USS Christmas | 2020 Christmas Movies

A very long time ago, I lived in Wilmington, North Carolina. Parts of USS Christmas were filmed there. It’s very weird to watch a Christmas movie and recognize locations.

While on a Christmas Tiger Cruise, newspaper reporter Maddie (Jen Lilley) comes upon a love story from the ship’s very first Tiger Cruise. Lt. Billy Jenkins (Trevor Donovan) helps her to track down the couple.

The term “Tiger Cruise” is heavily used in USS Christmas. Apparently, it is a period of time when family and friends can join their deployed sailors on their ship to experience the daily operations. While I love the concept (and yes, it is a real thing), it doesn’t have a lot to do with the movie. Sure, Maddie finds out about Sam (Hardy Rawls) and Dorothy (Ginny MacColl) while on the Tiger Cruise and the ship coincidentally takes them to New York, where they find more information about the couple…but that is it. We don’t even really see any of the named military characters actually working.

So far this season, Hallmark Movies & Mysteries has brought us pretty good movies. Unfortunately, this is not one of those. Everything about it is terrible. The actors have zero chemistry, the plot is boring, the conflicts are non-existent. It’s a complete waste of time. You would be better off untangling Christmas lights all night instead.

Merry Liddle Christmas Wedding | 2020 Christmas Movies

Sometimes a sequel is better than the original movie. That almost never happens in Christmas movies. Merry Liddle Christmas Wedding is the exception.

There are only 2 days left until Jacquie (Kelly Rowland) and Tyler (Thomas Cadrot) have their perfect Christmas Eve wedding. When Jacquie’s family shows up, things go awry.

Last year, we saw Jacquie and Tyler meet in Merry Liddle Christmas. And that movie was terrible. Jacquie was too much of a control freak and her entire family is like a chaos tornado that ruins everything they touch. Somehow, they family has tamed their wild ways. Since the movie needs some form of unbridled chaos, we are instead given Garrett, the wedding planner who refuses to speak to anyone besides Jacquie and quits abruptly after her family talks to him a whole three times. (Yes, that part annoyed me to no end.)

Of course, once the infuriating wedding planner quits, the Liddle family jumps to work trying to get Jacquie’s dream wedding ready in two days. While there are still catastrophic accidents that occur, there aren’t nearly as many of them. That makes Wedding much more bearable than the original.

It’s also nice that Jacquie isn’t as ridiculously controlling as she was previously. I don’t know if that is because she’s been spending time with Tyler’s kids or if she had some sort of epiphany. She is still a little weird - she wants an entirely white wedding on Christmas Eve with these atrociously ugly decorations and she apparently tries to feed children goat’s cheese with vegetables. But she isn’t throwing tantrums when things get ruined. She just kinda shrugs it off disappointingly.

The best part of this movie? You don’t need to watch the first one to understand this one. There’s a “Previously in Jacquie’s life” opening and the family members still all call each other by their relationship: “Hey Sis!,” “I love you, bro,” etc. (Let me say that I have a younger sister and I don’t think I have ever said anything like “Hi, Sis!” to her.)

Merry Liddle Christmas Wedding is definitely on my watch list. There are some adorable moments that made me smile. And that doesn’t happen a lot in Lifetime movies!

Christmas Waltz | 2020 Christmas Movies

At least this movie about dancing has actual dancers in it! This may be a Christmas movie first!

Avery (Lacey Chabert) is planning a Christmas wedding with her fiancé, David (Jeremy Guilbaut). After choosing the cake and scheduling ballroom dancing lessons, the couple cancels her wedding. Dance instructor Roman (Will Kemp) convinces Avery to keep the dancing lessons for herself.

Usually in Hallmark movies, they cast actors who can’t actually do the thing the character excels at. This time around, the cast dancers in the dancing roles. (Avery isn’t supposed to be able to dance well, which is why Chabert gets a pass here.) Kemp trained at the Royal Ballet School. JT Church (AKA John Talan Church), who plays the son of Roman’s head dance teacher, was the professional dancer paired with skateboarder Sky Brown in Dancing with the Stars: Juniors. (Spoiler: JT and Skye won!) As a dancer and a dance mom, it’s nice to see professional dancers cast as professional dancers. It’s annoying when you can’t see the people actually dance.

Another “new” thing in Christmas Waltz is that Lacey Chabert isn’t all that annoying! Her Christmas characters are usually whiny or annoying. Sure, her character spends a bit of time being sad but she also broke off an engagement 24 days before the wedding. She’s allowed to be sad about that. I hope that she’ll continue to get good roles in the future.

With all that said, if you don’t like dancing, don’t watch this movie. There is very little going on beyond the dance lessons. There’s talk about Roman opening a second dance studio but we don’t get to see that happen. I don’t think Avery and Roman even kiss, despite the fact that they are definitely set up as the romantic couple. They perform the Big Dance then roll credits. While I find that acceptable, people looking for the typical Hallmark romantic Christmas story might not like that. However, if you enjoy watching people dance, you might like this. They aren’t amazing dance moves but some of them are pretty. (To be honest, Church is the breakout performer here. He needs a lead role in something.)

Five Star Christmas | 2020 Christmas Movies

Can a movie be a comedy of errors if it isn’t funny?

When Lucy (Bethany Joy Lenz) returns home for Christmas, she finds that her father has turned her childhood house into a bed & breakfast. Once the news is broken to the rest of the family, they find out that the inn isn’t doing very well. The gang decides that they need to attract travel blogger Bea Turner to their B&B in order to get a five star review and gain more customers.

I don’t want to give away the twist, in case anyone wants to watch this…but it will make it difficult to talk about. After all, the plot of the movie revolves around mistaken identities and characters lying about who they really are. Lucy makes her family lie about who they are, while making assumptions about the actual customers staying with them. It’s a bit of a mess.

To be honest, the best part of the whole movie is that Lucy’s younger sister, Amber (Grace Beedie), gets to use her alternate persona to discover what she would like to do with her life. Lucy’s older brother, Will (Blair Penner), and his wife, Suzanne (Barbara Patrick), have a major life change that is pretty much overlooked. I think they put in way too many characters. None of them get quite enough screen time to make them real.

Can I recommend Five Star Christmas? I don’t think so. The movie wants to be an ensemble piece but it just isn’t there. Hallmark should stick to focusing on the romantic couple rather than everyone around them.

Dear Christmas | 2020 Christmas Movies

When I saw that Dear Christmas featured both Melissa Joan Hart and Jason Priestley, I was convinced that this was going to be a terrible movie. Perhaps I judged too quickly.

Natalie (Melissa Joan Hart) hosts a podcast about love. When she goes home to Lake Tahoe for the holidays, she meets up with a former middle school classmate, Chris Massey (Jason Priestley). Even though she is surrounded by stories of True Love, Natalie isn’t sure that it really exists. Will Mr. Christmas show her the way?

There are so many puns in the first quarter of this movie. Yes, even the romantic interest’s name is a pun. Normally, I roll my eyes at puns. Somehow, this movie actually made them funny. (Or maybe I have lost my mind from so many Christmas movies….) I guess that shows that the writing here isn’t terrible. (I don’t know if it’s relevant but the couple that wrote this movie has written the previous two Christmas movies starring Hart.)

On the acting side, there are quite a few heavy hitters here. Besides Sabrina the teenage witch (Hart) and Brandon Walsh (Priestley), we have Ed Begley Jr (who has so many credits, I wouldn’t know where to start), Faith Prince (a Tony award winning actress), and Robin Givens (recently seen in Riverdale). With so many big(ish) names, it would have been difficult for Dear Christmas to fail. Thankfully, everyone pulls their weight to make the movie a joy to watch.

I think that this may be the first Lifetime movie of the season that I am giving a thumbs up to. The channel has had a lot of boring bombs this year but Dear Christmas is not one of them. Grab your Christmas donut and a cup of cocoa and sit down for a good time.

Christmas by Starlight | 2020 Christmas Movies

This movie might actually break a few Christmas movie rules. It at least makes the ‘rules’ interesting.

Annie (Kimberley Sustad) is a family lawyer whose parents own a local cafe. William (Paul Campbell) works at his father’s development company that is planning on demolishing the cafe. She needs him to save her family’s business. He needs her to get his father off his back.

Surprisingly, Sustad and Campbell actually wrote this movie. Usually the actors don’t have such a close relationship with their characters. I think that having the writers (who are legitimate actors on their own) play the main characters was kinda brilliant. They bring a life to Annie and William that most Christmas movies lack.

Christmas by Starlight is quite adorable. Annie has this sort of childlike spark in her while William is the “my parents were distant” businessman. Normally, movies make this ‘childlike spark’ more childish than childlike. Here, Annie does things like wearing Christmas sweaters to a casual business Christmas party, dancing around her living room with her dog, and sneaking off to the coat room to eat a granola bar when William takes her to a fancy French restaurant for a client lunch. Things that a normal human being would do. (Well, maybe not ‘normal’…) Her actions offset William’s lack of Christmas spirit well. Instead of him thinking she acts like a kid, he just thinks she doesn’t know high society stuff.

I would recommend checking out Christmas by Starlight. It’s a cute change of pace from the usual fare.

Good Morning Christmas! | 2020 Christmas Movies

I almost kinda think this movie may have been based on reality. Or at least some sort of tabloid rumor. It just gives me that wink-wink-nudge-nudge type of vibe.

Brian Bright (Marc Blucas) and Melissa Merry (Alison Sweeney) co-host a morning (?) television show. Since they don’t get along off-camera, Bright decides to quit the show. The duo must spend Christmas week in the town of Mistletoe before airing the big announcement about Bright’s departure.

What corporate schlub named their television show “Today with Bright & Merry” instead of something like “Have a Merry & Bright Day”? Doesn’t everyone know that ‘merry and bright’ is the phrase and not ‘bright and merry’? It sounds dumb the wrong way. Also, this movie is named Good Morning Christmas! but at no point does this seem like a morning show. Morning show people do not go out at night because they have to be on-set at like 4AM. And it’s super bright outside when they are filming. And their entire show seems to be one small segment where they talk about what they are going to do. At no point are they on TV showing off the town’s festivities, even though we can clearly see cameramen around filming caroling and whatnot.

Beyond the obvious fakeness of their show, Blucas and Sweeney aren’t terrible actors. They have both been on popular TV shows, even if they weren’t favorite characters. Blucas was Riley on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Sweeney plays Sami Brady on Days of Our Lives. They don’t have a ton of chemistry together but I suppose they aren’t completely unbelievable as a couple. I could see them as the ‘formerly hated but now love each other’ type of couple. The relationship just wouldn’t move quite as fast as it does in the movie. (But that is true for all of these movie relationships…)

With all of that in mind, go ahead and watch Good Morning Christmas! It doesn’t stand out among the other Christmas movies but it’s also not completely boring. A perfect example of a ‘just fine’ movie.

A Christmas Tree Grows in Colorado | 2020 Christmas Movies

I’m not sure if I don’t know how towns get their official Christmas trees or if this movie doesn’t know how it happens. Why not both?

Erin (Rochelle Aytes) works at the office of the mayor of Brooklyn, Colorado. When the town’s official Christmas tree plans fall through, Erin finds the perfect tree on the property of a local firefighter, Kevin (Mark Taylor). He doesn’t want to give his tree to the town. So it’s up to Erin to convince him otherwise.

There are so many weird things in this movie. Erin’s father (Peter Bryant) is the mayor of the town, as was his father before him. He keeps saying that it’s Erin’s destiny to be the next mayor…but that’s not how it works. Mayors are elected officials. She doesn’t get to inherit it.

Then there’s this little tidbit they threw in about her professional life. She has a teaching degree. After she graduated, she got a teaching job in Denver. But then her dad offered her a job in the mayor’s office so she decided to give up the Denver job and stay in Brooklyn. WHY. If you didn’t like teaching, why did you finish out the degree? You should have switched majors. If you liked teaching, why did you give up a job? YOU GOT A TEACHING JOB.

I will give props to Hallmark for having people of color as the main characters. There is also a gay couple as side characters. Oh, and let’s not forget the single father adopting an “older” child. (I think they said she was 5 when he adopted her. We’re not talking teenager-older but not-baby-older.) Hallmark isn’t usually known for its diversity. This is a step in the right direction.

Is it a good movie? Not really. Erin kept talking about how Kevin’s house is in the former town square and she kept harassing him to cut down his tree. Why wouldn’t she ask if they could trim the tree where it stood and have the whole event there? Why talk about how historical the site was if only to use that bit of information as the “last minute savior” moment?

Should you watch it? Eh, if you want to. It’s fairly boring. But I would like Hallmark to have more diversity in their movies. I think that if this doesn’t get good ratings, Hallmark will decided that consumers don’t want to see people of color in lead roles. We do. We just want to see them in GOOD roles.

Heart of the Holidays | 2020 Christmas Movies

I think maybe I need to figure out some sort of BAD ranking. Like, boring is a 1 but an awful script is 8 or something. It might make it easier to decide just how bad a movie is.

Sam (Vanessa Lengies) finally got the job she wanted. On her first day, she finds out that her boyfriend, Will’s (René Escobar Jr), company bought her new company and fired a lot of the staff. Feeling weird that he saved her job, Sam immediately quits and goes back to her hometown, where she reconnects with her high school sweetheart, Noah (Corey Sevier).

Heart of the Holidays is a mess. At the beginning of the movie, Sam is a whiz at planning things. I didn’t even realize that she worked in the financial industry because she was so busy planning things. (I think she was supposed to be convincing the guy replacing her to work for the company? I’m not really sure what she was doing.) But when she moves home, she is terrible at everything…except planning a pop-up food bank on Christmas Eve. I think that the writers wanted her to be a “hometown girl finds that community is important” character or something. That doesn’t really come through. She talks about how she wanted to work with charities but then she became a stockbroker? Her character makes no sense.

The plot isn’t all that different. It wants to be “big city girl returns to small hometown to find she still loves her hunky ex-boyfriend.” While that does happen, it goes about it the wrong way. The writers tried to throw in another woman, Marina (Tina Jung), to tempt Noah away….but at no point does it feel like those two would ever be a couple. It feels like this was written by high schoolers.

Seriously, Hallmark. Step up your game. No one should watch this movie. As a matter of fact, can I unwatch it?

Homemade Christmas | 2020 Christmas Movies

Not one but TWO male love interests? Is that even allowed?

Megan (Michelle Argyris) helps people with their Christmas tasks, usually saving them from imminent social disasters. Chase (Connor McMahon) runs a design studio that should help Megan take her DIY blog to a new level. Kurt (Travis Nelson), who owns a local toy store, mistakes Megan-the-Christmas-girl for Megan-the-marketing-whiz. Now Christmas-Megan has to help Kurt find a marketing plan that will save his store. But which man will Megan fall in love with?

The “which man will she choose” conflict is an interesting change in the Christmas romance movies. Usually, we know who the couple is and, even if they aren’t together in the beginning of the movie, we know they will end up together. Though that is kinda true here. We can tell who Megan is going to pick, even if takes her awhile to make that decision. But it was a nice change from the norm.

To be honest, Homemade Christmas was kinda cute. Granted, Megan’s job is weird. Like, what does she do during the rest of the year? Her business is called Christmas for Hire….it’s not like people are doing Christmas stuff in March. Christmas in July is a thing but Christmas in August isn’t. She straight up says she doesn’t get a lot of traffic to her blog so that isn’t paying the bills. How, Megan? How are you not living on the street?

OK. OK. The movie is cute. Megan and Kurt do have a playful flirty chemistry that I like a lot. Everyone else is garbage but it doesn’t matter since they are the main characters. Should you watch it? Go right ahead. Though you might need a cup of hot chocolate to go with it.