Director: Brian Herzlinger
Writers: Brant Daugherty and Kimberly Daugherty
Starring: Brant Daugherty, Lana McKissack, Kimberly Daugherty, and Ryan Merriman
Here’s a movie with a promising plotline: A single woman
obsessed with campy Christmas romance movies—and her grumpy sister—are
magically transported to a town similar to the one in her favorite holiday
picture, and then must join forces with the townsfolk to save Christmas when
it’s threatened by…shit, I honestly don’t even remember. But it doesn’t really
matter: all you need to know is that Christmas is being threatened.
First things first – and I’m sure part of this issue stems
from the fact I’m just coming off of watching a Netflix holiday movie – but are
the production values in these movies always so generic? I guess I’d never
really noticed before, but it looks like it was shot for $20 using the
director’s closest friends and family.
The biggest problem with A
Christmas Movie Christmas is that it seems to completely forget its own
premise; rather than being a “spoof”, or even a “homage” to cheesy holiday
fare, it literally just becomes another one. There’s the occasional self-awareness,
but those moments are few and far between and aren’t nearly exploited as often
as they should be. What’s the point of having this setting when even the main
characters forget what it is?
That’s why, despite the promising setup, this one is a
sobering reminder of just how fucking godawful these movies can be. Exhibit A:
The main character. I hate her. She
goes from squealing with delight at the sight of everything in the village, to
suddenly forgetting it’s all a movie, and then looking sad about everything
when she pushes away her man and thinks she ruined the town’s annual Christmas
festival. Honestly, her biggest problem is that she has a very punchable face,
a fact only exacerbated by her overuse of it.
The sister is annoying in her own way, too, but she’s much
easier to look at, and doesn’t overuse her facial muscles to the point of
annoyance.
Not helping matters are the “love” interests are two of the
worst I may have ever seen in a romance movie. The main character’s, Dustin,
looks like a middle-aged father of three who’s constantly out cheating on his
wife, or running up a tab at a local bar. To say that there is no chemistry
between them is a vast understatement—this is definitely one of those movies
where you couldn’t care whether or not the two leads get together at all.
The sister’s love interest is a ridiculously over-the-top
guy who my wife referred to as a “puppy man”: he starts by leaving her dozens
of notes throughout the town, which she initially finds to be creepy. So he
changes that up by stalking her until she realizes she isn’t going to get
anything else, and just accepts his advances. But he’s so…childish that I
literally think he would qualify as being clinically retarded. Of course, the
movie is probably trying to exaggerate his “sense of wonder” (and I have to admit that it's absurdly entertaining), but especially to
be paired up with a character who has none of the same feelings about
Christmas, it’s a rather forced (mis)match.
The ending is cobbled together, and makes even less sense
than most of these movies—it’s a threadbare, completely illogical excuse to
have a happy ending that’s more or less literally formed out of nowhere. It’s
like the writers couldn’t be bothered to think of anything that fit, so they
just winged it during filming; “unsatisfactory” doesn’t even begin to describe
it on the most basic of all levels.
I suppose it was only a matter of time, but after getting
off to a strong start, our holiday movie season has run into its first snag.
STRAY OBSERVATIONS
- What was the point of having the grumpy boss character? He was just completely pointless.
- Being a movie-within-a-movie doesn't help here: This is just a bad movie within a terrible one.
- I thought this might be a clever subversion of the subgenre; instead, it's just shit.
- Apparently, these characters think self-loathing is a very attractive quality.
- You know you've done something wrong when the grandma character is by far the best one in the entire movie.
- Why does the dumb kid always sound like she has a cold?
- How come in almost every scene where there's a "famous musician" on stage in these movies, they're almost always alone on the stage with an acoustic guitar, yet the music that comes out features a full band? Where's the drummer and bassist hiding?
- For being obsessed with these kinds of movies, Eve is pretty clueless as to how they work.
- That explains some things: the writers of this mess are also two of the main stars.
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