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| If only mom were here to see this... |
I'm going to break form a bit for this one - it has a special place in my heart. I grew up with this genre, way way back, before watching movies on DVD, DVR or (gasp!) the internet was a possibility. Yes, Virginia, there was an era dominated by live TV viewing... I think the commercials might have been better, but it's a little fuzzy. I was always a cartoon man myself, but many a drab, rainy New England weekday night was spent around the mountainous family laundry pile heaped high atop the parental bed.
Ostensibly, I was "helping fold." In actuality, I was developing a highly attuned palate for romantic comedies. In my formative years I saw everything from Moonstruck to Moonlight and Valentino, While You Were Sleeping to Sleepless in Seattle. Peppering made-for-tv rom-coms into the mix was a bit like learning regional slang while studying a foreign language - you understand the substructure despite the swapped-in bastardized elements. I never "liked" these movies, but much in the vein of an atheist altar boy I grew up steeped in the vernacular of the form and developed an inherent familiarity and mastery of an unchosen discipline.
Fast forward to the recent past. I dipped into my usual holiday mix - a little Charlie Brown, a bit of the classic Garfield special. And then I took a gander at some of the Lifetime and Hallmark offerings and stumbled across this gem. I remembered these movies being a little rough, shot on tape, then early digital video, real bottom of the barrel production value. But this was something a little different. By the year this was made - 2008 - a newly codified semantics had been cemented for made-for-tv holiday movies, in part due to increasingly affordable digital production, coupled with a proliferation of small no-name production companies and an ever expanding roster of cable channels. There was a feedback loop being generated - shorter and shorter gaps between what the movies were mimicking (both blockbuster rom-coms as well as each other) and when they were being released. In short order we had the contemporary single-30-year-old-female-centric Christmas movie. It's no surprise that these are all cut from the same cloth; they are made from one template, and intentionally so. Their predictability is their charm; when they deviate too far from that baseline, they are usually at their funniest (unintentionally) and most absurd. It's a win-win.
Moonlight and Mistletoe is one the most emblematic movies of this genre. It's a standard bearer. To me, it is the archetypal film with the "single workaholic Christmas-hating-to-Christmas-loving" female lead. It was the first film that let me put into words the most absurd quality that is a common thread running through the genre: what the characters say in the script has nothing to do with what we see on screen. It's a delightful trend to track: the most beautiful tree someone has ever seen might be a 4 footer with a single string of Walmart twinkle lights. A mind-blowing NY Times front page review-worthy window display literally consists of a fresh coat of green paint on unfinished drywall with a toy train driving around a kitchen table. A billionaire's extravagant corporate-getaway Swiss hunting lodge is a one room cabin... outside of Vancouver. Or my favorite, from the true starlet of the genre, Candace Cameron (in Moonlight...), the hand-carved nutcrackers with exquisite craftsmanship that sell for $500 apiece are the shittiest dollar store abominations. Scratch that, they would look way better if they were from the dollar store.
This one is a must see - Tom Arnold, fresh into a pain-killer relapse, does a great job standing in for Santa (he's the Santa-obsessed proprietor of Santaville, who dons the red suit every day). He and Candace have to repair the tatters of their father/daughter relationship which went awry after the wife / mom passed away - classic. A big-city smooth-talking realtor / potential love interest turns out to be a villain (shock!) while the wildly overprivileged boarding school brat turned ivy league brat turned business man turned millionaire turned small town handyman (believable) gets Candace to fall for him (he's been in love with her since they were kids - adorbs). The bank is going to repossess Santaville (or it's getting sold, or something Scroogey, does it really matter?), and all the goodwill in town won't be enough to save them until business savvy Candace starts hocking overpriced "hand-carved" nutcrackers (again, in-script "hand-carved" = real life mass-produced by 9 year olds in a Malaysian factory then painted 5 minutes before shooting by a color-blind intern who thought he'd be working with the script-supervisor before getting shuffled off to the prop department). Spoiler-alert: everything works out, they save Santaville and they all find a happy medium between business world hustle and bustle and small-town struggling-economy doldrums. Classic, classic, classic.
Put a shining star on top of your metaphoric Christmas tree of holiday movies and dip into this one before the holiday season slips away for another year.
ISM - Implied Santa Movie
DW/M - Dead Wife/Mother
CDEM - Capitalist Deus Ex Machina
EL - Elf List
EN - Elfie Nominee - Tom Arnold, best Santa*
Keep it Merry,
- Jon Bobby Elf
*"non-Santa" Santa
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