2023, d. Emily Moss Wilson - Hallmark/W Network
The Draw: As we've been working through this year's Advent Calendar, Toasty and I seem to be on opposite sides of the Hallmarkie coin. Toasty wants the traditional Hallmarkie (and by "traditional" I don't mean "trad", but rather all the cliche/familiar Hallmarkie trappings like the PST/dick BF/hot cocoa/christmas tree shopping/decorating and baking montages/red truck and red dress traditional), while I seem to be gravitating towards the fantasy and Christmas magic and movies that want to escape the traditional.
This one was one of the late-in-the-season Hallmark movies last year that wasn't at all on my radar despite being a high profile Rachael Leigh Cook (Josie and the Pussycats) vehicle. As I was strolling the Hallmarkie offerings on Amazon/StackTV this one did catch my eye with mentions elves in the brief synopsis.
HERstory: We open with the MarVista logo, which sent a cold shiver down my spine. The trauma of A Royal Corgi Christmas is real. Elves Chuck (total "that guy" Patrick Thomas O'Brien) and Debbie (local hire Bailey Stender) -these are not great elf names- identify that Christmas spirit has been on a downward trajectory in recent years and have a plan to kick it back into gear. Find a candidate at random and give them 3 wishes (with caveats). Santa (T. Mychael Rambo) -maybe the best Santa ever in the worst fake beard- pulls the trigger and lands on Erin (Cook), a photographer in Duluth, Minnesota.
I'm not sure we ever get a decisive reason why Erin is so grinchy about Christmas. We probably did, but it's been a day and a half since watching it and some of the finer (finer, ha!) details have been lost. She's not like a total a-hole about it, she's just kind of jaded, and over it, and not feeling particularly festive.
Chuck and Debbie's plan is to try to lure Erin into entering a contest to win 3 Christmas wishes by heisting her radio in the car and bombarding her with promotions, and then when that doesn't draw her in they start spamming her email, and when that doesn't work they start magic chatting with her with what looks like old-school malware popups. You looked at some very weird text-based porn, Erin.
She takes the bait, oddly enough (where as I would have just done a hard reset on my PC) and uses her first wish for her mom's Christmas pizzelles (if you don't know what a pizzelle is, then you're either not Italian or don't have a Pizza Nova in your neighborhood... it's just a thin pancake-like Italian cookie). Barely a heartbeat later Erin's mom is at the door, in-and-out handing her a container of pizzelles.
Jumbling the timeline, Erin's sister Maria (Kathryn Fumie) and brother-in-law Taylor (Rod Kasai) try to set her up with Sam (Sam Page, Mad Men), a lawyer Taylor is working with and trying to hire full time. Erin isn't into the set-up but Sam likes her moxie and keeps trying, and Erin seems a bit...flustered by the attention.
Ah, I remember now, Erin got broken up with on or around Christmas by fellow photographer Archie (Ahmed El-Mawas), and Erin now finds out that he's gotten a nature photography grant that she's always wanted, and Archie doesn't even do nature photography. When prompted for her second wish, she just wants a little credit, recognition from Archie of how she helped him. A knock at the door, Archie appears, handsome, full of charm and ego. He swoops in and starts dominating Erin's life again, much to Maria and Taylor's chagrin. They point out how he just takes-takes-takes from Erin, offering nothing in return except self-serving platitudes and admiration. Erin thinks this is what she wants, only to find, within the day, that Archie is not only insufferable, but he ate all her pizzelles, and that's the last straw for her. He's on the street never to be seen from again.
This is a long way to go before we get to the actual premise of the movie, which is, when prompted for her third wish, Erin is feeling pretty low about Christmas again, frustrated, and she wishes Christmas would just...disappear. It's a red alert at the North pole, unless the elves and Santa can get Erin to truly believe in Christmas and reverse the wish before midnight December 25, then Christmas will be gone forever.
Erin, in total disbelief that Christmas has disappeared, starts to talk to everyone she can about Christmas, and everyone is baffled. She tells Sam, and the lawyer in Sam says he's willing to make a case for Christmas with Erin, and they being trying to bring Christmas traditions to Erin's family, and spread Christmas cheer around Duluth. Debbie steps in to help spruce things up to look a little more festive (and a lot less janky) while Chuck tries to encourage the romance between Erin and Sam (it doesn't need much encouragement Chuck).
Santa, meanwhile, is just kind of taking a vacation and enjoying himself plenty...but offering a little nudge here and there. Like, he points he mayor of Duluth, always looking for new and unique ways to draw attention to their small city, to the weirdly decorated house. The mayor asks Erin if she can bring this festivity to the whole city, and so her and Sam get to work on embiggening the Christmas celebration.
It all culminates in a town square, with a giant, garishly decorated tree lighting ceremony, and Erin giving a big speech about the spirit of Christmas and what it all means, thinking that it will magically reverse everything. It does not.
Turns out, Erin's actions were all about bringing Christmas joy and spirit to others, but not to herself. So it's up to the best santa ever to give her a nudge, and ask her just what Christmas means to her. She tells him, there's a flash, and Santa is gone, everything is back, and she up and kisses Sam. The elves get promoted into a safe space where they won't interact with the outside world, and Sam joins Erin and her family for Christmas day. Late Christmas evening, at Sam's place, they've fallen asleep together on the couch, and Santa stops by to drop off a gift... it's one of the janky ornaments from the alt-reality. Fin.
The Formulae: It's a heavy spin on the holiday Scrooge/Grinch scenario (the elves at one point even dismiss the three ghosts scenario), but not a lot of the usual Hallmarkie tropes. There is a moment where Sam and Erin go find a Christmas tree to cut down, and it's one of the saddest Christmas trees this side of Charlie Browns. There are quite a few mugs of hot cocoa which, clearly, have no liquid and are just cups of marshmallows, except maybe the fancy cup Santa makes for himself.
Unformulae: It's a playful bit of Christmas magic that plays by its own rules (and sometimes doesn't even know if it has rules or not).
True Calling? I suppose, but I think it needed a more sensational title like "Christmas is Missing" or "Bringing Back Christmas"
The Rewind: I had to marvel at all the foam-bubble snow, particularly in wide shots when people were walking in it. Also any scene with Santa is fantastic. T Mychael Rambo really is the perfect Santa...except that horrendous beard, which looks almost exactly like the foam-bubble snow.
Also the scenes North Pole General Counsel (Great Oglesby) are so much fun...but then I work with legal stuff all the time so this may be just be me enjoying the legal talk based around absurd Christmas magic.
The Regulars: It's really just Cook, who joined the Hallmark squad ...whoa, way back in 2016, and has made at least one movie with them nearly every year since. Page has also been a Hallmark hunk since 2016, but a very under-the-radar hunk.
How does it Hallmark? If we're going by how tropey is it, not very. It also looks different than most Hallmarks, like it got another half-mil in the budget. It feels more...lived in, which may be the Duluth of it all. They seemed to have gotten pretty free reign in the town, likely as a promotional element (although, given how often they make up names of towns in Hallmarkies, is the average Hallmark watching going to realize that Duluth is a real place they can visit?).
Whomever was set decorating did a great job of making things seem natural, not Christmas-bombed (when there actually was Christmas in the movie, that is) like the usual Hallmark.
How does it movie? It's a really decent watch, but it's a big, big step (or two or ten) away from being a real movie-grade-movie. The magic of it all is really, really subdued. There's no special effects, at all and the "North Pole" sets are passably interesting (real places in Duluth just spruced up with a bit of Christmas...the Christmas train was very nice though...clearly a museum piece), but this needed a LOT more magic in it from Santa and the elves. It also really needed to play with the distortion of reality even more than it did, and lean even more into the comedy of people thinking that Erin has cuckoo bananas.
Also, when Erin is explaining Christmas to people, she completely side-steps the Christ-in-Christmas part of the story. When she looks up "Christmas" in the dictionary, there's still Christians and Christianity and such, so it's not like baby Jesus was blinked out of existence too. It didn't need to be a whole big thing, but it should have been some thing.
If some of the production values and scaling of the story let me down, what does really work for this is really good performances all around. The regional local hires all killed it. Fumie and Kasai had some really impeccable comedic timing, and Stender, who barely has any on screen credit, was basically the third most prominent player in the movie and had incredible energy (she was so good I thought she was Jillian Bell at first).
How Does It Snow? Oh, that bubble snow. And lots and lots of it. And in some scenes, so much cotton batting filling up the background. Thousands of dollars worth, I'm sure.
It was Duluth, but probably late April-ish by the look of it (May, it turns out). Duluth is a sister city to Thunder Bay, where I grew up. Both are on Lake Superior about a 4 hour drive away from each other, but similar temperatures. It's fucking cold. It's average temperature in December is -8. The cast was wearing light winter gear, the kind you see in Hallmark movies, but didn't look like they were sweating in them. But in actual December when you're on Superior, you need layers upon layers with no exposed skin, because that dry cold will suck the moisture right out of you.
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