Watched: 11/6/2022
Format: Hallmark
Viewing: First
Director: Kevin Fair
I watched this because it stars Erica Durance, full stop. This is an Erica Durance stan site.
Look, if all goes well, we're going to podcast a Christmas movie or two this year and I'll talk more about Hallmark Christmas movies. They're not something you watch or discuss individually, but watching them is a longterm investment in observing an ever-evolving living organism of Christmas cheer. Collectively, they're something that mutates to respond to the environment and to best dominate the landscape. Thus, talking about any individual Hallmark movie is missing the point - you have to be talking about all Hallmark Movies or none at all.
We also will talk about what the movies are for, and how you watch them. And this movie served that purpose pretty well this weekend.
To that end, I had it on, I put on the movie and occasionally looked up to see what was happening as it unspooled. I performed household tasks in need of doing - like changing lightbulbs and cleaning and doing dishes and dealing with recycling. I was in and out of the house during all of this, and thanks to ample commercial breaks (this was recorded off cable) and the friction-free plot that just kept happening with no real conflict to mar the story, I'm pretty sure I followed the movie just fine. I saw a lot of great, large kitchens and Erica Durance in a wide-array of outfits.
In these films, characters always state their motives and feelings in clear terms, including "I don't know what I'm feeling". Because these are movies about things that cause feelings. Sadness. Melancholy. Stress. But always curving toward happiness and joy derived from Christmas, new friends, and new love.
As I say - I watched this because it stars the lovely Erica Durance, who played Lois Lane on several seasons of Smallville. Here, she's a recently widowed woman who has moved she and her young son to a new town to open a new interior design business (away from friends and family? Now? It doesn't all add up.). And - showing that Hallmark movies have dared to make the formula a bit different - it's about Durance meeting a new neighbor who went through similar (or worse) experiences decades prior, and how Durance and the neighbor - played by Lynn Whitfield, who you've seen in like 15 things at least - find friendship and mutual understanding despite their lack of any differences of opinion on anything of consequence.
The drama plays out in microbursts, which seems to be the new thing for the Hallmark movies. There's no single issue or misunderstanding, it's more like little episodes as characters get to know each other. It's kind of a weird style of storytelling that I can only really point to older novels or a few 80's or 90's movies to compare it to.
Yeah, a possible suitor for Durance is introduced, but the movie also knows it is *too soon* for romance to be more than a possibility by movie's end. Thus, he's an endlessly polite and patient dude who also does the things dudes do when they hope it will get them in good with Erica Durance - like dropping all of their Christmas plans to do a 5 hour turn around trip. It's a shocking amount of restraint in comparison to how these movies worked a decade ago. Like I said - evolving organism.
So it includes Hallmark staples
- Single Mom
- Kid unnaturally concerned with the feelings of adults
- Attempt to recreate Christmases past
- Weird Christmas events that don't happen in nature (Christmas camp for kids?)
- Local man who everyone in town adores but who is unattached
- Solider/ Veteran
