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| run away, Lacey! |
Watched: 12/18/2024
Format: Amazon Streaming - Prime
Viewing: First
Director: David Winning
So: Tonight Jamie and I admitted to each other that we weren't going to watch any of our usual holiday movies. We gripped hands, Thelma and Louise style, and declared we are going over the Hallmark cliff this year. I still have two movies I want to get in that are not Hallmark, but if it doesn't happen, I'll live.
Also - I started wondering if the movies at Hallmark had actually gotten better and harder to drag, or if I just got soft. I mean, I keep talking about how Hallmark recognized it's issues and doesn't make the exact same junk anymore.
Well. Thank you, Time For Us To Come Home For Christmas (2020), because I've realized, it not me, it's Hallmark. Or, it was, as recently as 2020. This movie was super fun to riff and I had a great time.
What's remarkable about Time For Us To Come Home For Christmas is that it's a horror movie in almost every way, but instead of it ending with Lacey Chabert running for her life before putting an axe through a dude's skull, it wimps out and has a nice, Hallmark ending.
Following the death of her mother, an emotionally fragile Chabert receives what she thinks is a gift from her employer to take the holidays at a lodge in the country. However, when she arrives, she realizes that her boss didn't pay for that, and she can't figure out who did. While the owner of the Inn, a man with a mysterious past of his own - who only recently obtained the Inn - is constantly lurking and seems unwilling to leave Chabert alone, she learns other guests also had been summoned to the Inn, and the Inn's owner at least claims to not know what is happening. Instead, as the guests consider their own pasts and connections to the place, the mystery deepens...
Vulnerable in her emotional state dealing with her mother's passing, Chabert confides in the friendly Inn owner, and allows herself to be drawn to him. Meanwhile, his mysterious sister is in the background, watching Chabert and the Inn-owner... always watching.
At this point, guests should start dropping like flies, but instead, they find out they all have ties to Christmas at the Inn in 1984, and it's wildly wholesome. Completely disappointing.
Anyway, this movie is weird looking and kind of a mess. It's hard to describe how distracting their choice of location is, especially when they make decisions like "don't put curtains on the massive glass wall of windows that look into Chabert's bedroom". And, man, even before I realized this movie really felt like an old-school murder mystery or horror film, the direction given to Man was, invariably, "consistently harass the small, young woman travelling alone whenever she's in public spaces, but trapped here at the Inn".
It's also a movie that begs us to ignore everything we're seeing with our own eyes and believe a corporate events center with obvious 21st century architecture is a charming Christmas Lodge from the mid-20th century, built with rustic charm. It wants us to believe that Chabert is staying in a hotel room with a wall full of uncurtained windows that open onto a common area.* The room doors are *glass* (a gross violation of fire safety laws, people). We're to believe that snow looks or moves like that and is consistent as if... from a machine... While also moving at different velocities depending on which angle we're seeing the snow fall from in shot/ reverse shot set-ups. It does have a real musician in it - Leon - who is like 57 and being asked to play a guy who would be in his mid-70's, and they do nothing to make him look older, and he's youthful for his age. It's confusing. Lastly - that leftover prom dress they put Chabert in at the end is... not it. We demand better for Lacey.
I didn't really understand the ending. I'm unsure if she decided to stay at the clearly failing Inn, return to her original home in Brooklyn or go back to being a successful attorney in Seattle with a lucrative career and a promising future. I think she stayed at the Inn? But... why? This @#$%ing guy? I don't think so. This is some weird emotional manipulation of someone in a tough patch in their life, if so, and he should let her go be rich and happy, not changing sheets at his bad Inn-vestment.
This movie is the third in a series produced by country guy/ TV guy/ somehow-landed-Gwen-Stefani guy Blake Shelton. They are entitled "Time For Me To Come Home for Christmas", "Time For You", Time for Them"... You get the idea. I guess it's all based on come song he did like 12 years ago I've never heard and never will.
*One day remind me to tell you about my emergency hotel room in Palo Alto, CA and sleeping in an actual hotel room with a semi-transparent curtain that opened onto a common area. It was... unnerving
I also think I've slowly developed a TV crush on Chabert and don't know how I feel about it
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