The Hallmark Channel is currently running their Christmas in July programming when they dip into their huge catalog of past holiday movies. But the global Covid-19 pandemic is wreaking havoc with virtually every part of our lives, and as movie and TV production has been mostly shut down for the past four months with little sign of significant re-opening before fall, I wonder if there will be any new Christmas movies on Hallmark this year—I suspect that summer is their prime time for production. With the sheer number of past movies (they've produced 30-40 new films every year for the past several years), this may not be a problem. In fact, it might be a blessing, as the Hallmark Christmas movie formula has become stale through overuse and could use a breather. I picked this movie at random to sample their July offerings and it's a nearly perfect example of their Christmas romance genre.
Elle works in Chicago for an advertising agency. A tight group of college friends serves as her family and she is looking forward to their annual Christmas get-together. At work, she is trying to impress her boss with a last-minute job putting together a social media campaign for a cookware line—she has her eye on a big promotion as a creative director and thinks this could put her over. Meanwhile, as she takes on the planning for her Christmas party, she has an awkward meet-cute moment with a handsome Coffee Shop Guy when she spills coffee on herself. It turns out that Coffee Shop Guy is Max, an ad man who usually works at her company's New York office but is in Chicago to help his sweet widowed mom with her Christmas ornament business (what a nice guy, right?). And they wind up partnered up to work on the cookware campaign. Sparks fly, but the course of true love never did run smooth; Max mistakes a cold-weather cuddle with her friend Jay to mean that they are in love. No sooner does that get settled than it turns out that both she and Max are applying for the same promotion and when she overhears him during his interview seeming to present ideas of hers as belonging to him, she's furious. Will Elle's social media ads be successful? Will she be able to make time for her Christmas party? Will she get the promotion? And, most importantly, will she and Max make up in time for a lovely kiss in the snow?
Of course, the answer is "yes" to all of above—no surprise there. But what I liked about this movie was that, between them, the supporting cast almost steals the show. Brooke Nevin (Elle) and Michael Cassidy (Max, both pictured at right) are nice-looking, pleasant people playing nice-looking, pleasant characters and they're fine. But there's a parallel romance which develops between Elle's buddy Jay (Jeremy Guilbaut) and Max's sister Oakley (Andrea Brooks) which is cute. Elle's best friend is played nicely by Lara Gilchrist, and her circle of friends includes some rainbow casting: the Asian-American actor Nelson Wong plays Ryan, and African-American actor Latonya Williams is new mother Kate who flies in from out of town with baby and husband in tow. Elle's boss, played by Catherine Lough Haggquist, defies the Hallmark boss stereotype and is actually a nice person, high-powered in a fairly low-powered way. P. Lynn Johnson is sweet but not overly so as Max's sweet mom. These characters aren't really fleshed out very much, but the point is that I could imagine all of them having lives outside the movie, which may be a credit to both the writers and the actors (Brooke Nevin gets co-writing credit for the original story). There are weaknesses, the worst of which involves the snafu between Elle and Max at the end which could have been solved in seconds except there was still ten minutes left in the movie and these romantic problems are always taken right down to the wire. All the cast members (except Cassidy) are veterans of Hallmark romances, but Andrea Brooks, in particular, was charming and deserves a Christmas movie all to herself. Will Hallmark get any new holiday movies out this year? Maybe not, and maybe that's OK. They can give the cookie-cutter productions a rest and maybe a recharge while fans double-dip from the catalog. In the picture at top left are Nevin, Cassidy, Brooks and Guilbaut. [Hallmark]
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