Chabert Watch: The Wedding Veil Inspiration (2023)

okay, I guess the hat is fine.

Watched:  03/14/2025

Format:  Hallmark 

Viewing:  First

Director:  Terry Ingram

heads-up:  If you're here for 100% Chabert content, I am going to alert you now, Lacey Chabert is a supporting character/ Executive Producer on this movie, and not the star.  But watching the Chabert filmography will mean sometimes she is not the lead.  I know.  I can't believe it either.

Job:  Art professor

new skill:  Social media phenom

Man: Paolo Bernardini

Job of Man: Lace mogul

Goes to/ Returns to:  Stays in Chicago

Event:  Lace store opening

Food:  we're back on Mac n' Cheese

The Wedding Veil Inspiration (2023) is part 5 (of 6) of The Wedding Veil series, and direct sequel to The Wedding Veil Unveiled.  The longer this veil nonsense goes on, the more they've piled in continuity, but like the driest of fan-fiction, it's all just rehashing the original concept while shoving our leads through some standard life-experience.  And, of course, now suggesting that the veil is not just for romance but ensuring its victims procreate.  

It *does* have a pretty good bit of insight at the end that just about had me flabbergasted for a Hallmark movie.  But it also brings in Man #2 and Not-Sarah Sherman as secondary romance victims of the veil, suggesting that its not just women who will be forced into romance by possessing the veil.

Italian Handsome Man Paolo is opening his lace store in Chicago (I think the suggestion is its on the Magnificent Mile) and Autumn Reeser is teaching Art History for Non-Art Majors.  She's also in line to become Department Chair of the Art History Department.  Like all movies, no one involved has bothered to speak to anyone in Academia to ask "hey, how does one become Department Chair?", which is something one could find out.  And if the usual processes are in place here, it is not at all obvious as Reeser is being mentored by a faculty near retirement age.  I won't keep complaining that's not how this works, because sometimes it is.

Disney Watch: Lilo & Stitch (2002)

Watched:  03/13/2025

Format:  Disney+

Viewing;  First

Directors:  Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders

No, I'd never seen Lilo & Stitch (2002).  It came out about three weeks after I moved to Phoenix back in 2002, and I guess we didn't get around to it at the time, or in the ensuing 23 years.

The movie is kind of the last gasp of Disney's 2D efforts as the annual summer release schedule was apparently taxing the creative teams and leading to less and less enthusiasm for each year's release.  And looking at the Disney Animation Studios output of 2D movies in the 00's, you can see this is the second-to-last film of the 2D movies anyone really talks about - the final being The Princess and the Frog.  

Spoiler - I liked this movie a lot!  The animation is fun and really well executed, but the story about being a terror goblin who doesn't even know what a family is and then learns that he wants one?  I found it shockingly effective and moving.  

When you want to know what sticks with people, its never the 3D or some animation sequence, it's how they felt, and I'll remember this one for a while.  That said - *how* they get you to feel any specific way is tied to those technical achievements, direction, art and story writing, and it's surprising to see a movie about a less-than-perfect family unit containing a kid who is acting out in the wake of the loss of her parents and her older, barely-an-adult sister, who is trying to keep it together.  Add in an alien-prison-escapee-genetically-created-space-WMD and it's a ride.  

But, yeah, Disney is at its best when it taps into those core universal emotions, that kids and adults can tap into, but when they come in at an oblique angle.  Do I spend time thinking I do not know who I am and if I have a family?  No.  But all of us can sympathize if not empathize with not feeling like we know how to fit in like Lilo, or that no one told us the basics, like Stitch - and reach for a place to belong.  

Voice talent on this thing is interesting, with Tia Carrere, David Ogden Stiers, KITH alumnus Kevin McDonald, Ving Rhames, Zoe Caldwell and a young Daveigh Chase as Lilo.  

The character animation is top flight, much as Princess and the Frog will make you a little sad that so much of what 2D did so well was really hitting on all cylinders just as Disney pivoted to 3D.   From both the first space sequences and the introduction to our out-of-the-way Hawaiian town, you can tell Disney's animators were leaning in hard.  There's a lot of motion-capture that makes the action fluid but still fun in a way I think we're kind of forgetting, as well as layered work that's just fantastic.

And the story is kind of daring in having both a little kid who maybe isn't a precious angel and her far worse alien pal - and you genuinely can buy that they help each other be better.  That's some solid writing.  We're a pretty far cry from Belle being an oddball for being nice and reading books as Lilo smacks around her classmate.  And, yet, I pull for Lilo - and holy cow, does it land as I look at my own niece and nephew puzzling through their younger years.

Anyhoo, I finally caught up on this one, and will certainly watch the live action remake.  It looks really fun.

Chabert Watch! The Wedding Veil Expectations (2023)

Watched:  03/13/2025

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:   First

Director:  Peter Benson

Job:  Curator at an Art Museum

new skill:  interior decorating

Man: Kevin McGarry

Job of Man: art teacher

Goes to/ Returns to:  Stays in Boston

Event:  Museum gala

Food:  Pineapple pizza (her pregnancy craving)

If one concept needed absolutely no sequels, it was The Wedding Veil, but here we are.  

Because we're doing all of this for science, I looked up the book that these movies are all supposedly based on, and it has nothing to do with anything in the movie.  I have no idea why they keep crediting the author.  The only thing the movies have in common with the book is that there's a wedding veil.  The plot and characters seem totally different.

The author is a Texas romance writer, and seems to pen hot and heavy romances about cowboys that take place here in the Lone Star State.  At some point, she renamed the book to make it more Texas themed.  Anyway, the series is well reviewed by romance fans, so get on that, if that's your jam. 

Back to our film!  

It's an indeterminate amount of time since we last checked in with Chabert and Man.  And as we have already been told in the first installment, and mentioned in two other films - they're happily -ever-aftering.   So, as we enter this film, we must put together a movie that both has some sort of conflict and doesn't disrupt the Hallmark promise of life being great after marriage.  Thus, we have a film with multiple plot threads and issues that rise up, and then fizzle away like water on a hot plate.

Western Watch: The Rare Breed (1966)

Watched:  03/08/2025

Format:  TCM

Viewing;  First

Director:  Andrew V. McClagen

A western-comedy-adventure movie fantasy about something weirdly specific - The Rare Breed (1966) is about the introduction of the Hereford steer to Texas.  Is this how it happened?  Most assuredly not. Do I care?  I do not.  

Because what the movie is about is really about dreams - who has them, how they can die or be put on ice, how we can find new ones, and how good does Maureen O'Hara look in green?*

Maureen O'Hara plays a British woman who was widowed en route to America, bringing a prize Hereford steer she plans to breed.  She and her husband planned to prove this type of steer could thrive in the US, and crossbreed well with local steer - but as he died she's now left to do it on her own.  So, O'Hara and her young-adult daughter, played by Juliet Mills (sister of Hayley), do what you did in the 19th century if you'd wound up here - they persevere.