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| Gosselaar and Smart bringing the cheer. |
If you put Amy Smart in a made-for-tv holiday movie, you’re already 90% there. If you set it in New York City, lift the plot of Groundhog Day, and cast Mark Paul Gosselaar as the hunk from the titular date she keeps repeating, you’ve totally struck gold.
Kate (Smart) is a sassy career girl (duh), who works at a marketing firm or magazine, or some other fun-looking corporate gig. We find out that tonight she’s meeting a guy for a pity blind date, set up by her mother-in-law, but first has to exchange xmas gifts with her ex-fiancee who broke up with her a year ago. And guess what? Yup, Kate is still crazy obsessed with him (duh). The opening scene also establishes that Kate's problem is that she needs to be more spontaneous. This becomes important later...
Kate goes to the mall to pick out a gift for Jack, the ex, and WHAM, we’re hit with some classic Christmas Mysticism right away: Kate is sprayed in the face with holiday perfume and things go all wonky (great effects scene for this kind of movie) and she faints. Fast forward to her date with Miles (Gosselaar), who has a million dollar smile and a nice sweater, but other than that he doesn't do much heavy lifting in this role. It doesn't matter though, because Smart bounces her way through the film with enough pep for the whole cast. Anyway, Gosselaar is smooth, but sort of a bummer (we find out later his wife died on Christmas Eve last year), and the two do not hit it off on date #1. Kate is pretty much a huge bitch and even ditches Miles early when her ex-fiancee Jack calls, because Kate is still convinced she can win his heart (although things get messy when she finds out Jack has a new beau and he's proposing to her that night).
So Kate winds up spending her Christmas Eve crying and alone, but when midnight strikes she's thrust back into the previous day, waking up on the floor of the mall where she was sprayed with the magic perfume. Now it all makes sense - she's doomed to repeat Christmas Eve until she falls in love with Miles. Got it. But here's where things get sticky. We see her nestle into bed a bit before midnight, and as she's just falling asleep (the clock strikes 12) her day resets - to around 3 in the afternoon. And that means a really fucked up sleep schedule, or, rather, no sleep at all - a few minutes at best. Not good. We all get whats supposed to happen in a movie like this: Kate transforms from an uptight psycho to a laid-back dream girl. But since she's on a 9 (maybe even 7 or 8) hour sleepless loop what we actually get is a hallucinatory descent into madness.
Since she pretty much falls in love with Miles on date #2, Kate, now fueled by her semi-conscious dream state, spends the rest of the film learning to be spontaneous. She bakes 600 cakes with her grandmotherly neighbor, goes on a shopping spree, gets a tattoo, helps a guy propose, and (in what is probably the film's best scene) she invites over a random woman to jump around on her upholstery while they devour donuts and spray whipped cream into their mouths.
All the pleasure-seeking behavior doesn't get her any closer to sealing the deal with Miles, though. In fact, his plot line seems to take a back seat to all the transformative mayhem. And Miles is further eclipsed by ex-fiancee Jack and his time-consuming story (where Kate almost screws up Jack's proposal to his new girlfriend and tracks them down in a remote cabin to patch things up). Yet when Kate and Miles are together, things go great. Like, really great. On date #5 they pick out a Christmas tree and the night ends with them holding hands in church at midnight singing carols. Classic ending. But did the movie start to wrap it up? Nope. Still seven more dates to go, and POOF, she's waking up on the mall floor again.
At that point I started to get frustrated, because I knew we weren't working toward a big lesson or any sort of satisfying story arc. So from there, where do you go? Just round and around, trying out new scenarios for the day, in no particular order. The last date, that becomes the real Christmas Eve, is pretty good for Kate and Miles. But so were dates #6 - #11. It probably would have helped the pacing of the film to just let Kate sleep through a couple of the 12 dates. She clearly could have used a break from her dissociative fugue state. And since the writers were grasping at straws to get 12 distinct dates in this film (not to mention all the subplots and bizarre supporting characters) the whole thing gets pretty convoluted by the end.
At least Amy Smart is bubbling over with holiday cheer and is a huge step up from the usual female leads in this type of holiday schlock (watch for our upcoming essay on Candace Cameron-Bure). Although the movie's plot be-bops back and forth until your head spins, it moves along nicely and stays entertaining for the full two hours. This is about as good as you get from made-for-tv holiday movies. I highly recommend it.
NSM - Non-Santa Movie
ECM - Extreme Christmas Mysticism
DW - Dead Wife
EL - Elf List*
Memorable Line:
"Mmmmm, you smell nice. Like honey." - Miles
Merry Merry,
- Emile Elf
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*Elf List Seal of Approval - don't miss this one
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