Hallmark Watch: A Glenbrooke Christmas (2020)

Watched:  12/21/2020

Format:  Hallmark?

Viewing:  First

Director:  David I. Strasser

This movie wasn't very good.  

Basic "I'm lying about who I am" plot as an heiress goes to an idyllic smalltown and falls for a fire fighter in generic Hallmark style.  The movie comes remarkably close to saying some true things about what happens when rich people start eyeing a community as the next hip place to move (they ruin it.  See: Austin), and that rich people are weird and don't relate well to non-rich people (in my experience - about 50/50.  It surfaces in subtle ways to absurd ways.).  This, of course, makes the rich person mad.  And the movie has to back pedal and say rich people are totally normal and don't fuck up the economy of middle-class towns.

The excuse-plot is that the heiress came to hear Christmas bells her parents loved, and the carillon is broken (the movie refuses to use the word carillon for mysterious reasons, and keeps describing the carillon instead.  You can teach people new words, Hallmark.).  The cost of repair is $10,000.  Not chump change.  But the hero is a millionaire many times over.  That's a write-off for her if she fixes it, but the movie refuses to let her just find a way to and over a bag of cash and instead leverages her rich pals to buy Kinkaid knock-offs from local teens.  

Discovering that (a) his new ladyfriend is a millionaire and not who she said she was, and (b) knowing that even if he got past that, she and he will have nothing in common, our firefighter reasonably calls it a day.  But she doodled him in a sketchbook, and rather than seeming creepy, he decides this means its love and he was wrong about her and the situation, and he judged her wrongly.  

Eh.  Did he, though?  In some ways, you'd really have to think "I've been dating a sociopath."  But at the same time, deciding to rush into marriage with a multi-millionaire before the endorphins clear and she thinks of a pre-nup is a baller move.