CW: children with cancer

Sam Elliott, Karen Allen, Sarah Paulson, and some other actual famouses star in this kid cancer movie. This is an oddity in the genre of made-for-TV movie featuring a child with cancer in that THE KID LIVES. SHE DOES NOT DIE. So, it’s boring as all get out and the production’s whatever, but I need you to know how weird I felt when the kid grows up to be the teacher telling the story of a November Christmas in the first scene of the movie. Like it’s not really a secret from the beginning, but like, I STILL was CONVINCED the kid would die even though we know it’s her (I think? Or it’s just telegraphed pretty clearly). That is how many of these awful, awful things I have watched. Kids just don’t survive Christmas on television.

OK, so, Cancer Child Vanessa gets a snowglobe from her dad sometime in the summer and her mom has to show her how to shake it up to make it do the snowglobe thing. As the globe suspends the little snow bits, so too shall you suspend your disbelief that an eight-year-old would need instructions on how to shake up a snowglobe. Kid is ENCHANTED by the thing, having never seen snow in her life (they live in the balmy climes of Rhode Island) and says she hopes she can see snow at Christmas. Dad and Mom share a pointed look.

Faced with the prospect of losing his child before the year is out, Dad inquires about the pumpkin harvest with local farmer Sam Elliott. He doesn’t say why he suddenly needs like five tons of good gourds, but Sam Elliott knows better than to ask questions. Unfortunately, Farmer Sam’s pumpkins still need a couple of months. Dad heads home, hat in hand, to search for pumpkins on the dark web, probably. But Farmer Sam knows something’s afoot, and takes the time to repair an old friendship in order to procure two truckloads of pumpkins from…Mexico? Canada? Who the hell has pumpkins ready yet? Anyway, they dump all the pumpkins on the family’s front porch in the dead of night. Come morning, Vanessa’s thrilled and decides it’s time for a Halloween party!

They make costumes and throw a Halloween party in summer. Vanessa’s illness has kept her from going to school, so she’s delighted when a local waitress shows up at the party with all the town’s children in tow. The Dad and Farmer conspire to orchestrate more early holidays, Farmer continuing to supply the appropriate symbolic out-of-season agricultural products. One night in November, the family heads home from the hospital after some grim news that Vanessa will need to undergo another round of chemo. But when they arrive home, all the houses in the neighborhood, including their own, are decorated with merry twinkling lights and festive Christmas adornments! All the neighbors stand along the driveway and loo loo loo like Charlie Brown to wish them all glad tidings. A November miracle strikes when it begins to snow! Vanessa grabs her snowglobe and shakes it up! Yep, that’s the idea! Snowglobes!

We cut back to the scene we opened on, where a woman is reading a picture book to some gathered children. Guess what? It’s the story of the November Christmas, and she’s Vanessa! SHE LIVED! I can’t stress enough how wild it is for a cancer kid to not die in a made-for-tv Christmas movie. Like I said, you kind of know it’s her from the beginning, but I still kept trying to figure out how they were going to kill the cancer kid.

WHIMSY: 🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️ 4/5 elf ears. It’s whimsical as heck to have Halloween in August! Kooky! Sam Elliott provides!
SPARKLE FACTOR: ✨✨✨ 3/5 twinkly lights. I’m including pumpkins here. It truly was an astonishing quantity of pumpkins.
ADORKABILITY: 🙃🚫 0/5 faceplants. Kids aren’t adorkable, and cancer definitely isn’t adorkable.
CHRISTMAS SCALE: 🎅🎅🎅🎅🎅 5/5 Santa hats. It’s so Christmasy they needed to move it up a month. Sam Elliott’s a nice alternative to jolly ho-ho-ho Santa and his F-250 sure beats a sleigh.
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR: 🔔 1/5 silver bells. There was probably music.
REASON FOR SEASON: Surviving cancer! Right on!

Once upon a trope, a career-obsessed 30 something has plateaued at work and it’s affecting her whole life, especially her lack of kissing boys. She’s the head honcho at the family business, a food distribution company that she has grown from a scrappy outfit into a regional player. Now Daddy can concentrate on golf and wearing fedoras while she implements new market strategies. One of her big new ideas is to purchase a local winery, but that plan is thwarted when a smug lawyer representing the winery plays hardball as if he’s Jerry Maguire representing Cuba Gooding Jr. (SHOW ME THE MONEY!). Not even a plucky secretary can cheer up our heroine now. It’s only Thanksgiving but she’s already in the Kickmas spirit.

Unfortunately things are about to get way worse. Her obnoxious sister (a successful chef and restaurateur) has just got engaged to the world’s only organic farmer who looks like he’s never touched dirt. At this, her low point of the year, Mom decides to tell them both about a preposterous provision in grandma’s will: apparently, because of her “old fashioned ways” Gram bequeathed the family food distribution company to the husband of the first of her granddaughters to marry. I repeat, the family business has been entrusted to the first stranger who ties the knot with a grandkid because grandma doesn’t believe women should run companies or be entitled to that company’s value. COOL. This is a world where men are so pure they’d never single cross their fiancée for the assured fortune of a precariously willed pot of gold. So, our lead is about to have the company she’s single-handedly grown get taken over by her lil sis just because she’s doe-eyed over an Express for Men mannequin.

But Christmas twist! What if SHE gets married first?! That way she can be willed the family company instead (er, via her future husband’s agreement to sell it to her?). Now all she needs is a man (even though Granny’s will was written pre Obergefell v. Hodges and she could have married a woman probably). So she calls up her high school pal after years of silence to take him out for a series of painfully awkward dates where she comes across as a cut rate serial killer. He’s pretty game to reconnect with her and do some couch cuddles while watching old movies and drinking wine. I THINK YOU KNOW WHERE THIS IS GOING. He’s gay, so her plan fails. Wamp wamp.

She goes on a bender and feels sorry for herself, and drunk dials the jerk lawyer from before. He is gracious enough to save her drunk ass from becoming the next Worldstar video sensation. He takes her home and puts her to bed, but to be truthful he was riding the line between chivalry and creepery. The next day they reconnect and she starts to think he ain’t so bad. Now they kind of like each other. There was another scene or two here but we honestly can’t remember what happened, these movies are all running together at this point.

Long story short, she and lawyer boy are totes in love and she even makes up with her sister for being a butthead at the dress fitting and rehearsal dinner. Now she’s ready to be the very best maid of honor that ever did, uh, honor. In fact, she even tells her sister that she is resigning from the company so that she can pursue new opportunities in the wine business (again, she never did buy that winery, so she has no experience doing this). Now lil sis has been gifted a company that she never really wanted and has no one to run. Oh wait, I mean her husband has all those things. COOL.

WHIMSY: 🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️ 2/5 elf ears for the “magic” of pretend-legal inheritance law.
SPARKLE FACTOR: ✨✨✨ 3/5 twinkly lights. It was the average level of festive decorations (festy deckies, as we say).
ADORKABILITY: 🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃 5/5 faceplants. I have never seen such a convincingly-played drunk character and it was extremely good. And the whole stupid scheme is adorkable I guess.
CHRISTMAS SCALE: 🎅🎅 2/5 Santa hats. Xmas wedding, some other stuff probably, but could almost stand alone without that Christmasy undergirding.
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR: 🔔🔔 2/5 silver bells. One original tune at the beginning and one at the end. Not good ones, but I’m feeling generous with these ratings tonight so I’ll give it one silver bell for each.
REASON FOR SEASON: Legally enforceable documents!

CW: stalking, but like, in a FUN way

My good pals Pauline & Trenton Hice were nice enough to host this screening AND feed me dinner! Bless y’all for making it through this movie with me. Means a lot. Whew.

After getting an earful from her parents about having some sort of purpose in life and not spending all their money, a wealthy woman (Fred from BtVS) promptly heads out to go shopping when a gentle breeze strikes nearby a mailman’s bag and blows a letter loose. She catches it! She hurries over to give it back to the mailman. Ha, no, just kidding, she sees it’s addressed “DEAR SANTA NORTH POLE” in careful block lettering, and tears it open to read a kid’s depressing letter asking Santa for a new wife for her dad. After her wealthy mom Skypes her from the beach telling her to find some kind of purpose, job, or at least a man, our Dubious Heroine decides to go all-in on fulfilling this kid’s order promptly like she’s an Amazon warehouse picker working 36-hour holiday shifts. (PSA: PLEASE DON’T SHOP ON AMAZON.) How to go about accomplishing this extremely bad idea? The churchbells are ringing and it’s stalk o’ clock!

Using her detective skills (such as “reading the return address”), she figures out where Bereft Dad lives and surveils him for a day or so before she tails him to a soup kitchen, following so closely he notices she’s there and assumes she’s come to volunteer! Remember how she’s wealthy? She groans at the prospect of interacting with poors but she’s so invested in her REALLY CREEPY WEIRD PLAN TO BECOME THIS GUY’S WIFE that she sticks it out! Look at that tenacity! Watch out, some character building over here!! She also joins him to do some work for his day job as a guy with a snow plow on his truck, which means she just sits there and chills while he plows snow. I know, we giggled a lot too, but I just need to get through this one so I trust y’all to supply your own “plowing” jokes. She also teaches the daughter (the one who penned the letter in the first place) to suck less at ice skating. The Bereft Dad is impressed and intrigued; his current girlfriend is not.

Wait a sec, you wonder, where’s the essential ingredient of Looming Financial Ruin in this movie, anyway? Fret not: The dad spends a scene or two furrowing his brow as he Struggles With Bills and sighs wearily as he Receives an Eviction Notice for the soup kitchen. Plenty of LFR to go around! Anyway, the wealthy stalker and the man-widow are having some lovin’ feelin’s, which the Current Girlfriend isn’t super cool with, so she tells Sad Dad that our beloved protagonist didn’t actually graduate college! And then protag leaves her purse at the Dad’s house, where Current Girlfriend discovers the letter to Santa! Oooooh we kinda thought she wouldn’t come back from that one.

But the cat came back the very next scene, ten stacks richer from the last disbursement from her parents, and pays the soup kitchen’s bills! Our (still generationally wealthy) heroine confesses to Dad and Kid that she found the letter and just wanted to help. Everyone’s cool with all of it and we get a real good Christmas hug to close out.

WHIMSY: 🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️ 4/5 elf ears. Amy Acker just brings that fun pixie/chaos dryad energy. The child contributes nothing to this film.
SPARKLE FACTOR: ✨✨ 2/5 twinkly lights. Adequate adornments. Nothing too spectacular. There’s a couple scenes of amateur snowplowing (I KNOW, OKAY), so–wait. Wait. This is Canada, isn’t it. OK, that makes a lot of sense.
ADORKABILITY: 🙃🙃🙃🙃 4/5 faceplants. She’s cute, bad at soup handling, good at ice skating. That gets her a pretty high rating. Aside from that, STALKING IS NOT OKAY TO DO. DON’T STALK PEOPLE. FOR REAL, DON’T.
CHRISTMAS SCALE: 🎅🎅🎅🎅🎅 5/5 Santa hats. Yeah, this one’s easy. A letter to Santa kicks off all the (inadvisable, creepy, stupid) action.
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR: 🔔 1/5 Did this movie have music? You’ll have to find out the hard way, I guess, because the easy way is going to bed now. God, these movies are KILLING US THIS YEAR.
REASON FOR SEASON: SERIOUSLY, PLEASE DON’T STALK PEOPLE. 👎🚫🕵️‍♂️🚫👀

CW: car accident, death

Well folks, it happened. For the first time this year we’ve got ourselves a movie that we’d almost consider watching on purpose. The cast is pretty talented, the production is slick, and the message is clear and genuinely heartfelt without being a Vermont maple sap festival. If only it wasn’t so dang sad.

A flighty barista/baker/aspiring career hopeful is not looking forward to her Tinder date, but after really hitting it off with a cute artist she gets excited for what’s shaping up to be a Christmas time romance in bloom. But, she also can’t help but text and drive, and sure enough emoji’s herself to an early grave when she gets T-boned by a semi. Cut to some really heavy funeral scenes and painfully realistic depiction of grieving the death of your best friend. Yeesh.

But in a twist we all saw coming, she comes back as a ghost and is visible only to her very best friend–a tea peddling, meditative, Goop subscriber. Together they are confused but pretty okay about this whole thing. After all, now they can still do pretty much everything they were already up to like surf lessons (this is in LA btw, as if you didn’t know), beach walks, and watching movies. But our Phantom Protagonist realizes the next day that maybe she oughta be in a more ethereal realm instead of, ya know, like a Whole Foods? So she and her BFF go to the friend’s spiritual advisor to play with crystals and find out how to go to heaven. They learn that she needs to find love, of course, so they quickly set out to find her Tinder date from the night she died. After all, Tinder is where true love begins.

He’s not doing hot after finding out the lady he thought ghosted him is dead, and it’s seriously affecting his art. His psychology student sister is doing some freshman diagnosis and prescribes him some craft brews to cheer him up. At the holiday beer garden (?) our dead gal and pal see him and approach, and are surprised to find that he can see her too! So again, things are going pretty okay for a dead person. He is questioning his own sanity and leaves, but ultimately decides he does want to go on that second date with this specter. They watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” along with many dozens of 1940s cosplayers in a LA cemetery, a pretty normal thing for two Black millennials to do.

Things are going so well that she is sure she’s falling for him and will soon be ascended. Of course, that means that would be the end of their relationship. THIS IS THE CENTRAL CONFLICT OF THE MOVIE! But he decides he’s cool with living perhaps 60-70 more years of life without his true love who he helped reach the afterlife, and they go back to the spiritualist to learn how people can have sex with ghosts. They were SUPER sure that sex = true love = ascension (just like Buffy season 2, and look how that turned out). They learn that at Christmas time, ghosts and people can touch after expressing deep feelings… I love how sometimes a Christmas movie will just invent new ghost canon. Bold. But to her dismay, she is still on Earth the next day and now has no clue how to leave if it wasn’t through getting to third base.

By this point, her best friend is fed up with her crowding her apartment and interfering with her plans to major in tea studies in Morocco. They have a huge argument and she goes to the Tinder hookup to be sad with someone else. He helps her by painting an apology painting of her with her friend which he debuts at his gallery show that night. The whole crew is at the show and in their feelings and Ghost Rider realize IT WAS THE FRIEND WHO WAS HER TRUE

LOVE ALL ALONG!! Not in a gay way although her friend is gay, but that’s beside the point here) but in a “you’re my Christmas present this year” (but not in a Folgers incest way). They share a magic ghost-people Christmas time hug and she fades away forever. Yay? The friend is now free to fart in her own apartment again and can look forward to sipping tea with other manic pixie yoga girls.

Epilogue: she’s at a bar in heaven that looks like the one where she met dude at on Earf when he enters and says “guess what? I DIED!”. She thinks that’s neat, but she can’t swipe right* tonight because she has to go haunt her friend, a thing which ghosts apparently do once a year. They REALLY took some liberties about the mechanics of the afterlife.

*We are old and haven’t used dating apps. Is swiping right good? We think swipe right means good.

WHIMSY: 🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️ 5/5 elf ears. Fun ghost montages? Ghosts that can be seen and kissed by people?! WE’RE GETTING REAL WHIMSY UP IN HERE BABY!
SPARKLE FACTOR: ✨ 2/5 twinkly lights. It was very well made but didn’t feel particularly festive (ya know, given the whole people dying in car crashes thing?).
ADORKABILITY: 🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃 5/5 faceplants. The relationship between our on-screen couple is built less on mutual interests and more on “AWK-WARDDDD” style interactions. It’s cute.
CHRISTMAS SCALE: 🎅 1/5 Santa hats. Said it before and will say it again: Southern California is not Christmas-y. Plus, we had very few mentions of the holiday at all and little to no trees, presents, Santa, etc. I NEED SEASONAL TIDINGS!
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR: 🔔 1/5 Totally unnoticeable. The sad piano funeral music did not add or detract from this movie at all.
REASON FOR SEASON: Hands-free calling devices!📱🚫

CW: alcoholism

Our ship has veered off course in the past week, and for that, the two cap’ns apologize. We have righted our vessel, the SS Xmas (fun to say), and have used our sextants, astrolabes, and protractors to set ourselves on a collision course with Christmas. Full speed ahead! Heave away me bully boys! Bound for South Austra–er, North Pole!

Today’s work of art is a real fun double throwback: a TV movie from 2004 that whisks us away to the magically ancient time of 1996! It’s fun to see that from 2019 but it’s hard to imagine how it’d be that thrilling of a quantum leap from…eight years later! But I’m getting ahead of myself. Eve is a Career Businesswoman who does advertising and stuff in skyscrapers. She has Terrible Success with men, obviously, especially her ex whom she ghosted at her own wedding because she wanted to take the Impressive New York City job instead. Oh, and then her boss congratulates her winning a new account with a little whiskey and a little unwanted touching. FUN! She excuses herself from that HR nightmare, goes out for a night of drinking with her executive assistant/best friend of 30 years (what a dynamic!), complains that she can’t catch a Real Mans, and bumps into a guy asking for spare change on the street and decides to drunktagonize him. They have a weirdly genuine conversation and she goes home and drunks herself to sleep.

The next morning, she wakes up in her room at her parents’ house. The newspaper date reveals this is 1996! Wow! Somehow she’s traveled back in time to the week before her Christmas wedding to the fiance she left at the altar! She acts all weird to her parents, goes with her BFF/future workplace subordinate to try on a couple hideous fashion blunders from a prissy French dressmaker designing her wedding gown, and then goes out drinking by herself because she brought her unhealthy, big-city habits with her on her time quest. She’s knocking back unspecified brown liquid when the same bum from last night appears and informs her he’s her guardian angel and she has seven days to undo the horrid disaster that her life turned into when she ditched her fiance. A chance to turn it all around! She’s thrilled!

So thrilled, in fact, that she proceeds to make the exact same choices that she made the first time around (just like when I started a second playthrough of Mass Effect): being super weird with her fiance right before the wedding (it’s 1996 and couples are only starting to learn how to actually communicate their feelings with each other, no doubt guided by the seminal tome “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus”), and drinking just SO much. Her friends don’t think it’s weird that she’s making references to Future Technology, moving through life with the clarity of a former NFL lineman, and talking to herself (her guardian angel is invisible to everyone else!). By day 5, she’s solving her future father-in-law’s Looming Financial Ruin TM by retconning the invention of Amazon to sell books online AND in meatspace.

But by day 6, she’s having an emotional breakdown agonizing over whether to marry the guy or take the job (I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY HIM MOVING OR THEM DOING LONG DISTANCE ARE NEVER MENTIONED AS OPTIONS) and writing the breakup letter that she’d couriered to him at the altar all those years ago. And then her mom asks her like two questions and she realizes she truly loves fiance! Problem solved. WAIT, FIANCE FOUND THE LETTER! Shoulda picked a better hiding spot than “on desk”. He confronts her dramatically in a park! She confesses tearfully that she’s been time-traveling this week and that’s why she’s been such a weirdo (I know, we all used that one to get out of P.E. in middle school!) He readily accepts this explanation without qualification and they get married in a canoe as planned. Then she wakes up after her wedding day, after the 7th and final day of Throwback Week, to find herself alone in her beautiful, comfortable NYC apartment. Aw, rats, I guess there’s a message here about feminism or something. PSYCH THE HUBSAND IS HERE HE WAS JUST BRUSHING HIS TEETH!

As with all time-travel movies, and clothes ordered from the Wish app, the holes start revealing themselves pretty quick when you examine them more closely. When the credits roll, you realize that:
1. Eve rejoins her life ten years later with no memory of anything that has happened to her in this timeline in the past decade, including those ten years of wedded bliss to her “new” husband.
2. They wake up in NYC, so the husband was willing to move to New York anyway!
These implications are grim as shit. So…Merry Christmas!

WHIMSY: 🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️ 4/5 elf ears. Not breaking any records here, but there’s time travel–and the guardian angel is BLACK! What fun!!
SPARKLE FACTOR: ✨ 1/5 twinkly lights. You know how sometimes you just know a movie is Canadian without any real articulable clues? She keeps referring to how she just loves being home in Oregon. This is like maybe outside the greater Ottawa metropolitan census-designated area.
ADORKABILITY: 🙃🚫 0/5 faceplants. No faceplants are awarded as alcoholism isn’t adorkable, it’s a medical issue. Eve has a nog problem.
CHRISTMAS SCALE: 🎅🎅 2/5 Santa hats. There weren’t any Santas, no snow, no poinsettias, carolers, presents, cookies, reindeers…just relentless establishing shots of the same uggo municipal decorative bells on the same street.
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR: 🔔 1/5 There was a karaoke scene and there were some fake-90s-sounding songs people sang. Probably cost too much to include “What if God Was One of Us?”
REASON FOR SEASON: Take-backsies! (But at what cost?)⏳

Guest post: Andi Nealon is back at it again, this time with another dog Christmas movie that is NOT the same as the other one even though they very nearly share a title.

Welcome to the Pits of Amazon Prime, where I found this thing. Apparently it had a budget of two million dollars, and I think they decided to spend all of that money on purebred, well-trained dogs.
Our main character, Emma, is stopped from caaaarryin’ the banna t’rough it aaaaaaaall by her dad, who tells her she has to go live with her Aunt Dolores, whom she’s never heard of before, in Doverville, a few hours away, because It’s The Depression And I Can’t Afford You Right Now Sweetie. Emma’s sad but Dad promises he’ll be there to bring her back by Christmas.

As Emma gets off the train, she sees a veritable smorgasbord [Ed. note: smorgasbark?] of dogs in cages being loaded into a truck by a lady in a cute hat and a little boy. He struggles to pull one cage down, prompting Emma to help, but when it goes awry and she accidentally opens the cage, letting the dog run free, little Mikey yells, “GIRLS ARE WORTHLESS!” before taking off after the prodigal pooch. Emma helps him chase the pup down and has her first encounter with the Dogcatcher. Yeah, that’s straight out of “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”. This guy’s a total freak about dogs and DOES do the sniffing thing when there’s one around. Also he has an evil cat, because cats are evil in all dog movies.

Welcome to Doverville, a place no doubt named to allude to Hoovervilles of the Depression Era, where Dogs Are Illegal Because Reasons. Cute! Maybe they meant to name it Roverville but thought “nah, that’s too heavy-handed” and just did the rest of the movie really heavy-handed instead. Emma gets to Aunt Dolores’s house and learns very quickly that Aunt Dolores is not her aunt, hates everything (especially Emma’s dad who broke her heart), and is a stingy middle-aged woman who will give a hungry child one piece of bread for dinner because It’s The Depression. This is gonna be the only allusion to people being poor in this town for the rest of the movie. The only beings that are hungry for food in this town are the illegal, pure-bred dogs that keep showing up from the woods, or something. To save the dogs and Christmas, and to make the movie have a sort of climax, Emma and friends stage a school performance they call “The 12 Dogs of Christmas”. And yes, they sing the ENTIRE THING. You know how long that song is? And the kids, for what it’s worth, do a perfectly tolerable job, it’s just. Such a long song. And they call a Brittany a Cocker Spaniel, which is so silly. Could have said “three kinds of spaniels” or something, but no. “Three cocker spaniels”, because a script editor or dramaturg was not ever even a twinkle in the producer’s eye. Anyway, the dogcatcher gets busted for dogfighting thanks to Emma (yeah, dogfighting in a kids movie!), and it looks like the dogs in the pageant eat him, but they really just lick him, because this is a kids movie. Dad shows up (aw. That’s kind of *sniffle* cute…i’m not crying, YOU miss your folks!!) like he promised, and everything works out, and dogs aren’t illegal anymore. Roll Credits (and Footloose). Perfectly cute, even if the anachronisms do stand out, along with the fact that in this universe, mutts do not exist.

WHIMSY: 🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️ 3/5 elf ears. Not much magic, but dogs and humans Connecting™ is pretty whimsical to me. Ooh, and there’s a mysterious old dude in the woods with a dogsled!
SPARKLE FACTOR: ✨✨ 2/5 twinkly lights. It’s The Depression and there isn’t such a thing as string lights. 2 points for snow on the ground and impressive production value for an elementary school Christmas pageant before stage lighting was a big thing.
ADORKABILITY: 🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃 5/5 faceplants. There’s PUPPY SHENANIGANS. Dogs tripping people. Dogs tripping over their own lil feets. The main character uses “run right into dogcatcher to get away” TWICE and both times IT WORKS.
CHRISTMAS SCALE: 🎅🎅🎅 3/5 Santa hats. It’s clearly Christmastime, with the pageant, the snow, and the–wait, that’s it.
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR: 🔔🔔 2/5 silver bells for mediocre parody of 12 Ds of C, some cute 30s stuff occasionally.
REASON FOR SEASON: Naming your puppy “Miracle” like every other child in every other Christmas movie. 🐶

A douchebag drivetime DJ pranks a radio station sponsor and is forced to lay low until the backlash calms down. As punishment, he’s been banished to help boost ratings in one of the company’s regional stations in a Colorado mountain town. His job for the next 2 weeks is to cohost an established, successful local advice call-in show with Dr. Haylie Duff, PsyD. Never mind the fact that she didn’t invite him or anything, he’s just here now to bring all those fart jokes and sound effects that people love in rural America. She grits her teeth and graciously makes space for him on the station’s flagship show she built from the ground up. LA’s #1 Morning Show Bad Boy Host, taking his paid suspension seriously to reform his image, accepts this responsibility and–oh, actually no, he shoots marshmallow projectiles at her, only talks about sex, and shows a general disinterest in this hillbilly town. That’s a fun energy he’s bringing!

Just when it looks like this will be two weeks of hell for them both, things turn heavenly. The two radio talents are required to dress as Mary and Joseph at the local Christmas pageant, in what is clearly a violation of the First Amendment. It’s here that Shock Jock reveals he’s actually a Man of Christ by reciting from the Gospel of Luke from memory, making Sissy McGuire swoon. Forget standards! He was forced to go to church as a kid so he must be marriage material! Now they’re all googly eyed and she takes him to meet her Mom, Maureen McCormick AKA Marcia Brady (who is doing great, btw!). Her character is written to be both a no-nonsense independent woman with an attitude but also a crying machine who produces more sap than these Colorado maples. Another person convinced our DJ jerk is a cool guy is the sound guy at the station with big McLovin charisma and a serial killer vibe.

The one person in town who’s not a big fan is the local station’s studio manager who just so happens to be in love with our female lead. The thing is though, he is SO clearly the better choice of the two that it makes the inevitable choice an obvious failure. He is handsome, stable, recognizes her talents, and never pressures her for anything more than a professional relationship, though he’s upfront about his feelings for her. But forget all that because she’s got the hots for the guy who fills her office with packing peanuts so they can have “snow” and makes a mockery of her serious advice show. At one point he tells a caller to disregard his doctor’s warnings about his heart condition and pop a few Viagras to satisfy his wife. And that caller? HE DIED! The next scene is them at the funeral where Crazy Ira here has to apologize for wingman-ing this octogenarian into the grave. No biggie though because a couple minutes later the widow has forgotten her husband of 50 years and is molesting younger men while mourners are dancing around the casket to “Happy” by Pharrell. Is this what a white Colorado funeral looks like?!

The third act presents Dr. Love with a choice: keep doing the show and being the boring spinster she is, or follow her manager to a bigger station in Dallas and have like a ton of opportunities. So she chooses career and romance (manager wants to be More Than Friends!), until the end of the very last broadcast, where the DJ guy just kind of cries at her on air and she decides this is the dude she’s going to go to Ikea with forever. We’re not sure what happens next, because the station manager (who quietly exited after seeing the crying/smooches) has already left. The future for this local station is unclear! Homeboy got his LA show back, but he’s way too mature for pranks now (having aged 14 whole days) so who knows. Looks like Dr. Love is off to private practice and DJ probably goes into podcasting.

WHIMSY: 🧝‍♂️🚫 0/5 elf ears. The closest we get to whimsy is old people boner/death jokes.
SPARKLE FACTOR: ✨✨ 2/5 twinkly lights. There were surprisingly few snowscapes for a movie shot in California in the summer. Who knew.
ADORKABILITY: 🙃🚫 0/5 faceplants. Haylie Duff’s happy hands dance sequence to “Larger than Life” was super adorkable, but that was in “Napoleon Dynamite”. Which is a great thing to watch instead!
CHRISTMAS SCALE: 🎅🎅 2/5 Santa Hats. The most Christmasy thing about this movie is the live nativity, which is pretty Christmasy, but it really could have happened around any major holiday. Arbor Day is lovely in Califorado!
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR: 🔔🔔 2/5 silver bells. There was music, it was bad, we will not dwell on it.
REASON FOR SEASON: Local radio call-in shows! 🤷‍♂️🎙📞

It’s late, I know. Sorry, the gravity of our undertaking has started to take its toll on us. We’ll catch up. Just hang in there.

CW: sudden violence, Tom Arnold, child abandonment, alcohol

This is one of the most peculiar holiday movies we’ve watched yet. The setup prepares us for a standard Dad Hates Christmas Since Mom Left (And Only His Teen Daughter’s Unpaid Emotional Labor Can Restore His Christmas Spirit), and shifts into a loose A Christmas Carol format with an expansion pack of complex time travel rules. But by the second act, it reveals itself as a Scrooge/Ghost of Christmas Present fic someone let escape from Archive of Our Own. I do not ship it.

Seven years ago, Mom told Tom Arnold that she was leaving him during their daughter’s Christmas pageant. She didn’t even stay until the end! She just left to run off to Aruba with her dentist! Flash forward to the present: Teen Daughter is well-adjusted and emotionally mature for her age, which is a fun thing that probably happens to most children who get abandoned. She tells her dad to quit being such a humbug at Christmas – he’s Footloosed all Christmas merriment out of the house ever since. Tom Arnold has No Chill and freaks! out! at all symbols of holiday cheer outside in public and screams at a hapless Walmart employee who was unable to remove the Santa designs from Coca-Cola cans. These unwarranted verbal assaults carry the force and fury of a sovereign citizen who was just pulled over for not wearing a seatbelt.

After an explosive Christmas-related argument sends the daughter out of the house to make out in car backseats, Dad gets drunk on the couch and passes out. Then appears the Ghost of Christmas Past to do all the things you’d expect. Except it doesn’t go that way. He takes them to 1968 where Dad can see the happy Christmas of his childhood, but in the process the ghost has a nervous breakdown and conceals the device that allows them to travel through time. Now they’re trapped here, which is fine by the Ghost of Living in the Past–he rants about “the good ol’ days” and how no one today cares about anything anymore. Ok boomer.

Back at Christmas HQ, some suit has to clean up this mess and send Dad back to 2005 before it messes up the space time continuum. Ya know, because think of how different the world would be with Tom Arnold!… So off to the past goes the Ghost of Christmas Present. She finds Dad hogtied and beaten by Christmas Past and rescues him, but not before breaking her Time Turner candy cane! Now the only way back is WITH Christmas Past. So they romp through Tom Arnold’s past, decade by decade, searching for the other Ghost so they can get back home. As you can expect, we get some classic time travel humor, including a literal panic at the disco that makes the scared DJ scratch his record up and accidentally invent hip-hop (they even do a “It’s me, your cousin Marvin Grandmaster Flash” gimmick). Also, Dad gets to listen to himself having sex with his ex wife on a pool table and relieve those glory days. Weird kink.

In the end he catches up to the day his wife left him and tells her good riddance. That apparently was enough to make him love Christmas (that and the fact that he’s fallen in love with Christmas Present because she knows how to live in the moment, probably). Just before their arbitrary midnight deadline to get him home, the day is saved by Christmas Future, some scarf-wearing underwear model who shows has one line in the whole movie. The whole gang goes back home and Dad gets to tell his daughter loudly that he is a psycho. What a way to ring in Christmas morning! Now let’s get back inside that house bereft of presents and cheer!

WHIMSY: 🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️ 5/5 elf ears. We’ve got time travel, complicated sci-fi mythos, corporeal ghosts, and disco inferno. This is where whimsy lives y’all.
SPARKLE FACTOR: ✨✨ 2/5 twinkly lights. The lighting in particular was awful and the props and staging made us cringe. One guy had a plastic marlin stuck in his chest in 3 different scenes. Also this movie is full of violence, drinking, sex, and smoking. Who is the target audience??
ADORKABILITY: 🙃🙃🙃 3/5 faceplants. There were plenty of slapstick moments but case law shows us that no reasonable person would consider Tom Arnold adorkable.
CHRISTMAS SCALE: 🎅🎅 2/5 Santa Hats. We never see Santa, presents, snow, a jingle bell, etc. If it weren’t for the Dickensian characters I’d say this movie could have been a SyFy Channel original movie set anytime.
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR: 🔔🔔 2/5 silver bells. Was there music? It was hard to notice behind all the brawls, boozing, and uncomfortable sexual innuendo.
REASON FOR SEASON: Fanfic! 💻💘🎄

CW: dead Dad trope–original!

Ginger is taking a personal day so I’m subbing in to take on this review alone. Call me a humbug but these Christmas movies haven’t been putting me in the holiday spirit. But maybe all I needed was the right movie. One with early aughts fashion, antiquated references, and a soul patched Billy Ray Cyrus-type just handsome enough to make moms everywhere wonder why she settled for Dad. Now THAT’S a Christmas to me!

Alas, this movie was another wince-meat pie with extra dull gravy and a heaping helping of schmaltz sauce. Our story begins with a widowed mother and her ~9 year old son as they join Grandma, Grandpa, and …Grandpa’s secretary?? for Thanksgiving dinner. Kiddo’s Jimmy Neutron Sega Saturn game keeps him distracted from the first holiday without Dad, who died in a car crash. Mom’s taking it well but the extended fam are convinced that she needs a man for Christmas this year. Oh, and a job. That’s why Grandpa has hired his daughter to be the new accountant at his successful toy making company (if any time travelers are reading this, pull your money out of Toys R Us stock before 2008!).

So Mom is now tasked with balancing the company budget, especially around the Christmas marketing campaign where Grandpa tends to go a lil overboard with expenses. In fact, he just hired the very best itinerant Christmas toy store marketing guru in America: a surfer cowboy type doing his best to look like Matthew McConaughey but who comes across more like Kurt Russel in Captain Ron. Naturally, he’s a buffoon and Mom rightly wonders if Grandpa is senile for giving this guy a paycheck and letting him around children. Unfortunately though he’ll be spending a lot of time with her only child, as he JUST SO HAPPENS to have moved in to the house 10 feet from hers on a street with literally no other homes. He immediately asks her out, breaking all hope of having a professional and cordial neighbor or workplace relationship. It’s a hard pass from her, but her son thinks he’s rad because he travels with his own reindeer and has three “elves” on his subcontractor payroll (You Bet we’ve got highly questionable little people slapstick in this movie!).

Kid starts to believe that this Christmas bro is actually Santa Claus just wearing a disguise fit to blend in at a Kenny Chesney concert. He eggs the kid on by telling him he knows Santa personally and can put in a good word for him. When he asks what the kid wants for Christmas, the kid says he wants his Dad to come home from “helping God with some stuff”–actual line. That puts the brakes fast on our beau’s playfulness but he says at the very least he’ll try to make sure Mom can be happy at Christmas this year. He denies he has any Santa powers but he can’t deny that lurve for kid’s mom. And Mom is kinda feelin it? After being sad, uptight, and openly hostile to this guy she suddenly turns around her feelings for him when her son catfishes her into a surprise date using Grandpa’s old love letters. One bite of his sack lunch sandwich and she suddenly thinks he’s Prince Charming. What kind of sprouts did he put in that thing?!

Alas, the love was not meant to be. Christmas is here, meaning it’s time for him to move on to the next town, perhaps to lead Valentine’s Day campaigns. We never see him do any work so who knows. After overcoming her sense of guilt to her dead husband she confesses her love for new guy, only for him to do a BRUTAL kiss fake out and friendzone her to the shadow realm. He says goodbye to the kid at the toy factory Christmas party, then he’s gone. But just as the family is gathering for Christmas dinner they hear sleigh bells outside and see some 2005-quality CGI transform him into LITERAL Santa Claus as he waves goodbye and flies away on his sled. Dag gum man that dude WAS Santa this whole time! And he didn’t even give any presents!

WHIMSY: 🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️ 3/5 elf ears. There was a whole 4th Act subplot about the family dog getting hit by the UPS truck. Thanks to Christmas miracles (and a willful suspension of Ginger’s knowledge of veterinary medicine) it survives and comes home on Christmas Day, delivered by the vet who becomes Mom’s new husband in the most phoned-in final shot in our series history. Joy!
SPARKLE FACTOR: ✨✨ 2/5 twinkly lights. Mostly just interiors of office buildings and houses. There are decorations but it feels about as cozy as a wool Kleenex.
ADORKABILITY: 🙃🙃🙃🙃 4/5 faceplants. There was a dreadfully long scene of a street hockey match between kid, 3 little people, and the dog. Corny corny corny.
CHRISTMAS SCALE: 🎅🎅🎅🎅🎅 5/5 Santa Hats. Can’t deny the Christmas spirit here. The whole movie is about the holiday and the man in red himself.
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR: 🔔🔔 2/5 silver bells. Mostly unnoticeable department store original Christmas music. Honestly this movie could have benefited from a Jimmy Buffett Christmas song or two.
REASON FOR SEASON: Changing your mind! 🤷‍♀️

Guest post: Andi Nealon continues to do the Lord’s work by watching some of these festive stinkers so we don’t have to. Bless her.

CW: dead parents. Ugh.

First off, can we get even a smidgen more creative with these names, Christmas Cheer Industrial Machine? “Christmas Mail”? Nothing so interesting as “Letters to Santa” or “Santa Writes Back” or something? Also, 30% of this movie is spent in lingering shots of mail machines and other USPS whirligigs and whoziwhatsits. You couldn’t even go with “USPSmas”? Well, no, I guess that last one sounds terrible too. But seriously?? CHRISTMAS MAIL. The LAZIEST I’ve heard a movie named since Christmas Inheritance. UGH. What? Oh yeah, the plot.

Plot is a strong word for this oddly-paced squished-together collection of things that happen in this movie. We open on a bright sunny day in Southern California, and follow a postal worker collecting mail on foot. After a dog steals a letter from him, he chases it and meets Kristi North, a mysterious blonde hottie. We learn he is Matt the Mailman. Kristi, we learn, is writing letters back to kids from Santa as a special assignment from “corporate”, AKA the Postmaster General. This does NOT sit well with Del Vista USPS Manager Richard Fuller, who thinks she’s there to destroy his efficiency by encouraging the kids to write more letters BACK to Santa. How can the Post Office survive when people… write… more… letters? Anyway, Man the Mailmatt sees Kristi again when he gets promoted to Assistant Manager to spy on her. Which he barely does. He’s really, really bad at it. He didn’t get ANYTHING to make Dick Fuller happy. So it’s especially hilarious how upset everyone is when she finds out what he was told to do (after they’ve Done a Kiss and are In Love, of course).

This movie is so bad, it’s amazing. It has all the tropes you hate, all the ones you love, and some weird bits that aren’t tropes but feel like they are, right? Quick and dirty list: Dog shenanigans, lady handles wild bird, main character is secret rock star that gave up rock dreams to raise his late sister’s kid, kid sets up uncle with elderly neighbor across the street, love interest woman is related to Santa somehow, Baking Shenanigans (including CGI from 1980), It Started Out That Way But Then I Fell For You, little kid who just wants her uncle to have a gf for christmas, Sassy Black Lady (who ends up as the manager of the facility once–again, the ACTUAL POSTMASTER GENERAL OF THE UNITED STATES–fires Dick Fuller because he doesn’t like Christmas), to name a few!

I have so many questions about this movie. Who did the audio? A drunk intern? There’s multiple piano flubs in the original score that they’re definitely trying to pass off as Christmas Jazz (to no avail), super-obviously dubbed-in nonsense words like “Ow oo! Oo ee! Aah da!”, and a scene where Matt the Mailman shows off his Epic Solo Award-worthy guitar skills by playing the loudest backup in the world to his incomprehensible niece and friend Heather who are supposedly singing “Jolly Old Saint Nicholas”, but if you don’t have subtitles you wouldn’t know they were singing ANYTHING. Another question: who hurt the key grip so bad they decided to make it look like every close-up utilized a green-screen background? Why did they think backlight akin to late-night shows looked good and not, you know, super weird? HOW DID THIS MOVIE HAVE A TWO MILLION DOLLAR BUDGET.

Whatever. I laughed at a few scenes. It was laughter at the production itself and not the jokes. But if you wanna look at a cute doggie and a cute kid for an hour and a half, try my next review of “The 12 Dogs of Christmas”.

WHIMSY: 🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️ 3/5 Elf Ears. Kristi North is Santa’s daughter, she summons a bird, there’s a dog, letters to Santa who writes back!
SPARKLE FACTOR: ✨✨✨ 3/5 twinkly lights. There’s some sparkle to this one, but most of it comes from Ashley Scott’s cute face.
ADORKABILITY: 🙃🙃🙃🙃 4/5 faceplants. Baking mishaps, running into people, tripping over hoses, dog steals letter, all around goofs.
CHRISTMAS SCALE: 🎅🎅🎅🎅🎅 5/5 Santa hats. Kristi, again, is Santa’s daughter and she calls him on the phone. Also Sally decorates the whole post office.
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR: 🔔🔔 2/5 silver bells. An attempt was made. There are some clear almost-parodies of popular Christmas songs, such as “Hey Mr. Kringle, I Need A Friend”, and there sure is a lot of music, it just sucks butts.
REASON FOR SEASON: A car chase in a little post office truck! How cute!🚚📨📬