An Unintentional Christmas

OK, some of these cookie-cutter (no pun intended) movies are actually sort of charming. This one is just annoying from beginning to end. Some feature some quality acting. Here, cardboard animation would have been an improvement. Some feature some half-decent writing. This treatment must have shown up in crayon, written by a kindergarten class - it's barely even English. Some even present a profound question or two. This one is so vapid and gutter senseless as to just be confusing. That's the other side of the coin. Sometimes these flimsy romance movies are just plain bad, although even those are not usually as painful and insulting as this. Add to all of that, the cheap production - virtually the entire movie is set in two non-descript boring rooms - and you have a just a painful hour and a half.

My wife and I will put on Christmas romance movies occasionally. They go by pretty fast, and they're funny, in a strange way. I usually like seeing ways that different ones stretch the mold a bit. This movie stretches the mold, but as a result, it's weird. On the technical side, there are some strange issues. The sound and picture are a bit odd. The color balance doesn't seem consistent, and it might be that interior lighting is way too harsh inside the primary house location. The sound has some real problems, occasionally the volume dips down much lower than normal. At least there's no distortion. The story starts off as pretty normal Christmas movie fare - the big city girl goes off (around Christmastime) to some rural area to foreclose on a house as part of some evil business deal. Along the way, she learns the meaning of Christmas - and romance. Where the movie gets weird is in the skipping of details. There is a dramatic argument between the male lead and his friend, and I came out of it not having any clue what their conflict was. The evil plot by the Big City Corporation seems to be something nonsensical. They're trying to take control of this family home, claiming that the male lead's deceased mother defaulted on payment. But this isn't a bank foreclosing. The female lead keeps referring to there being some sort of a deal. And the son doesn't have power of attorney, so he's not allowed to look at any of this paperwork - but they still need his signature to "close the deal." None of this makes any sense. The female lead is incredible in how evil she is at the start. In addition to this foreclosure plotline, there's also a Christmas cookie competition. And this is something that everyone is into. Also, everyone is very into pie. And the couple eats meatloaf and pie to cement their bond. The movie squeezes in a strange father / daughter drama at the last minute. Since this wasn't set up earlier, it comes across very puzzling. Direction has some odd choices. In a shot where Theodora says how it's so beautiful out there, everything behind her is a dead field and bare trees in the distance. The reverse show shows the same. One of the big kisses at the end is framed in a very awkward way. The couple is on the left side. In the middle is the BACK of someone's head. Then someone watching the couple is on the right. Also, at some point later in the movie, the house is turned into a farm. I'm not sure how it's a farm, since there doesn't seem to be anything other than a suburban house with a few fields around it. No animals, no signs of anything being planted. Despite all of these problems, the confusion that the movie brings is totally worth the entertainment.

I have no idea how this was made. The worst written I have ever seen. This is not against the actors, who had to work with this drivel. Lack of motive. Melodrama. No logical info on a conflict that was empty. Everything resolved with no information about what happen. How the foreclosure came about. No research done about how these kind of situations work. No explanation of why some little farm was important enough to steal. Did they steal? What happened at the bank? Heroine does a character 180 between scenes. Horrific cliches: she breaks a high heel; opens at a funeral; sudden motive for the all life-important cookie competition? OMG! Over the top dialogue and focus. All that was missing was her father's twirling mustache. The writer clearly has never written anything. Wince-worthy.

Christmas Collision (2021) - As if the depressing beginnings of this film weren't bad enough they underscored it with a comedy soundtrack of plucky violins, which was totally inappropriate for a funeral. Sebrina Scott as Theodora was an actual b!tch and John Wells performance in the role of Charlie wasn't exactly Mr. Charming either. I couldn't ever see that the two of them could come back from their initial meeting, which was tense to say the least and that meant that any relationship that might have developed would have been farcical or impossible for me to believe and he wasn't attractive enough to put up with that. Theodora's boss was obviously pure evil too and I wasn't prepared to watch another hard time Christmas, with nasty characters. I could tell that I wouldn't enjoy this one, even after ten minutes, so by the time I got to the first advert break I turned it off. Unscored as Unfinished.