It's too soon for Xmas...but I wish it was Xmas today

 When I was a kid, of course I was into Christmas.  Unless something miserable happened to you to create a negative association of Christmas (like your parents got separated on Christmas, or your parents accidentally took a trip without you on Christmas, or any of the many other premises for a Christmas movie) - or, of course, you're of a different religion -- you're generally into Christmas as a kid.  Some people just get wrapped up in anticipating Christmas as they get older, while others - like me - lose their enthusiasm for it.  

As a teen, I felt anxious about Christmas gifting.  It seemed so obligatory, rather than of any genuine sentiment.  Christmas day, I just preferred to sleep in than get up and do the presents thing.  In adulthood, I had a sort of aimlessness around Christmas, an even deeper disconnect.  Again there were expectations for Christmas that were perhaps just in my head, but made me want to disengage rather than celebrate.  

After getting married I started joining my wife's extended family for their Christmas gathering which was big and festive and perhaps even a little excessive, but with its own traditions and fun.  It's certainly something I look forward to, but I also felt a bit guilty for not spending it with my own extended family.  Truth was, what I enjoyed most about the Christmas season was time off.  Christmas day was kind of manic, with having to hold one kid off on opening presents until the other one returned from his other Christmas, and setting up zoom calls, and car rentals, and dress up, and travel.  There's not really a sense of calm to Christmas, which has only further contributed to a sense of anxiety leading into Christmas.

But last year, with COVID forcing everyone to stay home, Christmas changed for me.  With little else to do, it was something different to look forward to.  I went out and bought more Christmas lights, tripling the amount we already had.  I was actively looking for Christmas movies to just distract me from thinking about the future.  We would walk the dog on differing circuitous routes to find different Christmas light displays. Christmas, rather than causing anxiety, instead became a refuge from my anxiety, and that has caused a dramatic shift in me this year.

Hallmark had a new strategy  of airing  their Christmas romance movies all year, even introducing new ones once or twice a months, but they started their big "Countdown to Christmas" on or about October 24 this year, which I agree, was way too soon.  But by November 1, I was ready to just start getting into it.  As we've seen I've already started watching the Hallmarkies, and pre-planning which others I want to watch, setting up the DVR to record them.  The first weekend of November was unseasonably warm so I took the time to put up the Christmas lights on the house, and then set the timer run for 2 hours after dusk.  I wasn't the only one in the neighborhood, but definitely one of very few.  We've been walking the dog and I've been excitedly pointing out new additions to the Christmas lights club.  My Christmas shopping is nearing completion. I found some Gluten-Free Christmas Pudding at the British shoppe.  I've been adding SO many songs to my Christmas Playlist (as well as aiding in the construction of a playlist for GAK's Exploding Head Movies radio progrum ). I'm mentally prepping for doing some baking very soon.

And, of course, I'm getting a steady diet of  Christmas content:

I've lost track of which Hallmark movie I watched and when.  They've been cranking them out three per week for the past month, and the generic naming, at best tangentially related to the story, make them direly unmemorable. I think, I may have watched THE SANTA STAKEOUT (2021, d. Peter Benson) after Christmas Sail but before Crashing Through The Snow but I really don't recall.  It was certainly a debate when I was doing my last "A Toast To HallmarKent" whether to do ...Stakeout or Crashing... but I chose the latter because I genuinely loved it.  ...Stakeout was hot garbage.

 

I'm not even exaggerating when I say it took me no less than six sittings to get through this movie.  From the opening moments I detested it. It starts with Tamera Mowry-Housley and Paul Green as antagonistic police detectives...he's supposed to be the shabby one with no decorum, while she's the keener rookie, but they seem like children, pre-teen rivals in middle school, both sucking up to the Captain... who, by the way, is retiring but needs them to solve this last case of a series of fine art robberies before he can leave (I don't know that that's how retirement works).  He puts these two seemingly incompatible people together on the case, where they have to cohabitate and pose as a couple as they stakeout their neighbour yadda yadda yadda they solve the case and fall in love I guess.

This movie is such a bummer.  Green is leaning into a comedic persona that isn't on the page, while Mowry-Housley seems like a fish out of water in the role.  As far as procedural goes, this certainly isn't The Wire.  In fact, it seems doubtful that the person who wrote this script has even seen The Wire or any sort of stakeout movie that isn't on Hallmark or Lifetime channels.  It's just shite detective work, is what I'm saying.  The "mystery" of the film is garbage. There's only one legit comedic moment here (a fun slow-mo entrance, executed decently), despite the lighter tone it's stubby little arms are reaching for. The romance never feels particularly romantic, nor earned given the antagonism they start with, and the connection these two should be making is as work partners: mutual respect, not love.

The biggest bummer is the chief suspect is played by Joe Pantoliano.  Occasionally one understands how certain character or bigger name actors wind up in these Hallmark projects.  This one is the biggest mystery of the movie.  Joey Pants just sleepwalks through this with a half-smile on his face and a look of regret in his eyes.  Hope the money was good.

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Meanwhile, over on Netflix...uh oh, BIG MOUTH is back for a 5th season.  We're talkin' the next phase of pre-teen pubescence and a whole lotta inappropriateness.  The Hormone Monsters are back, along with the Shame Wizard and Depression Kitty, and now there's Love Bugs that turn into Hate Worms and back again.  There's confusion over sexual identity, petty resentments, unrequited loves, and bad breakups. There's genitals, and more genitals, and pubes, and more genitals, and endless talk about genitals.  And they feed Maya Rudolph more alliterative "B" words to bounce around with. And Coach Steve calls waitresses "restaurant mommies".

 

In other words, all the outlandish shit we've come to expect from Big Mouth

But what's all this got to do with Christmas?  Well, episode 8 is actually "A Very Big Mouth Christmas" special.  It's a half-hour holiday-themed anthology hosted by puppet versions of the Hormone Monsters Maury and Connie as they get ready for a party that never really takes off (Shame Wizard and Rick also make an appearance in puppet form).  

 

In "Jessi's First Christmas", Connie tells Jessi a very warped version of the Nativity that stars the cast of characters from Big Mouth.  It's okay, but much of the comedy is a little expected, and it's perhaps too tied into Jessi's story from season 5, where she's feeling anxious about her new stepmom-to-be and the birth of her impending sibling.  This is in contrast to the absolute lack of connection to Big Mouth at all in the follow-up tale "The 400-Year-Old Virgins".  Here we head to the North Pole where the elves, diligently working at prepping for Christmas, spy Santa and the Mrs. getting it on.  Following this discovery, the elves have a sexual awakening and Christmas is kind of ruined.  As promised by puppet Maury, we get to see Santa's dick, a lot sooner than expected.  It's all many kinds of wrong. Just really, really wrong.  So wrong I'm not sure if its even funny.

"Mira-kill on 34th Street" gives us the reverse John Wick-ian origins of Jay's dog, featuring Ludacris ("Featuring Ludacris" is the name of the dog).  In it the dog's owner is murdered and the dog goes on a bloody revenge spree.  The animation takes on a much more stylized aesthetic for the action heavy spectacle. It's cute. In "The Little Cummer Boy" Andrew, fed up with Hanukkah, has his wish come true of being Christian so that he can celebrate Christmas.  It all seems great until Andrew goes to masturbate at the end of the day and learns that it's considered a sin, and he goes to a Hell of his own imagining.  Funny segment with an eye-rollingly crude rendition of Deck The Halls.

 

In "Snowmom", latchkey kid Lola is alone at Christmas yet again, but she makes a magical snowmom to spend a wonderful day with.  Told in the same animated style as Community's "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas", this brief segment lacks any of the typical crudeness and toes a line between laughing at Lola and sympathizing with her (a line the show constantly dances around).  It's kind of sweet actually.   "Vader Johan" finds the Swedish twins relating the tale of their native Christmas customs, visualized in a sort of paper-cutout with watercolour 2-dimensional style to accentuate the creepiness.  It's a humorous satire of the Krampus and other similar horrifying holiday legends from Europe. Good stuff.  

The final segment, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being Santa", Santa starts to question his belief in himself, but his crisis of faith intersects with Featuring Ludacris revenge tale where the two team up to take on the last of the Russian mafia, ending with Santa laying dead in a gutter.

 

It's a vulgar, often uncomfortable, frequently hilarious special that shouldn't become a seasonal rewatch, but, you know, just might.  Puppet Connie, Maury and Rick in the framing sequences are so delightful. (Connie: "Look at my barf, it's so cute, all pipe cleaners and buttons...")  I can't in good conscience recommend it, but I also can't recommend it enough?

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 If my ventures into Hallmark this year so far have provided any sort of insight it's that they are definitely trying something different.  Gone are the plethora oh so painfully enjoyable Hallmark Christmas Movie Drinking Game cliches, in are attempts at subverting those cliches and creating a more believable reality in these movies.  Some of the films are opening with real-world songs, and even an opening credits sequence.  There's less paint-by-numbers sensibility, so the familiar beats of big city girl returns to small town to find the piece of her life that was missing and having lots of hot chocolate and a snowball fight and buying a christmas tree and baking cookies along the way...well, those seem to be somewhat gone.   

As I've seen with Christmas Sail and Crashing Through The Snow, there's the possibility of Hallmark movies now being good viewing and not just good-for-a-Hallmark viewing.   But I suspect that by abandoning the formulae, for the most part what we'll be seeing is just a lot of bad movies that are missing the cliche drinking game fun (for the ironic crowd) or the familiar feels (for the earnest viewing crowd).

So we have NEXT STOP, CHRISTMAS (2021, d. Dustin Rikert), which is a Hallmark time-travel story which features Christopher Lloyd and Lea Thompson, but otherwise has zero connection to Back To The Future.

In this, surgeon Angie (Lyndsy Fonseca) has a sudden encounter with her childhood best friend Ben (Chandler Massey) at a New York bar.  She's also reminded of the guy whose proposal she turned down 10 years ago, Tyler (Eric Freeman), as he's now a famous sports broadcaster whose images is plastered everywhere.  Trying to catch a late train from Manhattan to Yonkers, she's called over to a weird wooden booth where inside a charming Christopher Lloyd-like character with a twinkle in his eye (played by Lloyd, of course), sells her the train ticket that she needs.  On the train she falls asleep, only to immediately awaken and find herself alone on a very cool, old timey train, the only other person a Christopher Lloyd-like character who insists he's a different Christopher Lloyd-like character than the other one.  He tells her she's on a special journey, but in order for her to use her return ticket, well, she needs to figure that out.  

She finds herself 10 years in the past, back with Tyler, heading home for Christmas.  This time, she wonders, perhaps she needs to accept his proposal...?  There's really no rules to this, and it's weird, because we're never convinces that accepting his proposal is even remotely what she wants.  But when she does, it's not enough to get the return ticket home.  Meanwhile Ben is there and they are best friends again and all is crazy good between them, or so it seems.  Also her Mom and Dad are still together, but she's more keenly aware that they're drifting apart, and works hard with her big sister (in the midst of her own baby-making issues that Angie was oblivious to last time around) to bring them back together.  One of these things has to be the key to her returning home.  As she solves each of these relationships in her heart, she visits again with the Lloyd-on-the-train who says kindly but cryptic things to her and sends her back on her way.

Once resolved, because of course it's got to be about the fact that her and Ben should be together (because guys and gals just *cannot* be friends...we'll get back to this hoary trope in Boyfriends of Christmas Past shortly) she returns back to her time to find that, hey, her parents are still together and that her and Ben have been a couple for ten years...what?  There's no logic to this ending at all.  There's no rules to the time travel they present here (is it magic, science, or just a dream?).  The story dances around the obvious to a painful degree and doesn't do so with half the fun had it contained all the usual cliched Hallmark bits to drink to.

The performances are all pretty good, actually, with Fonesca being a very, very charming lead, and handling all the "what the's" and general confusion with a good comedic aplomb.  But the script and the dialogue is all pretty rough, first draft type stuff that even good acting can't save.  And the ending points out the flagrant lack of thought put into their time trave conceit, which any sci-fi ner would agree is unforgivable.

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Pivoting back to Neflix again for LOVE HARD, their first new Christmas/holiday program for this year.  It's also a mid-budget Christmas Rom-Com.  As such tt has some big shoes to fill stepping into this position, considering last year's entry in this realm was Holidate, which I watched twice last year and rewatched again this year.  It will be a holiday staple.

Love Hard, while cute, unfortunately doesn't hold up to that same high standard. 
Is it a good movie? Enh, probably not.
Did I enjoy a lot of it? Sure did.

There's a lot of uninspired, well, everything in this movie, and much of it relies completely on "movie logic" (which is to say things happen because the movie needs them to not because it makes sense for the characters). The story finds Nina Dobrov as Natalie striking out in the dating app scene in LA, being pushed to expand her boundaries, and finding a match with a handsome-looking Josh (Jimmy O. Yang) out in Lake Placid, NY.  After a few weeks talking and bonding she decides to head out to his home, only to find that Josh used another dude's picture (Never Have I Ever's resident stud, Darren Barnet) for his own.  It's a catfish.  Through circumstances she spies the real guy from the pictures, Tag, and Josh agrees to help her meet him.  The point being that she has to lie and change herself to be with Tag, because she isn't really his type, and ultimately learns that Josh is the same guy she was attracted to cerebrally over the phone, and much more her speed.  There's really no good answer here to this...it's all awkward.

It's kind of annoying that the relationship between Josh and Natalie starts because of a text conversation around whether Die Hard or Love,Actually (the two films which smash together to create this film's nonsensical, sub-Hallmark-level-forgettable title) is the best Christmas movie... is so banal and, frankly, amateurish and lazy. And there's more where that came from (the film literally ends with a grandma making a dick-pic joke). There's extensive rehashing of how rape-y "Baby It's Cold Outside" is, but it actually leads to a charming new rendition that gives Key and Peele's take on the material a run for its money.

That all said, the cast, particularly leads Nina Dobrev snd Jimmy O. Yang, sell every awkwardly scripted moment of this movie. Yang certainly delivers in selling Josh's unlucky-in-love-for-obvious-reasons-but-actually-has-something-more-going-on-underneath, and Dobrev sells junior-grade Carrie Bradshaw rip-off Natalie's subversive desires as well as her shallowness without ever being unlikable. She's game for the physical comedy and she sells a sense of inner monologue in her eyes.

Love Hard does make a point that a type of Catfishing kind of happens just as much in person as it does online, that we often try to present a version of ourselves who doesn't really exist. The point here is that being honest with someone else means first being honest with yourself. Just wish someone had been honest with the script writers and asked them to take another pass at it.

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Swinging back over to Hallmark once more, we have Boyfriends of Christmas Past, yet another riff on Dickins' A Christmas Carol but this time it's about a woman who is oblivious to the romantic affection her best friend has for her, so her ex-boyfriends (who aren't dead) come and haunt her in the night, replaying the end of each of their relationships to try and teach her a lesson maybe.

Again it's a Hallmark aiming for a more ambitious story.  Catherine Haena Kim plays Lauren, a successful whatever who is just trying to find inspiration for this thing at work which is due before a presentation which takes place on Christmas Eve, like so many professional things do in these movies but almost never in real life.  This work-work-work focus is frustrating for her best friend Nate (the handsome Raymond Ablack) as he wants her to slow down with him and enjoy the holidays together (as he works up the courage to say he wants to do this in a "more than friends" way).  The deal here is  Lauren kind of takes him for granted.

 

The Jacob Marley is her dopey high-school skater boyfriend who warns her of the visitations.  She looks him up on line and looks like he grew up and has a dopey, happy life and family. The next day, she's visited by her guitar-playing college boyfriend Jake (the extremely handsome and suave Kara Kaira).  At Christmas he says he loves her and she freaks and breaks up with him.

 

The next visit is with her post-college romance, with the successful Henry (Ish Morris).  He brings up the idea for her to move in with him at a Christmas party they're throwing, and she dumps him.  A couple days later (after some stuff gets contentious with Nate) in comes Logan (Jon McLaren) who reminds her that when he asked her to marry her while on a Christmas hiking retreat , she literally pushed him away...on a zipline.  

 

After Nate confesses his feelings in a fit of frustration and giving up, Lauren is visited by all four "ghosts" who take her to the future to see Nate getting engaged to the cute woman who started helping out at the community center.  Lauren gets jealous, as well as feels guilty and realizes in the middle of her pitch meeting and runs out, totally getting fired at Christmas, to confess her love for Nate, and all is happy.

Except is it? Seriously, why can't Hallmark just let friends be friends...OR actually deal with the awkwardness that occurs when one friend likes/loves their other friend romantically but it's not reciprocated.  I've been on both ends of that and it's not fun, but it's real.  Here, there is no romantic chemistry between Kim and Ablack, so when she "finally" realizes she loves him, it feels less like a true romantic awakening and more of a fearful "oh shit, I'm going to lose him" reaction. 

 

It's like these "ghosts" (of people who aren't dead) are trying to teach her a lesson, but it's a lesson she's already been learning.  She has residual issues around romantic partnerships because of her mom leaving her dad (the wonderful, but underutilized Paul Sun-Hyung Lee) at Christmas, and then all these guys wanting to accelerate their relationships at Christmas (but each time she's already growing, from love, to living together, to getting engaged) which is clearly triggering to her.  She doesn't really need ghosts for this realization.  But if we're following the trajectory, when Nate proposes in the "One Year Later" scene, all I can think is we're heading towards a "runaway bride" situation, because that's the pattern this script presents.  Poor Nate.

But I want to see that happen.

 

This movie isn't bad, but it's not well thought through. It's trying to be cute and playful not realizing that it's saying more than it thinks it is, but not making the point it's trying to.  The cast is good, but none of the relationships delivered much of the romantic feels that I think they were going for.  The lighting in this is also pretty bad, like, noticeably so.  I think it was intentional to try and give it a different, less polished look than the typical Hallmark but it only succeeded in making it look cheaper.

 

The Korean feast the Kim family eats looks exceptionally delicious though.

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Some people be next-level angry about the new Home Alone legasequel, just flipping irate, as if somehow any additional Home Alone product could be any more damaging to the John Hughes original than the three non-Macaulay sequels that were cranked out from 1997 to 2012.  

Now I kind of know how non-Star Wars nerds feel about the Star Wars nerds getting all upset about something, because I have so little invested in Home Alone, so little attachment to it as a property, that nothing about Home Sweet Home Alone bothers me, at least from a series standpoint.

As a movie, as entertainment, this was fine. Just...fine.  Nothing offensive, nothing to celebrate.  It's passably entertaining, occasionally amusing, and reaches to tug at some genuine but someone's iced down the path there so they keep slipping and can't quite reach them.

It's kinder, though certainly not gentler nor as mean-spirited as the original, but in giving us plenty of sympathy towards the accidental, desperate burglars in the form of Rob Delaney and Ellie Kemper, the slapstick booby traps don't pack the same kind of comedic catharsis.  Jo Jo Rabbit's Archie Yates is the little shit-disturber in this one, and he's just as much a pill as Kevin McAllister.  Does he learn any lessons, though?  Hard to say.

 The movie works best up until the stunt gags start happening, surprisingly enough. If it improves upon the original, it's only in the plausibility of the set-up for leaving the child home alone.

The film is stacked with comedic players though asking very little of them comedically (did Andy Daly or Chris Parnell have more than a line of dialogue each?) I'm sure somewhere there's an unnecessary 2 hour cut with a lot of off-script riffing, but mercifully they trimmed this down to a fairly brisk 90 minutes. Maybe let's see some outtakes though?

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One more BizHallmarkie, then we'll put this perhaps ill-advised post to bed.

Open By Christmas is, by Hallmark standards, a good looking movie.  There's some noticeably good set decoration, and wardrobe department kind of hit it out of the park.  But the story...oh, that main story just made me sad, sad, sad.

The central story, finds Alison Sweeney's Nicky discovering a heretofore unseen romantic Christmas card from her high school days, and actively seeking out the anonymous sender with a little flutter of hope that maybe there's a bit of love still there to be had.  There is no resolution to this storyline that would make me happy, and the one we get is damn near worst case scenario.  Her approaching random people she went to school with to try and suss out whether it was they who had feelings for her is so cringe...and not cringe comedy, just cringe. Smacks of desperation.  High School was 28 years ago, Nicky, let it go (sorry..ahem...22 years ago because Nicky is only 38...sure). Don't look for love in the past... that's kind of the worst thing you can do.

What works in this film is the friendship between Sweeney and Erica Durance...unlike most of these BizHallmarkies where the "best friend" is cast aside the moment a man enters the picture, here the real relationship of the piece is their friendship. (You can make a drinking game for this one out of how often they tell each other "I love you").  But Durance's Simone encouraging Nicky to pursue this mystery, and not out of fun but out of some potential for romance...? You"re being a bad friend Simone. And Nicky's Mom...? Not you too. Bad friend! Bad mom!

Simone has her own B-plot which revolves around her depression over her son leaving home... in 3 years! ... and other stuff, like her future mother-in-law visiting and the mystery surprise her boyfriend has cooked up for her (but he's not even hinting at a surprise so it just seems like he's neglecting her). It was a more satisfying storyline, at least in comparison.

The romantic interest for Nicky is a real dud, and it's obvious in their very first scene together that the film is setting him up as him being the card sender.  It's all a little sketchy how it plays out.  This real estate guy with a dull sense of humour and no real personality to speak of just kind of latches onto her and drags her around, and at one point, mansplains her behavior to her... I really don't see the attraction between them except two lonely people in their mid-to-late 40's pretending they're in their late 30's and acting like they're still awkward high school nerds.  Nicky is now a big NYC something-or-other, and seems to have forged a her own path in life, but she's hung up on her high school experience...and we can only intuit that she's been single for years, and this obviously has left her with very low expectations. It's kind of sad in the script for this, we don't really get to know Nicky for who she is today, only for her high school traumas and baggage....so hey, maybe Nicky is a real dud too?

This one features the most cosiest living room set I've seen on TV this side of the Fireplace Channel.  It's got low ceiling and wood panelling and a real wood burning fireplace, natural light and it's just really comfy with full on Christmassy-vibe (the wife tells me the furniture was too large and crowding the room, but don't harsh my decor buzz, babe).  I also liked the ample amount of drinking in this one.  As I said, Hallmark is in it to win it this year, and I just enjoyed clocking how often people were reaching for wine and such.  So much more natural, and realistic than hanging out with hot chocolate.

Again, you can tell Hallmark is trying to do something decidedly different this year, and this one finds the A-plot and B-plot sharing almost equal amount of time, effectively making Sweeney and Durance co-leads (despite what the poster may be showing).  I wish they had focused more on Nicky's character development, on having her work through her past trauma and let go. I wish the dude hadn't been "the dude" and that she either never did find out who wrote the card or if she did it was someone who wasn't right for her, but that there was a dude who was.  I dunno, it could have played out so much better.  I get what they were going for but it really didn't work.  And the ending's double kiss pull-out... ew.