All About Christmas Eve

All About Christmas Eve / 2012 / made-for-tv movie

West Coast Christmas vs. East Coast Christmas

A wintry fly-over shot thrusts us into the center of bustling Manhattan.  Irreverent, crunchy guitars bang out the chords to Jingle Bells, accompanied by a rough-around-the-edges vocal.  A smattering of establishing shots confirms that, yes, it is Christmas in New York. Cut to an interior - a throng of young party goers lets loose on the dance floor to this rousing rendition of Jingle Bells.  It’s a Christmas-themed Bar Mitzvah, the brainchild of one Eve Wright (played by the curvaceous Haylie Duff), event planner protege on her way to the top.  We’re only a minute in, and we already know we’re in for a treat.


There must be some tangential Christmas magic in the air, because the plot hinges on a dash-through-the-airport rift in reality, spawning two alternate timelines that play out in tandem.  Eve - let’s just call her Duff (is she ever in character?) - makes an important flight to LA in one timeline, and misses the flight in the other.  The reason for the trip - a big tech company is hosting a last minute event for it’s relaunch.  You know, that tech company Gobble (introduced through a priceless bit of clunky expository dialogue between Duff and her boss… “You’ve heard of a company called Gobble?” ...“Yes, of course, the next generation social network”).  It turns out Aidan, a hunky stranger who flirts with her at a bar, is none other than the CEO of Gobble and managed to track her down so she could personally oversee the party.

New York Duff mopes; LA Duff soars.  New York Duff catches her unambitious boyfriend mid-coitus with a younger and smaller-faced woman, gets fired from her job, and starts bartending between bouts of depressed napping.  LA Duff falls in love with Aidan, getting to know him at the Gobble (...I can’t even type it with a straight face) headquarters, and demonstrates her hard-won battle-honed event planning skills by throwing together a top notch soiree last-minute.

An endearing pop-punk, pop-rock and rockabilly soundtrack keeps things moving along and adds a bit of fizz and joy to the movie.  It captures a sunnier Los-Angeles-centric side of Christmas with whimsy and aplomb (it’s no easy feat maintaining a palpable Christmas vibe amidst the palm trees).  “It’s a Hollywood Christmas”, penned by South Park music-man Jamie Dunlap and Wendy Ellen Feldstein, is a standout track, worthy of any big-budget theatrical wide-release holiday flick.

Low-cut shirts and revealing tanks seem to be a central motif - Duff is at the top of the ranking for “most cleavage in a holiday movie.”  It seemed coincidental at first - she does, after all, have an hour-glass physique with hips-for-days by Hollywood standards - and I tried to take it as an unavoidable by-product of her build.  But by the fourth or fifth shot of her bouncing around an airport or bending over a bed, I came to the conclusion that it was a last ditch effort on the director’s part to salvage what was left of her scenes.  If you think I’m exaggerating, there’s a link below to a website that took the time to make a photo gallery devoted to her décolletage in this role - and it only includes about five percent of the shots they could have grabbed.  Nevermind how I found it, I just found it, ok?

I like to give a compliment before I take a dig - great job with casting Duff’s dad, they have good matching noses.

I only have one major complaint with the film.  Although the seeds of a budding romance between hunky Aidan and voluptuous Duff are planted early on during their meet-cute at the bar, all the heavy lifting of their bonding and courtship only happens in LA Duff’s timeline.  So when, mid-event, she jets back to NY in a whacky display of emotional confusion and runs into NY Duff working on some middle-school art-class caliber paintings at a small gallery (NY artists make their paintings in gallery windows, right? Oh, did I mention her dream is to be an artist?  Sure… why not…) we wonder, what will become of the split souls?  Will they merge into one, or will they both continue to coexist in parallel?  Wrong on both counts.  LA Duff just ceases to be, her corporeal self vanishing in a burst of white light as the two touch hands through the gallery window.  Metaphysical implications be damned, there’s only one Duff, and it’s the NY moper, no trace of LA memories, no sudden rush of insight, no merging of the halves.  I guess hidden in all this muck “the message” is that LA Duff was chasing down a false dream, becoming a power-player in the superworld of celebrity event planners instead of the struggling artist she was meant to be.  They just never won me over to NY Duff’s storyline, and in the end we’re left with an “Eternal Sunshine…”-esque re-meet; Aidan returns to NY and their love rekindles anew.

I don’t feel settled knowing that fate ultimately axes event planner version of Duff.  She was predestined to get fired for missing the flight - a cosmic fail-safe to keep her on her true path; making the flight was an anomaly that the universe had to course-correct, and since she didn’t meet her untimely demise before returning to New York (universe course-correction is a harsh mistress, if we’ve learned anything from the Final Destination films), her atoms were shattered into non-existence like a collapsing wave-function when the two Duffs attempted to occupy the same spacetime.  Bummer.  So much for free will, bring out the eggnog and light the tree, it’s Christmas.


NSM - Non-Santa Movie
SCM - Subtle Christmas Mysticism
WWC - Warm Weather Christmas
EN - Elfie Nominee*

Memorable Line:
"Why can't I find a nice guy? Like, just one guy who's not gonna wring my heart out like a ShamWow?" - Eve Wright


Envision sugarplums,

- Jon Bobby Elf