T&K's XMas (2022) Advent Calendar: Day 9 - It's Christmas, Carol

A Toast to HallmarKent 
2012, d. Michael Scott - Tubi

The Draw: Carrie Fisher, obviously.  Plus, I'm already in on two Christmas Carol-related movies this year, why not another?

HERstory: Carol Huffler is a real C*word. CEO? She's CEO of a publishing empire, yes, but the other C*word.  She cancels basically tells a Salvation Army Santa to fuck off, she cancels everyone's Christmas, she fires an passionate editor after making a plea to publish a manuscript (we don't publish books to read, we publish books to sell), and she doesn't allow Kendra, her senior editor, to have the transfer London where her boyfriend is moving.  She also doesn't want to see her ailing mother on Christmas ("she might not have many left" her caretaker tells Carol.  "Stick to your job description" she snaps back).

At an industry Christmas party (is that a thing?) Carol runs into her ex from 10 years ago, Bland...I mean Ben, the author of the very same novel she fired an editor for proposing they publish. It's a terse, fraught reunion, Carol storms off to the bathroom, where she encounters...Eve, the founder of her publishing company, who passed away (from getting hit by a bus) years ago.

Eve tells her she's there to help her to, well, stop being a total bitch. As she explains, she works for spiritual entities that oversee the balance of things.  "We call them the 'Board of Correctors'" she says, wryly (a pun only Carrie Fisher can sell).  As Carol storms out of the building, she winds up in 1985, and Eve guides her to her mom's job behind a department store counter.  Carol's reminded of her mom's motto (which clearly she forgot) : "Work to live, don't live to work". Point being, Carol grew up poor.

They debate the business that Eve started, since it almost failed...where Eve made a family out of it, Carol made an empire. "You died with integrity, and a mountain of debt, which I turned into a mountain of profit."  At a used bookstore in 1999, Carol meets Bland...Ben...Blend, and he asks her about what authors she likes (and she rhymes off Dickens, Hugo, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy...eliciting groans from my English major wife..clearly someone just did a Bing search on "best authors ever"). Smash cut to Blend and and Carol moving in together, and she gifts him a typewriter, which Eve points out encouraged him to pursue his dream.  Carol tries to be dismissive of this trip down memory lane, and then storms away, only to find she can't leave the trip.  She turns back up to a year or two later, when Carol and Blend argue over Carol's ambition to take Eve's company to the next level even if it means going over Eve's head and compromising her vision for the business, but also turns into a debate about Ben's ambition and Carol's distaste for being poor.  Blend walks away after past Carol says "I wish I never gave you that typewriter", but today's Carol says she regrets saying that...because if she had never given him the typewriter, they might still be together and then she wouldn't be where she is today." "Direly single, with no friends..."  Carol then jumps out a window.

Winding up in the present tense, Carol finally clues into this being...like... oh, what was that story...? (for such a supposed fan of Dickens, per the earlier scene, Carol should not be labouring this hard over recalling the title of one of the most famous stories in western culture).

They visit the employee's house who she fired earlier in the day, and Carol victim blames her for getting fired.  Then she sees her other employees at a bar drinking and plotting to quit en masse and start their own company.  Then they visit Carol's assistant Kendra who defends Carol to her boyfriend (Kendra's boyfrend is even more blah than Blend), and they get into a fight.  Kendra looks up to Carol, and is loyal to her and this causes division between them.  When Eve points out that Carol can change things for them, Carol asks "Why? Why should I?"  They stop off at Carol's mother's, where her caregiver gives her a present "from Carol" to make her happy (we later learn the gift was arranged by Kendra, but I thought the caregiver would have done it... I'm pretty sure the caregiver and Carol's mom are in a secret relationship. At one point Carol's mom tells her to go home and be with her family on Christmas, and she's like "Nah. I'm good here").  Eve and Crol visit Blend at his sister's (where Carol seems to learning for the first time that he had a sister), and Blend's sister tells him to fight for Carol if he still has feelings for her.  Clearly she's never met Carol, otherwise she'd be telling her brother to run far, far away.

Then blink, Carol's back home, sans Eve.  She looks up "A Christmas Carol" (on "Info Traveler") to find out what happens next.... It's fucking "A Christmas Carol", Carol, how do you not know what comes next? Maybe the stupedest thing I've seen in a movie in a long time.  Eve fakes her out with a "creepy" descent down the staircase in a dark cloak (Carrie Fisher trying to bring some sense of energy to this direly boring teleplay), then takes her to a series of possible futures.  First to Carol and Blend's big happy family, then to her funeral where only Kendra shows up (acting just like her, and looking not too dissimilar to now, implying that if Carol doesn't change her ways, she dies soon?).  She asks if there's a door number 3 and Eve tells her it's up to her and just walks away.  

Carol wakes up and finds Blend's manuscript in her mail slot, and she reads it. Then goes to fired editor's place to give her presents for the kids and to apologize for her ...well, everything... and gets the door slammed in her face at least 3 times, but makes amends and gets her editor back.  At the office, the revolution is about to begin but Carol. has set up a breakfast buffet, profit sharing documents, and 2 weeks paid Christmas vacation.  But it's still bloody Christmas morning... send.them.home.lady!  She gives Kendra a 1 year paid sabbatical, and then runs off to spend time with her mom, then runs off to Blend and they...I don't actually know what happened in the final minutes...and I'll tells you why...in a minute.  BUT...how...HOW!? How, on Christmas day, did Carol manage to 1) read an entire manuscript, 2) go shopping for gifts to woo the fired editor, 3) draft up an entire profit sharing/ownership restructuring document, 4) arrange a breakfast buffet... how did she do all this?  Jewish lawyers and catering?  I'm just wondering how she got through a whole manuscript before noon.  She wakes up and it's light outside, so in NYC in late December that's post-7am.  To fit this timeline she'd had to have read the entire manuscript in about 45 minutes.  Good thing she woke up with PRISTINE makeup applied and perfectly unmussed hair.

The Formulae: It's the Christmas Carol formulae.  No Hallmark cliches.

Unformulae: Oh, it does not break formulae, much, except instead of three ghosts, it's just the one, for max Carrie Fisher time. Hard to argue the value add with that change.

True Calling? It's a fun play on the traditional title, but the movie isn't as fun as the title suggests.

The Rewind: Oh. my. god. In the last five or so minutes, when Carol's just a girl, standing at her ex-boyfriend's sister's door, something about the lighting really highlighted Emmanuelle Vaugiers eyebrows, and...wow, her esthetician did her rrrreeeal dirty...and it's immortalized on film.  Once we noticed we couldn't stop staring and then we just started laughing, uncontrollably for minutes straight, because the camera was pretty much fixated, in close-up, on Carol...and those Jon Waters' moustaches over each eye.

So I went back and ...yeah, her eyebrows are like that the whole movie, I guess her hair framed her face differently through the rest of the film.  It would have been great if her eyebrows were different in the ghost trips.

The Regulars: Susan Hogan, who is a hardcore Hallmarkie staple for the past decade, plays yet another Mom. The guys of this film are way too bland for Hallmark, but Geoff Gustafson has a tiny part in this and he turned up as recently in Three Wise Men and a Baby (and a thousand others).  Rebecca Davis and Patti Allen, both in small roles here as two of the three rebelling employee crew, each has a few Hallmarkie notches under their respective belt (Carson Kressley from classic Queer Eye and Drag Race judge is the third in that triumverate, he turned up last year in a cameo in The Bitch Who Stole Christmas)

How does it Hallmark?  Sans all the cliches, it's kind of a lesser-than as far as this kind of holiday fare goes.  It's really devoid of Christmas feels (all those trips into the past and present and future were supposed to be Christmases? They didn't much feel like it at all, and any Christmas we do see all seem a little sad).  It definitely had a better production budget than the usual Christmas crap (it looked more like a movie than a Hallmarkie usually does but that's not saying much). 

How does it movie? Ieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeewwwwwt's not a good movie.  Sorry, started nodding off while writing this.  It's so bog standard the Christmas Carol formula that the only bright spot was Carol having the door slammed in her face three times at the same household.  You just don't buy such a dramatic turnaround from her after being such a C*word (not CEO!) for the entire production.  Then to just see her gravesite and repent, I know that's classic Dickens but it's just such a unbelievable stretch.  I did kind of enjoy Vaugier being an asshole though, she played it really quite well.

Also whenever there was a pratfall (which was like three or four times) the score would go all Looney Tunes for a brief few seconds.  It was awkward.

How Does It Snow? Dammit, I forgot to pay any attention to the snow.  I'm guessing there wasn't much of it to speak of.  Most of the movie takes place indoors.