Mainlining Christmas

The Christmas Train is a TV movie based on a novel by David Baldacci released through Hallmark Movies & Mysteries. The story is centered around a former couple, both writers, who bump into each other while traveling across the country. One is working on a movie script for a Hollywood director who's more or less adopted her, and the other is a journalist looking for a story. The movie includes numerous other quirky characters who are also traveling by train and is an exceptionally good... Wait. Hold on. I need to check my notes, because something feels off. Okay, yes. The words, "Hallmark" and "good" both appear on this pad of paper, which... Hold on a minute. These things can be good?!!! Then why the hell have we been sitting through bland, lazy romantic comedies this whole time? No one told me Hallmark was actually capable of putting out good movies! Okay. Let's get back to the movie, which - again - is good. A good Hallmark TV movie. About people recon

This one got on my radar because William Shatner plays the Ghost of Christmas Present, and I really wanted to be able to say I've seen versions of A Christmas Carol starring four Starfleet captains. As the title implies, this is a gender-flipped adaptation. Set in the present day (or at least what those of us who are growing old still think of the present day), this Hallmark movie focuses on self-centered TV personality, Carol (Tori Spelling), who's preparing to do a live broadcast on Christmas Eve and who... Hold on. That sounds kind of familiar. Let me check my notes... Undervalued assistant who purchases presents for boss's sibling's family... Love interest who's devoted their life to helping the homeless... Comedic ghosts played by famous actors... This isn't based on A Christmas Carol: it's a knock-off of Scrooged. Okay, maybe not tonally. This is far more... well... Hallmark in its approach. At least it's 2003 Hallmark, before the studio mandated

By their nature, movies with titles like this always fall into one of three buckets: either they're inexplicably amazing, bad in an amazing way, or just borderline unwatchable. I went in hoping for that middle option, as those are the most fun, with "amazing" as a second choice. Unfortunately, neither was to be, so we were stuck watching just a godawful low-budget kids' flick. The primary issue here isn't the story or dialogue, though neither is particularly good. Rather it's the pacing that makes this drag. Most of the time when I refer to pacing as an error I mean structural pacing: the length, arrangement, and layout of scenes. Typically, pacing complaints fall on the writer and editor. But Unicorn for Christmas doesn't even reach that point: the problem here is how each and every scene is directed and acted. Characters speak slowly, as if concerned the audience will be unable to follow along. Running this movie at 125% speed would honestly help. Becaus

Well, that's certainly not what I expected. As a rule of thumb, animated adaptations of A Christmas Carol with runtimes between an hour and an hour and a half tend to be pretty by the numbers, as far as the scripts are concerned. Occasionally they'll toss in an animal companion, but the basic story almost always sticks to the source material. I've seen quite of these now, and all follow more or less the same formula. Until now. This one is... it's weird. Really, really weird. Let's back up. This is a British animated movie released direct to video in the US. To the limited degree it's remembered, it's due to the relatively impressive cast, which features Kate Winslet, Michael Gambon, Rhys Ifans, and Nicholas Cage, among others. Simon Callow voices Scrooge and plays Charles Dickens in live-action segments at the start and end, a role he'd reprise on Doctor Who a few years later. It's also worth noting this is directed by Jimmy T. Murakami, who made Th

We meant to get to this back when it came out, but for whatever reason missed it in its first year - most likely a combination of negative reviews and high rental price convinced us to hold off and catch it on streaming. But this thing kind of disappeared into the ether immediately afterwards, and we forgot it ever existed until we stumbled across it on Netflix. And now that we've seen it... well... we found out why it disappeared into that ether. Pottersville is pretty bad. Actually, that might be overly generous: the movie is a train wreck on a scale rarely seen with a cast this impressive. The movie's lead is Michael Shannon, with Judy Greer, Christina Hendricks, Ron Perlman, and Ian McShane all playing major roles. That's a hell of a cast for a low-budget holiday satire. Assuming this is satire. Honestly, it's difficult to identify what exactly they were going for, because - whatever it was - it missed the mark by light-years. I'll get to the plot, I promise, bu

I have no idea whether or not you'll be able to watch this movie by the time we post this review. Lindsay and I stumbled across this on Amazon Prime a while back. It looked like a weird take on A Christmas Carol, so we decided to check it out. As the credits rolled... well, that's actually one of the reasons I suspect you're not going to be able to watch this. It's not that the credits are particularly unusual: the majority are indistinguishable from a typical Hollywood movie's. It's just that the typical Hollywood movie they are indistinguishable from is specifically the 2019 film, Angel Has Fallen. Once Carol's Christmas runs through its actual cast and crew, it just sort of runs a chunk of credits from Angel Has Fallen. I should note they don't start at the beginning of Angel Has Fallen's credits: they start with the stunt performers. I took a picture: I have no idea if this was some sort of mistake (i.e.: if they uploaded the wrong file, perhaps

One of the main plot threads of Yogi's First Christmas is that the bears - Yogi, Boo Boo, and Cindy - are constantly struggling to stay awake. In a stroke of artistic genius, the producers of this hour-and-thirty-eight-minute TV movie found ways to not just depict this on screen, but fully immerse the audience in the story by lulling us into the same state. I am not exaggerating when I say I found myself physically and emotionally drained when I paused this movie to discover I was less than thirteen minutes in. I should mention this seems to borrow heavily from Casper's First Christmas, a half-hour special also from Hanna-Barbera, released the previous year. The cast of characters is virtually identical, including Yogi and Boo Boo. Technically, I suppose this could  be a prequel to Casper's First Christmas, though I doubt anyone was worried about continuity when making this. On top of everything else, this includes a couple songs from the prior year's special (as well a

Let's start with the disclaimer: The Best Man Holiday is the sequel to The Best Man, a 1999 dramedy I haven't seen, meaning thematic and story connections between the films almost certainly went over my head. As such, I'm only able to review this as a standalone installment, rather than a piece of a longer story. There's a popular perspective that this shouldn't be a shortcoming in my ability to review a work, as movies supposedly need to be able to stand on their own. I do not share that ideology - I believe that presumed context isn't an unreasonable assumption on behalf of filmmakers and that those of us lacking that context should at the very least be upfront about it. Hence this paragraph. I don't feel quite as bad about this as I sometimes do, because the bulk of what I have to say is going to be positive and most of my complaints relate to story beats and character choices wholly contained within the narrative of this film. On top of that, I found eve

2020 was the year studios and TV networks simultaneously decided to acknowledge the existence of same-sex couples in Christmas romcoms. The highest profile example was of course Happiest Season  (still great). That year also saw the release of Lifetime's first holiday romcom with gay leads, The Christmas Setup . Around the same time, Hallmark released The Christmas House, their first Christmas movie with.... er... This is actually a bit complicated. The Christmas House is not centered around a same-sex couple, though the movie includes one in a significant supporting role. To put this in perspective, this is one of three couples the movie showcases, and they're given the least plot. Just so we're clear on how small a step forward this actually represents for Hallmark. That's not to say the gay characters in The Christmas House are bad. Brandon and Jake are given some good lines and some fun moments, and the movie does a decent job avoiding cliches and stereotypes. It a

I almost skipped over this one. It's one of several produced in part by Hallmark Entertainment, and I haven't been particularly impressed with the others I've seen from them. And while I want to see as many adaptations as humanly possible, the reality is there are a lot  of these out there. Since it's impossible to see them all, I've been prioritizing the best regarded, then mixing in as many that seem notable or unusual as possible. On the surface, this one seemed pretty unremarkable, and I hadn't come across any diehard fans or proponents.  It stars Kelsey Grammer, who has a less than stellar track record for choosing Christmas movies, and an even worse record when it comes to this particular story . On top of that, I'm not a fan of the guy as a person (his politics are awful, and - before anyone asks - given how bad the world's gotten, I absolutely think it's fair to let that factor into your opinion of a celebrity). All that said, he's certa