T&K's XMas (2021) Advent Calendar: Day 23 - Dashing Home for Christmas

A Toast to HallmarKent: Dashing Home for Christmas - 2020, d. Amy Force - CityTV

The Draw: 

Because I'm a glutton for punishment. I've got a backlog of Hallmarkies that I *could* write about but when I'm doing "A Toast to..." I basically need to either make notes while watching or watch the whole thing again.  I just don't feel like watching anything I've seen again.  

I've come down with my traditional "I'm on vacation now" illness, so I'm laying in bed with a laptop to write on and my phone to watch the movie and so, here I go with some off-brand, Canadian-made, holiday romance, chosen only at random in as much as the picture featuring the lead couple showed TTC streetcars in the background so that was my deciding factor.

HERstory: 
Establishing shots of Toronto.  Many, many, many establishing shots of Toronto.  Establishing shots with heavy, heavy snowfall.  So are we to assume this is Toronto and it's snowing heavily?  You'd think so, right? Wait for it...

Management consultant Emily is trying to get her client to see that whatever spreadsheets she's presenting and jargon she's spewing is the right choice but that maybe thinking about it over the holdays is for the best.  At this point, we're not exactly clear as the viewer that she is not this man's employee.  It's subtle.  But Emily actress Paniz Zade is not pulling off the corporate speak very convincingly (mainly because it's not well written).  Anyway, the point of this is less the business talking and more that she's running late for her flight.  She mentions that she's made it from downtown Manhattan to her seat in less than 30 minutes before, but I don't think she's ever tried to make it from Front Street in Toronto to Pearson in the same amount of time...that is unless she's flying out of the Island Airport at which point she might be okay.  There is inclement weather that is troubling her though, and her rideshare is waiting outside for her.  So, of course, with these three things (being late for flight, ride share waiting, and weather troubles) she stops to call her family to tell her she's on her way.  Precious minutes, Emily!  Call them from the car, or the airport or ANY OTHER TIME!

Outside, where it's kind of sunny (you can see the cloudy blue sky in the reflection of the building) and not the heavy snow flurries the establishing shots presented, Emily has her jacket wide open, no gloves or hat, like it's, say, mid-springtime in, looks like Barrie, despite all the Christmas decorations and the Santa around the front of the building.  She mindlessly runs into a woman carrying presents on the snowless sidewalk and helps her pick them up.  She donates some money to the charity Santa to show she's a good person deep down, and she rushes to the edge of the sidewalk where, Simon, a handsome, towheaded, bespectacled man of appropriate romantic age in a light jacket and not-jaunty-enough scarf is totally in her way with his many many bags.  Why Emily cannot negotiate around his bags on the hundreds of surrounding meters of sidewalk is unclear.  Her ride share drives past (do they do that?  0-stars for that driver.  Shit.) and she steps into the street with her wheely bag, only to accidentally trip over it and Simon comes to her rescue, ish.  He feels bad, and offers her a ride in his car share.  

Smash cut to the now very snowy highway establishing shot, but then cut to the interior of the car which has superimposed background scenes of downtown Toronto with heavy digital snow.  So what is it, are they on the highway, or are they downtown? Simon talks Emily's ear off as Emily tries to ignore him while texting her family.  Rude much?  Emily apologizes, he's in sales and likes to talk, so he decides to bug the driver who has to negotiate the messy snowy Toronto terrain with Toronto's notoriously aggressive drivers, but hey, what does he really need to concentrate on?

At the airport, where it's stopped snowing again, Emily gets pulled aside for additional security check.  The security lady doesn't like Emily's attitude and takes seeming great pleasure in sifting through all her things and messing up her neat packaging job.  Emily, hurredly repacks and knocks her wallet on the floor, and doesn't notice.  Bound to be a problem.

Emily gets to boarding (which seems to be the front of an office building, but I digress) and Simon is right behind her (it's not a long line, just the two of them).  Emily finds that her premium class seat was given away while she was in security and she's only offered a middle seat which she is none-too-pleased with (jeez, Emily, you're in a rush, take what you can get) and she starts to get all particular with the lady checking her in.  Simon offers to exchange his aisle seat for her middle seat since he feels guilty about his luggage getting in her way, or whatever.  Okay, I get that she was delayed by security, but Simon arrives behind her in line for check-in... they got to the airport, for the same flight (to Seattle apparently) at the same time. So why does he arrive behind her in line.  Maybe he had a huge problem with his many bags of luggage? Or perhaps needed to take a big ol' poopy? Who knows, just weird.  Emily offers to buy Simon a drink on the plane.

All Seattle flights are being diverted to Butte, Montana due to a Polar Vortex. Looking at a map, the flight path from Toronto to Seattle... yeah, Butte is on the way.  Checks out.  In the holding pen, Emily is the last to find a seat, because she was probably being a nuisance to some poor flight staff about when they were taking off again.  She finds a seat next to Simon (after he moves his many bags). He again tries to engage in small talk but she just wants to listen to music and do her spreadsheets (no XMas deadline as far as we know yet). But the flights are grounded for the night.  

At the hotel, Emily discovers her missing wallet, much to the delight of the desk clerk who really doesn't like Emily's attitude.  She releases her room, which Simon swoops in and takes up with the desk clerk completely swooning over our be-spectacled hunk.  Simon offers Emily to share the room, and the desk clerk is not pleased especially after she just upgraded the room for Simon to the Honeymoon Suite.  The porter expects a tip, and kind generous Simon, somehow, doesn't believe in tipping I guess as he just goes in the room leaving wallet-less Emily out there.  

While Simon is in the bathroom, Emily calls home, and of course the topic of conversation is about the cute guy she just has to spend the night with.  After the call she both checks Simon for a ring, and for a cute butt.  But in the bathroom, Simon has left a mess of things all over the place.  Toothpaste in the sink, splatter on the glass, toiletries everywhere.  Why the extra toilet paper is half unwrapped I do not know.   Emily, cleans up, then tries to run the shower but there's no hot water, and when she comes out of the bathroom she finds that Simon is in the Honeymoon Suite tub, the insinuation that he used up the hot water (really? What hotel has ever run out of hot water?)

Turns out both Emily and Simon are seasoned travelers for their jobs, but that doesn't explain why Simon has so much luggage.  Experienced travelers pack light.  Have you never seen Up In The Air? 

They have Honeymoon Suite chocolates (Hershey Kisses - it is Butte afterall) with champagne (out of big ol tumblers?) and have chit-chat about their holiday plans, relationship talk, and their family life (Simon has no siblings and dead parents so he spends Christmas with college buddies, Emily is visiting her parents and pregnant sister for XMas).  What I basically don't believe is that these two very attractive, seasoned road warriors don't just get it on for one fleeting night.

Like, 5:30 am Emily needs to run to see if she can catch an early flight because her sister's in labor, but the flight desk doesn't open until 6:30 am (it is Butte afterall), but the desk lady says given the ice outside that maybe no flights are taking off today, and suggests she go rent a car asap.  But without her wallet, no credit card or license, she's kind of stuck.  Emily gets a bit flirty with The Mr. Rental Car Agent and he decides he will help her out, but he cannot rent her a car without a valid driver's license.  He can rent her the car, just he needs *someone* with a valid license.  Enter Simon who agrees so long as he can play the tunes which is aggressive rock music which is like strike two for Simon.  Emily's sister calls, noting that her labor pains were a false alarm, but the call is taken over the car speakers where there's a little "Cute guy" talk before Emily frantically turns off the car speakers.

There's a moment on the drive where Simon says he's hot, Emily says she's still wearing her jacket.  "Good thing we're not dating, we're totally incompatible".  Uh, yeah, because people who run hot and people who run cold are such a terrible mix.  They have a quick stop to view the Greenscreen Rockies.  And... time check, I'm only HALF WAY THROUGH THIS FILM.  Are they going to play the 8-hour drive to Butte in real time?  

Oh, mygod, Simon's luggage is strapped to the roof of the car.  

I just realized that they had a choice between a compact or a passenger van, and Emily chose the compact?  I mean, when you're driving in the winter a compact isn't preferable, not the most sure-footed on winter highways.  Plus, the passenger van would have been good for Simon's luggage to be *not* exposed to the elements.

At a diner, Emily gets very picky about her meal...very, very picky.  Like, annoyingly picky, like, the-diner-staff-is-definitely-spitting-in-her-meal annoying.  Simon tips big to the waitress, so what was the deal at the hotel, Simon?

Caption: "450 miles to home."  Transactional Emily, and Sensitive, Aggressively Cheerfyl Simon both discover they love Christmas music.  Then they blow a tire.  Simon wants to call roadside assistance, but Emily changes out the spare.  Back on the road, Emily finds there is a once-a-day train that will get them home but they just missed it.  While inside, the rental is towed.  Emily is crushed.  But it's only December 23rd, so hey, all is not lost.  They can go to the hotel across the street and catch the train in the morning.

They get separate rooms at the hotel, and a loneliness montage plays over a hushed singing non-standard Christmas tune.  They meet cute in the hallway and go for a walk on "the cute little main street" which I think is just Queen Street East, definitely not "cute".  They find the only little patch of snow on the street and make snowballs, while Simon juts off for literally 30 seconds to throw out trash, only to return with a gift bag containing wine and snacks and sandwiches.  He says everything else is "closed for the holidays".  It's December 23rd.  Nothing should be closed for the holidays yet.  What kind of effing "small town Washington" is this that its shopping closes two days before Christmas?  It's not like it's even nighttime yet, it's still clearly daytime.  

Drinking their wine and eating their snacks and, as far as I can tell, whitebread and butter sandwiches, they bond over their love of the Muppet Movie and then a jazzy Christmas tune plays over a montage of them having fun, which ends with Simon getting a text saying that bro-Christmas-hang is off.   With his Christmas plans falling through Simon is bummed and calls it a night.  Emily's phone interrupts a mildly tipsy attempt at a kiss.

Emily's sister calls, and Emily realizes what a great guy Simon is, and mentions that it'll be Christmas Eve when she arrives and they haven't decorated the tree yet.  Mom on speakerphone basically invites Emily's travel companion over for Christmas, which, I mean, we all knew that's where this was heading from like, minute 10 all along, didn't we?

While waiting for the train, a man carrying Christmas gifts trips and spills them all.  Simon gets up to help, and say "wait here".  He disappears for 20 seconds, enough time for the guys to say to Emily "I don't know where you found him, but don't lose him."  Who just says that?  Anyway, Simon returns with a gift bag for the guy to carry the presents in.  Simon is just the master of disappearing for less than a minute and returning with needful things...or, well, gift bags.

The train is cancelled and everyone leaves the platform for the bus station.  A nice woman offers to change seats so that Emily and Simon can sit together (because, he's cute).  Simon leads a carolling on the bus, which isn't annoying at all, but some people seem into it.  With 20 minutes left, Emily reads a text from her boss about suggested headcount reductions for her client, and Simon, nice guy Simon, isn't very keen that Emily's job involves getting people fired.  He thinks it's a sign of a flawed character and gives her the cold shoulder.  

In Seattle, they say their goodbyes, but Emily, basically, is rejected by Simon, who is being so judgey about her job. After parting, sad Christmas music plays while Emily looks at photos her and Simon took on their journey together.  A pep talk from her sister tells her to turn around and tell the boy how she feels, surely he'll come around to knowing there's more to her than just her job.  She's actually a good sister.

Upon returning to bus station, she finds Simon walking around with gift bags (where does he keep getting those), and it turns out he's got all this luggage and stuff packed full of toys for the toy drive.  He's going to hand them out on Christmas to the kids.  Is that how Toy Drives work?   They talk, they kiss, she brings him home for Christmas, because he's her Christmas gift this year.

The Formulae:
Okay, I was pretty surprised to find this didn't really sit with the usual holiday romance formula, but instead was attempting a hybrid of Planes, Trains and Automobiles with Up In The Air on an extremely modest budget.

There's the looming Christmas deadline that Emily has, although it's just a bit of background noise that's not clarified until it really becomes a problem in the 20-minutes-to-go complication spot.  And yes, there's a 20-minutes-to-go complication. Sigh.

The leads are frequently (and prematurely) mistaken for a couple...at the hotel, at the train station, at the diner.

Oh, the almost-kiss that gets interrupted, this time by a cel phone.

Unformulae: 
I thought for a moment at the beginning when Emily donated money to the charity Santa that he would turn out to be a magical Santa, and that there would be silly Christmas magic, but nope.

At this stage I think there's been a few "gotta get home for Christmas" road movie romances (I believe this year's Time for X to Come Home for Christmas on Hallmark was a road movie) so it's not that unformulaic... but still not the most conventional of Christmas romances because there can't be any decorating montages, cookie-baking/flour fights in a kitchen, or Christmas tree shopping sequences.

True Calling?
Enh, close enough.  I wouldn't say Emily was just "dashing home real quick" though.  Especially since she left on December 21 which is like 3 days early for the big city girl to be going back to her...big city hometown.

The Rewind: 
When Emily and Simon meet out front of the office building, there are seemingly weird greenscreened shots with downtown Toronto backdrops behind them.  I was wondering why, when they clearly did some shooting in Toronto, they were greenscreening the backdrops.  It turns out they shot that scene in Barrie (which must be a newish building since I last lived in Barrie in the year 2000), so any wider screen sequence needed to have a bigger city backdrop than Barrie, Ontario.

Seriously, those sandwiches were just bread sandwiches. 

The Regulars:
Director Amy Force (sounds like a GI Joe name) is a recent upstart in the off-brand Christmas romance movie world with this, Christmas In the Rockies, and Christmas on 5th Avenue, in the past two years.

Paniz Zade is an Iranian-Canadian actress who has appeared in a few different off-brand holiday movies (including Christmas in the Rockies and Santa Squad).  She's got an appealing presence but I don't know that she ever quite finds the character of Emily in this, but it's not really her fault since the script doesn't give her a consistent thread to pull on.  The key to successful movies is heightening the characters so that they really go on a journey (not physically but emotionally).  By the end of this Emily is just sort of like "hey, I kind of like this guy" and he's sort of made her a little bit less self-involved as a person.  It's not a dramatic enough swing, it's too subtle.  I get that they didn't want her to be a raging bitch, as they seed in enough niceties to make her not a monster, but maybe that's what she needed to be, more of a monster, though with layers underneath that Simon brought out...?

They see fit to make Emily's family reflect Zade's diversity, somewhat, with her sister played by an Italian Canadian, her dad played by a Canadian actor of indeterminate descent, and her mother played by Valerie Buhagiar, the Maltese-Canadian actress who was the host of Showcase Review which was one of my prime venues for discovering a wider world of movies in my late teens and early 20's. Love her.  But given all that, Emily's family is clearly not the "Nichols" family.  I don't know why they couldn't have just tweaked the script... but I have to remember these are made for selling to Lifetime or other American networks where "foreign sounding last names" are off-putting ...or something.  

Adrian Spencer, who plays Simon plays a bit role in another off-brand holiday romance Christmas in London.  He is indeed handsome, but again, they don't really find the character in the script to really make him stand out.  He's a nice guy, he likes to talk, he's a generous person, but he needs more extremes.  A messy bathroom or bad taste in music doesn't really cut it.  The dead parents are one thing, but even that he seems over and accepting of (he's a "look on the bright side of life" kind of guy), but he seems to be getting sad about being the last man standing in his group of single friends... but not nearly sad enough.  He doesn't have enough soul to really connect with, he's just ... nice.  

How does it Hallmark? 
It's got all the cheap movie trappings of a Hallmark, but a mildly better story.  The performances needed more life to them, more humour (the characters "joke" with one another but it's pretty weak how they do it), more drama.  It's a better example of the off-brand movies, but very middle-of-the-road compared to a typical Hallmark.

How does it movie? 
I don't fault it for ambition, but they didn't have the budget to pull it off. 

Did I enjoy it... kind of, sort of.  There was enough terrible set decorating and weird wtf moments to be entertained, but it started feeling long in the tooth about halfway through, and the late stage "complication" was kind of bullshit.  I did like the reconciliation moment though... and then there was 4 unnecessary minutes of Simon at the Nichols house because they ran short on time.

What this movie really needed was some legit steaminess. Zade and Spencer make for a good looking duo, and it's hard to believe that given the situation they wouldn't be hitting it.  I know that's not what these Christmas holiday romances do, but that's really what this needed.  If you wanted to make it weird and awkward, how weird and awkward would it be had they hit it that first night in the Honeymoon Suite, then she gets up to leave, very early, and then needs his help with the car and they're stuck together actually, you know, having to find out about each other.  If this was a "supposed to be a one-night-stand but then becomes something more" story... that, like, quadrouples the interest factor. You need a complication?  Sex makes things complicated.  Letting Zade and Spencer introduce a lot of sexual tension and confusion into the mix would have made this ...well, not a real movie, but certainly a better one.  

How Does It Snow?  
Fakey fakey fake fake.  Real snow in establishing shots though.  Toronto was getting hit hard.