2024 Holiday Romance Movie Roundup: Part 1
It’s not that I’m feeling Scrooge-y this year, I’ve just been slow to adapt to it being the holiday season, and as such, my holiday romance movie consumption is going at a slower pace than usual, so you might get these in briefer installments than years past.
Years Past: 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 Part 1 | 2023 Part 2
So, for Part 1, we’ve got a hot snowman and a 2-hour commercial for an American football team. Let’s do this.
Title: Hot Frosty
Network: Netflix
Notable Stars: Lacey Chabert, Dustin Milligan, Craig Robinson, Joe Lo Truglio
Premise: Gretchen Weiners falls in love with Ted from Schitt’s Creek, who is an actual snowman.
Plotty Stuff: We open on Kathy (Chabert) living in a house in serious disrepair, including the heat being broken. She owns the diner in her small town of Hope Springs. She’s gifted a scarf from the owner of a thrift shop, and there’s a lot of winking involved, so it’s probably magic. At the town’s snow sculpture competition, she sees a Greek god of a snow sculpture (he has abs) and she puts the scarf around his neck. After she leaves, said sculpture turns into a real-live and very jacked naked man (Milligan). He stumbles through town and conveniently through the window of the thrift shop, where he steals some coveralls and boots. When Kathy finds him the next morning, she thinks he’s going through some kind of mental episode. She takes him to a doctor, who finds that he has a very low body temperature, and Kathy starts to realize maybe the crazy man (who is going by Jack) and the sexy snow sculpture are one and the same. She brings him home and installs him in front of a TV. (He doesn’t know what food is, but somehow he can speak and read English.) He learns how to do stuff from TV and starts repairing Kathy’s house, and then the hot-and-bothered middle-aged ladies of town start hiring him to fix stuff, but he’s a new guy in a small town and has caught the attention of the local cops (Craig Robinson and Joe Lo Truglio). Jack seems to believe his time as a live man is temporary, so he’s going about living life to the fullest, and he wants Kathy, but he’s worried he’ll have to leave her.
Holiday Shenanigans the Characters Get Up to While Falling in Love: Jack learns to make eggnog from TV. He also finds the Christmas decorations in Kathy’s basement and decorates her house. He helps the kids at the local high school decorate for their Winter Dance. He and Kathy make Christmas cookies together.
Hallmark Cliches: In addition to Chabert, perennial Hallmark mom Sherry Miller plays the owner of the thrift shop. Netflix does the Netflix thing of putting its own movies on in the background. There’s some weird out of time stuff, too. Everyone drives vintage cars. Sheriff Craig Robinson uses a flip phone.
Does It Snow? It does!
Other Thoughts: We learn about a third of the way into the movie that Kathy’s husband died suddenly of cancer not long ago, which gives Kathy some emotional depth; she’s not ready to move on just yet, but the goofy guy who thinks he’s a snowman is so absurd he breaks her out of her funk. But this is one of those movies you can’t think about for more than five minutes or it starts to fall apart.
Should You Track It Down on Streaming: Yes! It’s goofy but fun, and much better than it should be.
***
Title: Holiday Touchdown
Network: Hallmark
Notable Stars: Ed Begley Jr., Diedrich Bader, Christine Ebersole
Premise: An extended ad for the Kansas City Chiefs
Plotty Stuff: I would like to note two things upfront. 1) I watched the “extended cut” on Hallmark+, in case I mention things that weren’t in the version that aired on terrestrial cable. 2) I have no strong feelings about the Chiefs. (That is, I’m a Giants fan, and we’re not going to talk about that anymore.)
Anyway! Alana (Hunter King) comes from a family that eats, drinks, and breathes the Chiefs. Derrick (Tyler Hynes) works for the Chiefs but he’s new in town. He goes to a local BBQ joint to try KC BBQ for the first time, and it happens to be owned by Alana’s family. Alana’s mom and grandma (Megyn Price, Ebersole) spot him there. Their function in this movie is to be busybody matchmakers. In the KC Chiefs store the family owns, Derrick spots a toque in a glass case and admires the “vintage hat,” and Alana tells him it’s not for sale because it’s magic; when someone in the family wears the hat on Christmas, the Chiefs win the Super Bowl. Grandpa Ed Begley Jr. first acquired the hat fifty-some years ago, then lost it for a bit, then got it back in 2019, when, as we all know, the Chiefs won the Super Bowl. Derrick thinks this is nonsense because he is “not superstitious” and the whole family is like, “Welp, that’s over. Bye forever, Derrick.” (Look, as someone who is still pretty sure she was solely responsible for the Yankees slump this past summer, I believe it. Derrick.) Derrick turns up at the shop the next day because his job is fan outreach for the Chiefs, and he’s there to meet with Alana’s family about the Fan of the Year contest, to which Alana has entered. Alana is still mad about Derrick not believing in the magic toque. While she’s yelling at him, she drops some money in a Santa’s red bucket, and he’s probably real Santa, because that’s how it works in these movies. (Uh, spoiler: he is the real Santa; who knew Santa was a Chiefs fan?) Derrick invites her to a Chiefs staff holiday party, to which Alana wears a spectacular dress that I would like to be in my closet. They ditch the party to sit in Alana’s season ticket seats in the empty stadium and have a heart-to-heart talk and then kiss. (Seems conflict-of-interest-y to date the Fan of the Year, but this is a Hallmark movie, so we’re sliding right past it.) Obviously, Alana’s family wins Fan of the Year, and this is somehow not the end of the movie. Instead, Alana brings the magic toque to an event at the Chiefs’ stadium to show it off, but the hat vanishes while Alana is distracted by Santa! And it’s the worst possible time because the Chiefs are playing a must-win game on Christmas! Oh no! Alana and Derrick have an incredibly stupid fight because Derrick wants to try passing off an imitation hat as the real one (now that she’s Fan of the Year, the whole city is depending on her to wear the magic toque on Christmas so the Chiefs win the game). Alana is like “You never believed in the hat!” and he’s like, “You have more faith in the hat than me?” and they kinda break up. Will Alana realize this fight is stupid? Will they find the magic toque? Will Alana realize the magic was in her all along? Diedrich Bader plays Alana’s dad. Various lesser-known Chiefs, the mayor of KC, and Jenna Bush Hager have cameos.
Holiday Shenanigans the Characters Get Up to While Falling in Love: Alana and Derrick put beef-themed Christmas ornaments on the tree in front of the BBQ restaurant. They bake gingerbread for a gingerbread house building competition. They go ice skating. They drink holiday themed cocktails. Derrick gives Grandpa Ed Begley Jr. the greatest gift of all: his seats from the old Chiefs stadium.
Hallmark Cliches: This kind of flips some old cliches on their heads. KC is not a small town, but Alana is the native, and Derrick is the jet-setter who lived all over the world with his high powered job in PR, so it’s the dude who chooses to stay to be a part of Alana’s life (although the movie’s conflict is mostly about Alana clinging to fate and superstition while Derrick is skeptical of all of it, although he eventually just plays along the way that Ben on Parks and Rec pretends he understands why Lil’ Sebastian is a big deal).
Does It Snow? It does, in a weird “added in post” way.
Other Thoughts: It’s important to know that one of the other contestants in the Fan of the Year contest is a cat named Catrick Mahomes. He was obviously robbed. I mean, look at this cat.
Should You Track It Down on Streaming: Sure. Hunter King is quite charming. I enjoy sports superstitions. Catrick Mahomes.