2023 Holiday Romance Movie Roundup: Part 2
I cheated a little bit. I’m going out of town later this week, and will be far from my DVR, so I felt like I should prioritize watching the buzziest ones. (By “buzzy” I just mean other people have recommended them to me.) So here we go with four new movies:
Title: A Biltmore Christmas
Network: Hallmark
Notable Stars: Jonathan Frakes
Premise: Time travel, Golden Age Hollywood
Plotty Stuff: We open on a fake Golden Age movie called His Merry Wife!, in which an actor named Jack Huston (Kristoffer Polaha) plays a guardian angel who comes to Earth to help his former wife find love again. In the modern day, screenwriter Lucy (Bethany Joy Lenz) brings a Mr. Balaban of Balaban Pictures a script for a new version of His Merry Wife! that has a more ambiguous ending and is “real life,” but Mr. Balaban isn’t having it and sends her to the Biltmore Mansion to… better understand the spirit of Christmas? It’s not really clear. After a scene with her sister, we’re supposed to understand that Lucy is deeply skeptical about love and the holidays and that His Merry Wife! is this universe’s It’s a Wonderful Life. When Lucy arrives at the Biltmore, she’s welcomed by Jonathan Frakes! He leads a tour through the mansion that includes an exhibit of costumes and props from His Merry Wife!, which was filmed here. Here we learn that Jack Huston died shortly after the movie was released. A prop hourglass on a table falls over, which sends Lucy back in time, where she meets Jack Huston. She freaks out and runs away and finds Commander Riker again, so she’s back in the present. (The hourglass is the time travel mechanism. It takes Lucy a lot longer to figure this out than it does for me.) Anyway, she ends up on the 1947 movie set again, and learns that the actors who play the romantic leads in the movie hate each other. Jack Huston is intrigued by her, though. He tells her that the movie has a sad, ambiguous ending, but he hates it and has been lobbying for them to make it happier (the happy ending is the one Lucy knows). So Lucy’s new goal in life is to find out more about the original ending and why they changed it. Back in the present, she steals some old clothes from a dusty closet at the Biltmore so she can look appropriately 1940s. On her next trip back in time, she gets her hands on the original script, but while she’s there, the movie’s romantic lead, Claude Lancaster (Colton Little) confronts her and assumes she’s there to replace his nemesis, Ava Hayward (Anabelle Borke). In the process of disabusing him of this notion, she knocks over the hourglass and it breaks, stranding her in 1947. She and Jack start spending time with each other. Ava overhears that Claude is trying to get her replaced and quits the film, but since this turn of events could affect the future, Lucy has to undo it. (Claude seems to be kind of a mustache-twirling villain.) She also encourages the writer/director of the movie to call his estranged wife, which is how he ends up rewriting the end of the film to be happier. (Basically, this is not a Back to the Future situation, because it’s a loop — Lucy’s present as she knows it is the way it is because she is destined to go back in time. The hourglass has a crack in it the first time Lucy sees it, for example.) At the Christmas Eve Ball, Jack and Lucy realize they have feelings for each other, but of course Lucy doesn’t belong in 1947. She tells Jack she’s a time traveler, and he believes her, but then the elder Mr. Balaban shows up and Lucy has to get out of there, so Jack helps her escape. So. Is the hourglass fixed? Does Lucy get back to the present? Is that it for her and Jack?
Holiday-Related Activities the Characters Engage in While Falling in Love: Jack and Lucy drink hot chocolate at night like they’re having cocktails. Everyone drinks eggnog at the Biltmore’s bar. Jack plays jazz piano and duets with Lucy on “Jingle Bells.” Lucy and Jack dance and kiss at the Christmas Eve Ball.
Character or Town with a Cute Christmassy Name: His Merry Wife! is doing a lot of work. (Present day Mr. Balaban points out that the title has an exclamation point, so it must have a happy ending.)
Hallmarkian Career Paths: This one’s an outlier.
Other Hallmark Cliches: Hallmark movies almost always rely on the “it’s impossible to stay in the same place and/or time” conflict.
Notable Coats: The 1940s clothes are very cute. Lots of victory curls on the ladies. Lucy wears a spectacular but kind of busy ballgown to the Christmas party.
Does It Snow? It does!
Other Thoughts: Fun bit of trivia: A Barney Balaban was the president of Paramount for most of the Golden Age, so I assume that’s where the name comes from. If you were like, “That name sounds familiar…” Barney was the uncle of character actor Bob Balaban. Also, in the movie, the modern Mr. Balaban is Michael but his grandfather Harold Balaban is played by Robert Picardo, who played the Doctor on Voyager, so there’s a lot of Star Trek in this movie.
The Biltmore is a real mansion built by the Vanderbilts during the Gilded Age. This movie was filmed on location, so that’s cool.
I know they can’t all be Oscar caliber, but Ava Hayward talks in a weird voice; I think she’s going for Katherine Hepburn, but it comes out like a 1930s gangster, see? (Claude Lancaster and Ava Hayward are great Golden Age Hollywood names, though.) Kristoffer Polaha looks like a Kennedy, enough that I took a tour through his IMDB to see if he’d played JFK somewhere, but the only movie I’ve seen that he was also in was Wonder Woman 1984, in which he is billed as “Handsome Man.” He’s very charming in this movie, though.
I’m very disappointed that Frakes never does the Riker Maneuver in this movie.
Should you track it down on streaming? Yes. It’s actually a good one! Anytime I was like, “But wait, how are they gonna…?” they figure out a way to pull it off. Seriously, props to the script writers. It got a little dusty in my living room at the end.
***
Title: Round and Round
Network: Hallmark
Notable Stars: No one major
Premise: Groundhog’s Day, but on the seventh night of Hanukkah
Plotty Stuff: Editor Rachel (Vic Michaelis) tells us that her parents met in the ’80s on a seventh night of Hanukkah and had a wild first date in NYC that ended with them eating jelly donuts (sufganiyot) at Goldberg’s Bakery, thus in the present Brooklyn resident Rachel is buying donuts at Goldberg’s to take home to her parents in New Jersey. While she’s on line at the bakery, her boyfriend calls her to say he can’t make it to her parents’ party. While she’s going through a train station that is not Penn Station (for the record), some dude bumps into her and her donuts go flying. So she arrives home empty-handed. Her dad is Rick Hoffman (Louis from Suits). Rachel’s grandma tries to set her up with a guy she invited to the party (the older women in this movie are all trying to be yentas), and the guy turns out to be the same dude who bumped into her and destroyed the donuts, Zach (Bryan Greenberg). Zach is a D&D nerd; there’s a runner about how he keeps dice in a fancy box in his pocket. The party carries on, and Rachel’s grandma gives her a dreidel that sparkles when she spins it, so it’s probably magic. The party ends when some curtains catch fire. Then Rachel wakes up in her bed in Brooklyn and it’s the seventh night of Hanukkah again. She goes to get the donuts, her boyfriend cancels, Zach collides with her at not!Penn Station and ruins the donuts, she goes to New Jersey, the house catches fire. Cue montage of Rachel experiencing the same day over and over again, and each time, donuts fly through the air and the house catches fire. She tells Zach she’s stuck in a time loop, and he points out that, in those time loop movies, the main character has to change something in their life in order to move forward; Rachel argues that her life is perfect, aside from her absentee boyfriend (a classic Hallmark sign that he’s a douche) and the fact that she seems to kind of hate her job. (Everyone in her family continuously points out that she’s a great writer, and she’s like, “Well, I edit other people’s books now, so.”) Zach brings her to a comic book store where one of his friends gives her a bunch of time loop comics. When Rachel’s douchey ex pocket dials her, Zach determines from the voicemail that he’s at a bar in TriBeCa where an ’80s cover band is playing (which he just knows; sure, Jan), and Zach thinks they should confront him. So Rachel, Zach, and Comic Book Guy (I never got his name) go to the bar, Rachel confronts her boyfriend, and the boyfriend dumps her. So now, at least, she knows he’s a douche. In another reboot, one of the kids who works at the comic book store is like, “Well, you fixed the bad boyfriend, so maybe it’s your job,” and Rachel confesses that she wrote a YA novel she’s always dreamed of publishing. Zach and the comic book nerds then workshop her novel? Like, they mark it up with red pen, and there’s a corkboard with index cards on it and the whole nine. Zach then gives her manuscript to a literary agent who is friends with Rachel, and the agent loves it. But that doesn’t work, so now she wonders if the donuts are the way to fix the time loop. So she has to devise a way to get to New Jersey without the donuts getting destroyed. But TWIST! In the reboot where she manages that — and kisses Zach — the douchey now-ex shows up at her parents’ house. Will Rachel put all the puzzle pieces together and figure out how to get to the eighth night of Hanukkah?
Holiday-Related Activities the Characters Engage in While Falling in Love: They play dreidel. One of the comic book nerds has an alarm on his phone that tells him when to light the comic book store’s menorah.
Character or Town with a Cute Christmassy Name: Nada, since this is a Hanukkah movie. Rachel’s parents live in Montclair, NJ, a real town near where I grew up, so it’s not, like, Menorah Falls or whatever.
Hallmarkian Career Paths: Rachel is a book editor; she says at one point that she’s an assistant editor at a big publishing house, and she aspires to be a writer (and as someone who was once an assistant editor at a big publishing house who now writes novels, she should calm down about all the hours she puts in at work, because she’s young and this is how it goes).
Other Hallmark Cliches: I feel like when Hallmark does Hanukkah movies, they jam as many Yiddish words into the script as possible, and if there’s a way to mention, like, Hebrew school or gefilte fish, someone weaves that into the script. On the other hand, it’s nice to have a Hallmark movie in which basically everyone in the movie is Jewish, so no one has to explain Hanukkah to the goyim. (Or Christmas to the Jews, which is even sillier.)
Notable Coats: Instead of red and green, everyone wears blue. Rachel wears what I think is a nice blue coat in the scene where she picks up the donuts from Goldberg’s, but she’s wearing a huge blue plaid scarf that obscures it, so it’s hard to tell. One of the yentas takes one look at Rachel and is like, “Oh, you’re clearly going to a Hanukkah party, let me tell you about this young man I know…” but it’s not clear to me how it’s obvious Rachel is going to a party aside from the fact that her coat is blue? Let’s not analyze it too closely. (Not!Penn Station has a busker who sings a goofy Hanukkah song while wearing a suit with a print that includes lots of Hanukkah iconography, also notable. And Rachel wakes up in Brooklyn wearing Hanukkah pajamas.)
Does It Snow? Sadly, no.
Other Thoughts: The literary agent character is an old friend of Rachel’s who speaks with a British accent, and Rachel is resentful of her and is like, “Girl, you’ve lived in London for two years,” but late in the movie, it’s revealed that in reality, she sounds like Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny, so that was a fun gag.
There’s a lot of fake ’80s music in this movie. None of these characters were alive in the ’80s, but I was, and I’ve never heard any of these songs before. Although there’s a fun cover of the Modern English song “I Melt With You” at the end.
Rachel’s sister is married to a woman and it just is, so that’s cool and progressive of Hallmark.
I love that Rachel has to use the donuts to fix the time loop. That is A+. And those donuts look tasty. And now I really want a donut.
Should you track it down on streaming? Yes, it’s really cute.
***
Title: A Cowboy Christmas Romance
Network: Lifetime
Notable Stars: Jana Kramer, Mary-Margaret “Dawson’s Mom” Humes
Premise: Cowboys.
Plotty Stuff: We open on Lexie Crenshaw (Kramer), a shark of a real estate broker in… LA? (somewhere with a lot of palm trees). Her bestie/partner informs her that, rather than going to Iceland for vacation, Lexie’s going to her hometown in Arizona to close on a lucrative property deal in which the owner requested Lexie specifically. Lexie is pretty upset about this — she and her dad seem to be estranged, she hasn’t been home in ten years — but she sucks it up and goes. She arrives in a little theme park of a Western town and takes herself to a bar to get a drink, where she meets a single dad (Adam Senn) who hits on her mostly because he thinks she’s his blind date. She isn’t, but they hit it off and she helps him blow his actual date off. They are clearly vibing on each other, and then dance and make out a lot. She invites him back to her hotel, but he turns her down because “I’m not a one and done kind of guy.” They part ways without learning each other’s names. The next day, Lexie drives out to a ranch to try to talk the owner into selling. She meets Millie (Humes) who says her son, Coby (the man Lexie is supposed to meet) is out repairing the fence because their cows wandered onto the Crenshaw property. Lexie’s like, “The Crenshaw land is twenty miles from here,” and Millie informs her the Crenshaws are buying up all the property in the area. Millie then lets Lexie borrow a horse to ride out to find Coby. So she does, and instantly bonds with a tween girl named Abby over horses, and you’re never going to believe this, but Coby is the guy from last night. Lexie’s brothers are also there and out her as a Crenshaw, so now Coby’s pissed and very uninterested in selling. Lexie tries telling him she doesn’t work for her father — she’s working for a mysteries property developer — but he doesn’t care. She also hadn’t planned to stay in town very long and has to leave her hotel, so she shows up at her dad’s house and asks to stay there, but it’s uncomfortable. A series of scenes expositions that Lexie’s older brother Walton is a dick who is turning the ranch into a tourist attraction to bring in more revenue, her younger brother Jack is hurt that she left town, her dad is trying to make amends but is still sexist and manipulative, and Coby has a side hustle training horses, including horses for Lexie’s dad, meaning Lexie and Coby run into each other repeatedly and have conversations about horses that are metaphors for what’s going on with them emotionally. Millie pulls Lexie aside at one point and is like, “Tell me about the offer,” because the ranch is struggling financially. (Lexie’s bestie/partner looks into it and says the Crenshaw name is in no way connected to the property developer, which seems to be an outfit out of Minnesota, but this is not reassuring to me, maybe because I know how these movies work.) After Lexie has dinner with Coby’s family one night, they totally do it in a barn. The next morning, Lexie accidentally sees his unpaid bills and they fight. Then she goes to have breakfast with her family, and they fight, and Lexie airs her grievances and storms out. (It boils down to horses being the thing that brought her the most joy, and two months after her mother died, her father wrote her out of the will because she’s a girl and ranching in men’s work, and she was deeply hurt.) The climax of the movie happens when a storm blows through. Coby has to ask the Crenshaws for help and everything kind of blows up. So, who is behind the mysterious property developer? Will Coby sell? Will Lexie reconcile with her family? Will Lexie and Coby overcome their geographic divide?
Holiday-Related Activities the Characters Engage in While Falling in Love: Lexie makes a Christmas tree out of horseshoes. Abby counts down the days until Christmas by calling it “Christmas Eve Eve Eve Eve.” There’s something called “Christmas lasagna.”
Character or Town with a Cute Christmassy Name: Christmas seems sort of incidental to this movie, actually. It takes place at Christmas, but that’s mostly in the background.
Hallmarkian Career Paths: She’s a big city realtor who falls for a cowboy in a small ranch town.
Other Hallmark Cliches: Lexie was a championship barrel rider in her youth and is a whiz with horses, of course.
Notable Coats: It apparently does not get cold enough in Arizona for anyone to wear a coat, so none.
Does It Snow? Nope.
Other Thoughts: Okay, so, I decided to record this after I saw this weekend update segment:
(It’s short and just at the beginning — this fine piece of cinema is the notorious first Lifetime holiday romance movie with a sex scene.)
Generally, one thing Lifetime tends to do better than Hallmark is that they cast leads with really good sexual chemistry, and it’s implied they’d do sex if given the opportunity, but we frustratingly usually just get a hug and a peck on the lips instead. (Hallmark is almost completely asexual. People fall in love, but sex is never part of it.) But in this case, Kramer and Senn have really good chemistry that leads to them making out on a kitchen island before he carries her to the barn. The sex scene itself is very brief — it fades to black shortly after he takes his shirt off — but they do wake up in their underwear in the barn together.
I’ll just say, there’s a little bit of a twist with the ending I didn’t see coming that ends up being the way the romance is resolved, and it’s convenient, but it works.
Should you track it down on streaming? Yes. The plot’s a little cliché, but the performances are good and I got pretty emotionally invested in these characters. And these two are so hot together, things might light on fire.
***
Title: Christmas on Cherry Lane
Network: Hallmark
Notable Stars: Jonathan Bennett, James Denton
Premise: Three couples at Christmas.
Plotty Stuff: Couple #1: Lizzie and John (Erin Cahill and John Brotherton) have just moved into their house, and it’s full of boxes. They’re expecting a baby. Couple #2: Regina (Catherine Bell) is a widow with adult children, and she has to break the news that she’s selling the house. Couple #3: Mike (Jonathan Bennett) and his husband Zain (Vincent Rodriguez, Josh from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) are having their kitchen renovated but the contractor is running behind schedule and their kitchen is unusable, and Mike is very stressed out by this.
It’s not clear until a about a half hour into the movie, but these are three occupants of the same house, 20 years apart. Lizzie and John own it in the early 1970s. The next owners are Regina and her husband, and that story takes place in the ’90s. Mike and Zain are now. Neighbor Daisy is present in all three stories.
(Side note: Zain says his name like “Zee-ahn” but IMDb spells it Zain, so that’s what I’m going with.)
So, plot. Let’s sort this by couple, because the movie bounces around. Lizzie’s whole family shows up on Christmas Eve, which Lizzie and John find distressing. Lizzie is also feeling extremely stressed; John runs a gas station that is barely turning a profit because of the price of gas (because 1970s). The baby is due imminently. Lizzie’s family is a lot and kind of take over the house. They get a call from the police that the gas station has been broken into, so John runs to see what happened. The extent of the damage seems to be a broken window. John befriends the cop on the scene, who is also an expectant father. (He’s Regina’s husband, right?) They’re sweeping up the glass when Lizzie’s father calls and says she’s in labor. It’s blizzarding outside, but the cop is like, “I’ve got snow tires and a siren, let’s do this.” While Lizzie struggles through labor on the sofa in the living room, her mother admits that she’s been so overbearing because she worries Lizzie is all grown up and doesn’t need her anymore.
Regina’s boyfriend Nelson (James Denton) shows up early at her house and accidentally lets slip that she and Nelson are engaged, which Regina’s son Conrad is not cool with. Regina also plans to retire and sell the house, so this will be their last Christmas on Cherry Lane. Conrad is extremely not cool with that, and Regina has to be like, “Not your decision, buddy.” Conrad decides he needs to fill the house with Christmas magic to talk his mom out of selling. (Regina’s daughter Winnie seems fine with everything.) Conrad pitches a series of family fun activities that mostly make it clear he misses their father; Regina sees right through him and reiterates that she won’t change her mind. Conrad storms out. (His character is supposed to be 27, but he acts like a bratty child here.) He runs off to his friend Ivy’s house. Ivy gives him a pep talk; she also announces that she’s about to get a foster child and she wants to make Christmas special for him. (She calls the kid Sam, but it’s Zain, right?) Conrad decides to drive back to his mom’s house.
Mike and Zain have just been approved to foster a little girl… right now. So they have to prep their house for her right away, even though they are having a dinner party that night and the kitchen still isn’t done. Zain was also adopted, and he wants to make his house as welcoming for his new foster daughter as his foster family was for him. But he doesn’t have time to dwell on it, because the contractor ruins Mike’s turkey, so now they have nothing to serve for dinner. Then the power goes out. Mike goes to his restaurant to cook dinner, although given how pretentious he is about food (he tells Zain that if Zain buys canned cranberry sauce, they’re getting a divorce) his restaurant surprisingly looks like a diner. Mike manages to finish dinner at the restaurant, but his car won’t start.
Will Lizzie’s baby be delivered safely? Will Conrad get over himself? Will Mike make it home in time to meet his new foster daughter?
Holiday-Related Activities the Characters Engage in While Falling in Love: Lots of these characters try to distract each otherby singing Christmas carols. John and Lizzie decorate a tree. Mike and Zain (very tastefully) decorate the main part of their house, although Mike spends most of that scene plotting his contractor’s untimely demise (he only refrains because he needs the kitchen to be done). Regina’s family plays a goofy game involving blindfolds.
Character or Town with a Cute Christmassy Name: Cherry Lane I think is supposed to be the Christmassy thing. There’s a character named Ivy.
Hallmarkian Career Paths: I don’t think we learn everyone’s jobs, but John is a handyman, Mike is a chef, Regina is a high school principal, Winnie is an aspiring singer.
Other Hallmark Cliches: All of the couples are established, so the romance cliches are mostly dispensed with, but there’s a lot about making families welcoming for new children.
Notable Coats: The styling of Lizzie and John’s wardrobe is not obviously ’70s, so I didn’t pick up on the time period until the movie told me it was 1973, aside from Lizzie commenting on Nixon and the gas shortage. It’s a real mishmash of different period fashion; her parents and siblings look more early ’60s. Lizzie and John look modern. So does Regina’s family. Wardrobe could have tried harder here. Lizzie has a pretty plaid coat, though.
Does It Snow? It does!
Other Thoughts: Conrad drives a rust bucket of a car. Winnie mocks him because he has a lucrative enough job to buy a new car, but he insists on driving his uncle’s old car because his uncle was his father’s best friend and also he’s resistant to change. We see later that this was John’s car in the 1970s. In the modern storyline, Conrad has the car restored. So that’s some nice continuity.
There are a ton of other connections between these three families, which I won’t spell out as to not spoil them.
Should you track it down on streaming? Sure. It’s a little low-budget, and sometimes heavy-handed, but the way the stories weave together is fun. Actually, for a movie with this many characters, they manage to tell pretty complete stories for all three couples, so it works.
And that’s it for now!