Christmas At The Golden Dragon | 2022 Christmas Movies

When I saw the title Christmas At The Golden Dragon on Hallmark’s Christmas movie list, I wasn’t sure what to think. Hallmark isn’t known for its diversity. I was a little worried about a movie about Asian people with a title like that. Thankfully, my worries were unfounded.

Jim (Vincent Cheng) and Sue (Sharon Crandall) Chen have run The Golden Dragon for as long as anyone can remember. Now that their children have grown, they have decided to close the restaurant to allow them to live their own lives instead of spending every Christmas working at the restaurant. Prompted by the news of the closure, their regular customers start to reexamine their own relationships and what they want from life.

Christmas At The Golden Dragon isn’t just one story. It’s five different stories that are all related. Not all of the stories are great but a couple of them are actually good. Romy (Kara Wang), the Chen’s daughter, has a great story about going home for Christmas with her boyfriend, Blake (Markian Tarasiuk). She imagines the Christmas that she sees in the movies with perfect caroling, a childhood bedroom that hasn’t changed in decades, and the family gathering around to open presents on Christmas morning. When she doesn’t get that, she starts to understand how her version of Christmas (working at the restaurant every year) effects the other people in her community. She really comes to appreciate the restaurant that she resented growing up.

While I don’t think every story in here is a home run, I do think The Golden Dragon is worth watching. At the very least, you will get to see how “helping your community” can have a different meaning from volunteer or charity work. Keep an eye on Miguel (Jason Fernandes). He is someone we should all strive to be.

Christmas Sweethearts | 2022 Christmas Movies

I think I get it now. The former CEO of Hallmark didn’t leave the channel because he thought “The Gays” were taking over. It was because people actually acted like they enjoyed being around each other. I think all of the movies I have watched on Great American Family, so far, have consisted of couples that didn’t even like being in the same room as each other. It explains a lot.

Ashley (Breanne Hill), a party planner living in Los Angeles, has come home for the holidays. When she finds out that her high school sweetheart, Grant (Tanner Novlan), is dating popular influencer Bella Vega (Masiela Lusha), she decides to pretend to date her friend and co-worker, Liam (Colton Little), in order to make him jealous. Things go awry when Ashley finally gets what she thought she wanted.

Sometimes the jealousy plotline works well. But it only works when all of the people involved like each other. There are some longing looks from Grant towards Ashley and we’re supposed to gather from the very beginning that Liam is in love with Ashley but it’s difficult to see either of the men actually wanting to date her. She comes off as very self-centered, especially since her entire plan is to break up a current couple. The only person I feel bad for in this movie is Bella. She didn’t do a single thing wrong except for maybe be a little on the dumb side.

My vote is to stay away from Christmas Sweethearts. I’m sure there will be another, better, jealousy Christmas movie this year. This one is just bad.

The Picture of Christmas | 2022 Christmas Movies

We are a little over halfway through November and The Picture Of Christmas is the 34th Christmas movie I have watched this season. At this point last year, I had only watched 17 movies. No wonder this year feels insane!

Ember (Chelsea Hobbs) is a graphic designer in New York. She returns to Willow Hill in order to sell her late grandmother’s Christmas tree farm. While there, she finds her old storybook illustrations, rekindling her love for illustrating instead of just graphic design.

There seem to be a lot of inherited farms in this year’s Christmas movies. I would love to know why the ladies are always so surprised to find out their grandparents hired people to help them on the farm. Since these grandparents all die, I assume they are older people. Do they really think one or two elderly people can run an entire farm by themselves? Even if a grandparent didn’t tell me about their hired help, I would assume there was some sort of hired help. Especially if the farm is an actual working farm with an actual working business like a Christmas tree farm!

The Picture Of Christmas is a fine movie. There is nothing particularly stand-out about it. Ember’s drawing are nice. Emily (Mila Jones), the daughter of love-interest Brandon (Giles Panton), is adorable. She’s probably the best part of the entire movie. Otherwise, everything is bland. Ember tells Brandon that she’s selling the farm and potential buys come to see the place. Brandon wants to buy the farm but doesn’t want to tell Ember. It’s the same stupid conflict that could be solved if everyone was just honest with each other.

If you have nothing else to watch on television, The Picture Of Christmas would be all right to turn on and tune out to. If you are looking for something engaging, you won’t find it here. I would say to watch it for Emily and ignore all of the adults. They are boring anyway.

Our Italian Christmas Memories | 2022 Christmas Movies

Our Italian Christmas Memories is the saddest Christmas movie I have ever watched. I tried to think of a way to make the movie end on a happy note and I couldn’t come up with anything that wouldn’t make it sadder. Let me explain.

Anna (Sarah Power) is an adjunct sociology professor. She has taught college classes all over the world. When she finally comes home for Christmas, she finds that her grandfather, Vincent (Beau Bridges) is suffering from dementia. As Anna spends more time with Vincent, she tries to slow his memory loss by trying to figure out her late grandmother’s pasta sauce recipe. She hopes that talking through the family history will help his mental state.

I’m not joking when I say this is the saddest Christmas movie I have ever seen. We watch Vincent’s memory slip from his grasp. He calls Anna by the wrong name, he frequently looks for his late wife, and he even gets lost going on his daily morning walk. While there are other family members, most of the movie is spent with Anna and Vincent. That means we get very little reprieve from the devastating effects dementia has on both the patient and his entire family. It sucks.

Is there something good in Our Italian Christmas Memories? Not really. Anna’s little brother, RJ (Jesse Irving), always feels inadequate even when he is being praised by everyone around him. Her little sister, Ella (Morgana Wyllie), is usually left handling the business of the family farm, which makes her resentful toward Anna as Anna is able to travel all over the world without a care about the family. They all do come back together at the end but the whole movie is about family trauma but on the light setting.

This is another movie where I don’t want to recommend it. It’s so depressing. But if this is something you feel you need to watch, it’s not terrible. Beau Bridges does a beautiful job playing a man who is losing the things that make him who he is. But if you think this is something that will do bad things to your mental health, please don’t watch it. It can be a lot for anyone, especially someone who has had a family member with dementia. Do what you need to do to keep yourself healthy.

Reindeer Games Homecoming | 2022 Christmas Movies

As I was poking around the web a bit, I found out that Sarah Drew voiced some of the characters in Daria, one of my favorite shows! I knew her from the early 2000s show, Everwood, and she has done a few other Christmas movies but I never knew about Daria. I think I might like her a bit more now.

MacKenzie (Sarah Drew) is a high school biology teacher and an EMT. After her firefighter father dies, she joins his former team to compete in the town’s big fundraiser - The Reindeer Games. This year, her high school crush, Chase (Justin Bruening), comes home from Hollywood to visit his pregnant sister. When he gets talked into joining a competing team, sparks begin to fly between the two.

I admit that I don’t always pay close attention to the opening credits of these Christmas movies. Most of the time the opening panning shots are awful and the credit font is either unreadable or ugly. But that means I completely missed the fact that Sarah Drew also wrote this movie. I don’t think that changes my opinion of it but it’s an interesting fact.

A lot of Christmas movies suffer from having nothing going on. Reindeer Games Homecoming has the opposite problem. There is a ton of stuff going on and some of the stuff gets kicked to side a bit. For example, Chase supposedly wants to nab this role in an action movie. But it only comes up as an excuse for something. He originally doesn’t want to join the team for the polar plunge because he’s afraid he’ll get sick and he really wants this movie role. The movie is filming in Prague so who knows what would happen if he gets into a relationship with MacKenzie. (Though, honestly, he thinks about that part the least.) Meanwhile, MacKenzie is still mourning her father while doing the morning crossword puzzle, teaching biology, moonlighting as an EMT, and also participating in the Reindeer Games. The movie wants us to believe that she loves crossword puzzles but we only see her doing two - one of which is a scavenger hunt at the end of the movie. I think Drew wanted to make the characters feel more three-dimensional but shoved too much in there for a 90-minute movie.

Despite the movie being chock full of nothing, it is still pretty fun to watch. The acting is decent and I really enjoyed watching Chase and MacKenzie complete in the Games. Go ahead and give it a watch. If nothing else, you’ll get to see Bruening jump into freezing cold water in his underwear. That is worth something, right?

The Royal Nanny | 2022 Christmas Movies

At this point in the Christmas movie season, I usually fast forward through all of the commercials and previews for upcoming movies. What that means is I know literally nothing about new movies before I watch them. I assumed that The Royal Nanny was about a nanny…for a royal family. I wasn’t wrong…

Claire (Rachel Skarsten) is an MI5 agent. When the royal family is threatened, she is tasked with going undercover as the children’s nanny in order to keep them safe.

Yep, that is the entire plot of the movie. And it is absolutely brilliant. There were a couple of cheesy lines, which is to be expected because it’s Hallmark, but otherwise I loved it. For the first time in a long time, I picked the wrong character as the secret bad guy. Granted, once I was proven wrong, I was pretty sure who it was but I was stunned that a Hallmark movie got me! These are supposed to be predictable, aren’t they?

Besides being surprised by the bad guy, The Royal Nanny had so many of the things I love in a movie. It had action, it had comedy, and it had a romance that wasn’t forced from the beginning. And speaking of the romance, the chemistry between Clair and Colin (Dan Jeannotte) was lovely. They were both guarded but became closer the more they realized they could trust each other. It took awhile to blossom and it was wonderful.

Do I think you should watch The Royal Nanny? Of course! Go watch it then come back here and tell me if you guessed the bad guy. I want to know if I was the only one that missed it. I bet I’m not!

A Merry Christmas Wish | 2022 Christmas Movies

I know I harp on the stupid titles that some of these Christmas movies have. And I know that there is a limit to what they could name them. After all, all of the movies need to have something holiday related in the title, right? With a title like A Merry Christmas Wish, you would think it had something to do with wishes in some way. Nope. There is no wishing here. This should have been called A Merry Christmas Inheritance or Winter Wonderland Down On The Farm or something like that. This title gets a -100 out of 100 from me.

Janie (Jill Wagner) is a New York marketing executive. Recently, her great-uncle passed, leaving her the family farm and a letter. In the letter, he asks her to hold the farm’s Winter Wonderland festival one last time before selling the property. With the help of her childhood friend, Dylan (Cameron Mathison), she not only holds the festival but falls back in love with the farm and the town.

For once, I don’t know what to say about a movie. Usually there’s something I can was nice or was terrible but this one just was. As a matter of fact, the only memorable scene in this entire movie was a kid saying the cookies she made sucked and the face Janie made when she bit into one. Indeed, the cookies did suck. So they had to have a whole new scene where they were making completely different cookies. I guess that makes it two memorable scenes…

You can watch A Merry Christmas Wish if you really want to but be warned that you already know what will happen. This movie is extremely predictable and boring. Even the big conflicts in it are boring. If the writers had made any of the side characters at least a little unlikeable, that would have made it slightly more interesting. But nope, everyone is just fine. I kinda hate it.

A Tiny Home Christmas | 2022 Christmas Movies

A Tiny Home Christmas is probably the first Christmas movie title that confused me. Is this about people that live in tiny homes celebrating Christmas? That seems weird. It did get me interested in the movie, which is the point of a title, right?

Blair (Rebecca Dalton) and Mason (Christopher Seivright) were not only co-hosts of a hit design show, they were also dating. When her father’s construction company started to fail, Blair quit the show and went home to help the family business. One of Blair’s ideas is to build a community of small homes for the town’s houseless citizens. Mason, who has come back to town to sell his house, accidentally walks in on Blair’s pitch to the state’s Secretary of Housing. Now they will need to work together to try to make this project come to life.

Surprisingly, I found A Tiny Home Christmas very endearing. As I think we all know by now, I enjoy movies where the romance doesn’t steer the entire plot. And that is what happens here. Blair’s passion to get this project going - both to help her father’s business and to get people into houses - is so sweet. Her annoyance with Mason does sour it a little but you can kinda see where she’s coming from . Even though that all could have been solved with a simple conversation. But we know how these movies go.

If I was to complain about anything in the movie, there is one tiny thing that bothered me. There was a hint that there was some sort of romance or at least flirting between Blair and Scott, one of her father’s employees. Mason even shows a bit of jealousy toward him. Yet it goes nowhere. I’m pretty sure there isn’t even a conversation about how they are just friends or that he works for her father or anything like that. It felt a bit misleading.

Other than that, I really liked A Tiny Home Christmas. I think this might be a movie that you could actually watch and enjoy. Even the montages were interesting!

The Dog Days Of Christmas | 2022 Christmas Movies

Generally speaking, Christmas movies with dogs are terrible. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a good dog-centric Christmas movie. At least not one on Hallmark or Lifetime. But I’m willing to give The Dog Days Of Christmas a chance.

After three years away, Annie (Georgia Flood) is an aid worker who has finally come home for the holidays. Unwilling to simply relax, she volunteers to foster three dogs. With the help of her high school debate team nemesis, Dylan (Ezekiel Simat), who also happens to be the town veterinarian, Annie works her non-profit magic to save the local animal shelter.

While it sounds like this would be a promising plot for a movie, there is so little that actually happens. Instead of showing us things, the movie likes to tell us things. There are a few small scenes where people are interacting with the dogs but a lot of the scenes are montages of Annie interviewing people to adopt the dogs or Annie handing out flyers at a dog park. (Here’s a hint, Annie. The people at dog parks already have dogs. That isn’t an ideal place to look for people to adopt dogs.) It would have been nice to have a little more interaction with the dogs since the movie is named after them.

As for the people, none of the people in this movie have any chemistry together. You would think they were all cast yesterday and just met the day of filming. I think they needed a few happy hours or something to get to know each other before pretending that they’ve all known each other for years. Because it definitely does not come through in the movie.

The Dog Days Of Summer isn’t the worst dog-related Christmas movie I have seen. Even taking out the dogs, it’s not a good movie. I would say to stay away from this one. There’s much better movies out there. And if you really want a dog movie, don’t watch a Christmas one. You are bound to be disappointed.

In Merry Measure | 2022 Christmas Movies

We now have Hallmark’s second movie about a singer. All Saints Christmas aired on November 6 and In Merry Measure aired on November 11. You would think that, when making their annual schedule, the network would try to put a bit more time between movies with a similar premise.

Darcy (Patti Murin) is an aging pop star. Dropped by her label, she is trying her best to get signed by a new label. She decides to come home to Dayton, OH to spend Christmas with her sister, Gretchen (Jennifer Robertson), and her niece, Megan (Cassidy Reichman). Megan dreams of singing with her high school glee club, The Herald Angels. When she doesn’t make the cut, Darcy steps in to help boost Megan’s confidence and maybe make the Angels a bit better as well.

I was surprised when I found myself actually enjoying In Merry Measure. Instead of focusing on the romance between Darcy and music teacher Adam (Brendan Penny), the movie actually focused a bit more on the kids and their singing. Granted, I was a little disappointed that the only black girl in the choir, Sasha played by Pendo Muema, was relegated to only beat boxing. The other characters of color were all male. It would have been nice to see a few more non-white ladies in the choir. Though, to be honest, we didn’t spend a lot of time with the rest of the choir. The movie only focused on five or six kids. The rest were only panned by while they sang. There could have been more people of color in the choir and I didn’t notice due to the lack of time spent on them.

In addition to focusing on the kids, the movie also prioritized the relationship between Darcy and Gretchen more than Darcy and Adam. There are a couple of references that Gretchen’s husband passed away about six months prior to the movie but we never really see Gretchen crying over it. She is sad when they are hanging stockings and she notes that she hasn’t been crying every day since Darcy arrived but I think the movie may have been a little stronger if there was just one scene of Gretchen breaking down a little. She doesn’t need to be completely unable to live or anything. Just maybe slightly more emotional with Darcy there to really support her.

In Merry Measure is definitely a movie you should watch. Jennifer Robertson is always a joy to watch and Patti Murin is delightful alongside her. You might even walk away humming a few of the songs. Especially Sugar Rush.