlay (Victor Webster).  Jake and Lucy hit it off instantly and over a few days and nights the line between guest and host has disappeared.  Also maternal Grandma Margo shows up and is instantly wants in on the fun of deceiving the guests, posing as an uppercrust lady with a German? accent.  Margo's delightful.

There's some sloppy 70's sitcom hijinks, a bunch of the usual Hallmark Christmas cliches, but also a few above grade scenes, like a genuinely romantic late-night gab-fest over a fire pit between Jake and Lucy, and later a tidy callback to their in joke as Jake makes a grand gesture, embarassing himself in a very public space (obviously after the complication happened whereby both of their deceptions were revealed).  So it's sweet romance all around as even Dad and Beth get some more time together... and it's rare that Hallmark handles the senior romance with anything less than a bludgeon.

What I took from this, though, is that Bethany Joy Lenz is a goddamn delight.  There are a few other bright, quirky, charismatic leads in the Hallmark stable, but none of them manage to navigate the comedy, drama and melodrama quite as adeptly nor as enthusiastically as Lenz.  She's just both feet on the ground and hoisting the whole production up on her shoulders. I've only seen two of her efforts (I'll get to Unexpected Christmas tomorrow) but I'm ready to declare her Hallmark's best lead actress.  Her past and future films will be on my "must watch" lists to come.  

The whole cast here comes together and delivers a well-above average Hallmarkie. It's still ridiculous but it uses that ridiculousness for comedy.  It's not trying to pull this scenario off as if it were something legit, it's just a romcom.  Hallmark is still kind of new at the com-part of romcoms so we'll forgive them a few growing pains.  By no means a must watch, but enjoyable nonetheless.