NOSTALGIC CHRISTMAS (2019)

It's Christmas time, and if you read this blog, you know the Hallmark Christmas movie drill: driven big-city gal meets small-town, down-to-earth guy who works with his hands; sparks fly, complications ensue; she comes to appreciate the slower life; they kiss; the end. In the first of our holiday movies up for review, we have Anne (Brooke D'Orsay), a big-city toy buyer for a department store chain. After she wraps up a presentation of the latest snazzy, gimmicky toy of the season, she heads off to her hometown in Maine to help her father Bill who is retiring and closing up his toy shop where he sells old-fashioned wooden toys that he makes. When she was young, she made toys as well, and Bill has found a bunch of them and is giving them away with purchases. Once in town she is corralled by an old friend into helping plan the town's Christmas displays and activities, and finds herself working with (as the Hallmark web site puts it) 'handsome local widower' Keith (Trevor Donovan). He is also dealing with a retirement problem: the woman who runs the town mill, where he is a foreman (you didn't think he wouldn’t work with his hands, did you?), is retiring and trying to sell the land, which would throw much of the town out of work. Will Anne decide she wants to stay and run the toy store? Will Keith be able to keep the mill open and thereby avoid having to leave town? But more importantly, will Anne and Keith kiss by Christmas Day?

I mock these movies because it's so easy (predictability and generically vanilla characters), but the difference between me turning a movie off at the 20 minute mark (when the first ad comes) and sticking with it to the end is usually a matter of two things: an attractive male lead and good chemistry between the male and female leads. This one has both. I liked Brooke D'Orsay in Miss Christmas last year, and I remember Trevor Donovan as country singer Eddie Arnold in the underrated TV series Sun Records—which sadly was not renewed before it could finish its story. One minus: no one in the supporting cast really gets to shine. Another minus: weak writing—with particular reference to the last-minute machinations to save the mill. And there's that terrible generic title. But it's snowy and Christmassy and there's Trevor Donovan (pictured) as the manly but sensitive guy, so I didn't feel too guilty about finishing this one. [Hallmark]