Just like every other writer you know, I started a Substack. It will always be free and mainly exists so that I can write about the pop cultural ephemera that I can’t write about anywhere else. I included a link above but my username is kaceybange.substack.com if you want to go the old fashioned way about it.
Top 10 of 2021
Hello there. It feels like it’s been a while. Not that I have stopped watching movies or even creating Top 10 lists. It’s just that the end of the years have been a little dramatic these past few years. 2019 ended with me too physically ill to commit to writing up my top ten films of the year (I had a kidney infection); 2020 ended with me too mentally ill to commit to writing up my top ten films of the year (I had a man forcibly enter my apartment while I was inside it).
2021, thankfully, has had no such twist ending and so I am finally back to tell you why my favorite films of the year were my favorites. It feels healing to be back.
in fact, while 2021 is still filled with sadness and misery and despair and all those other heavy words, I do like to think of it mostly as a year of healing. A year where I slowly began to put together a new life in the wake of the one that 2020 seemed to smash and grab from me. I think the move industry is doing the same kind of healing. After a year where the pandemic shut down movie theaters and seemed to take the majority of movies with them, 2021 began to bring them back. It certainly was nice to go back to the theater again, even if the Nicole Kidman ad began to drive me bonkers after the umpteenth time of seeing it (I miss it now that it’s gone though, funny, how it works, huh?).
While it will be a slow process full of starts and stops, I have hope that 2021 portends for better days ahead. For movies. For myself. For now though, here are the ten films (out of the 180 new releases I saw) that connected with me the most.
This Week in Hallmark: A Little Daytime Drama
A little known fact about me is that a long time ago, back in 2015, I went through a soap phase. This mainly involved watching playlists on YouTube of past soap plotlines that were recommended by people (Josh Duhamel, am I right?) and trying to keep up with the Young and the Restless because I was fascinated by the fact that Justin Hartley was on it when he had seemingly graduated to primetime television gigs ( a place where he eventually returned). I even dipped my toe into British soaps, and discovered they were way more bonkers fun than American ones. I was especially intrigued by the Emmerdale plotline where someone tries to kill someone else by drowning them in grain. Even though it’s been years since I have followed anything that has happened on a soap opera, I know the base appeal. When done right they are melodramatic, compulsive fun.
As a result, when I heard that Hallmark was doing a soap opera movie and not only that but one that starred soap stars (I had learned of Ryan “He’s Hot!” Paevey’s existence through a General Hospital playlist once upon a time), I was a little hyped. There was so much potential for a fun, twisty movie that both appreciates soaps and winks at them a little. But as all things with potential, Hallmark tends to fail live up to its promises.
A Little Daytime Drama decides to eschew the drama altogether. Not only in its romance plotline which basically contains of one long stupid miscommunication instead of anything resembling pining, banter or other classic romantic comedy tropes, but even in its show within a show. The female lead is desperate to make Forever, the fake soap they all work on, younger and hipper to gain a new audience base. Her very exciting plans? Having everyone travel abroad to be medical doctors. That’s it. I don’t know who this is supposed to excite but as someone still in my 20s, I can tell you that it would not gain my interest in the slightest. (Most likely, the way to gain a younger social media based fanbase would be to go the Hollyoaks way of having like gay love triangles and people careening off cliffs in cars and murder and the like – but you can’t show that on Hallmark Channel.)
I’m usually forgiving of Hallmark’s tendency to avoid conflict at all points possible, but you’re making a movie about soaps. If there was any time to have a little fun and go a little overboard – this was it.
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This Week in Hallmark: Sand Dollar Cove
It’s been a while since I have last sat down and watched a Hallmark movie. I had my reasons. I started working at a new job (hooray!) and had to deal with some more stressful personal life stuff (boo!), and as a result there just was not enough energy in my brain to truly contemplate what was up with the Hallmark Channel.
However, a friend of mine texted me about Sand Dollar Cove and when a friend texts me about a Hallmark Channel movie, I feel like it’s my solemn duty to look into it. Plus, Sand Dollar Cove featured newbie Aly Michalka teamed up with Chad Michael Murray and supported by Scarlett from Nashville (Clare Bowen). So, I was a little curious to see how it all come together.
Well, it came together like every typical Hallmark Channel seems to do. It starts out with high potential for fun. Chad Michael Murray’s character is named Brody Bradshaw and he is very, very defensive of a pier. A pier that Aly Michalka’s Elli is trying to buy for her real estate development company. The potential for overwrought drama and ridiculousness seemed to be right there! For twenty minutes, I was having fun.
Then, as it always seems to happen– the movie hit a lull. The plot rushes to get the characters over their hard feelings for one another and all the tension in the romance is snapped. It’s no longer a question of why. Instead of basking in tropes, the movie instead decides to bask in very long lectures about the benefits of small town life. There’s an endless scene where Elli talks to Scarlett from Nashville about why Scarlett from Nashville decided not to backpack in Europe and stay in Sand Dollar Cove and get married instead. It’s a scene that doesn’t really add anything to the story except to let you know that small towns are awesome! And as someone who has watched a Hallmark movie before, I am aware of that. I have learned many, many times that small towns are the best places in the universe and we should protect them. I get it.
Lately, it feels like I keep coming back to these movies hoping for tropes and fun and just getting a travelogue for my troubles instead. I don’t know why that is. I have theories. Hallmark produces too many movies and are no longer focused on quality. It’s cheaper to shoot a scene where someone waxes on about a small town versus a dynamic scene with action. Tourism boards paying them to waste a certain amount of time as advertising. But it doesn’t really matter why. What matters is that it keeps happening, and it’s taking all the fun out of the experience for me.
I want more movies that deliver on the absurdity of their premises, and less that waste time as PSAs. Hope springs eternal that my wish will one day become true.
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This Week in Hallmark: Right in Front of Me
As I am typing this review out, I have QVC playing in the background (I am a huge fan of leaving QVC on in the background when I am stressed out, the monotonous, inexplicable capitalism has calmed for decades). Apparently, today they are launching Candace Cameron Bure’s new exclusive fashion line on the channel and it is fascinating. They are selling average t-shirts and being like, “Candace, you look like you are ready to just jump right into a Hallmark movie and get a coffee. Look at that style!” Meanwhile, I’m just mockingly nodding along like, “Yes, when I look at a basic linen tee, I’m just like absolutely that is Hallmark and not just an average staple. It’s so much more.”
But maybe that is what Hallmark is supposed to be, actually. Just an average basic movie that is so much more on basic of how average it is. I remember learning at Christmas Con that part of the appeal of Hallmark movies to people is how they are all for the most part, the same. I’m sure some people use the channel to get to sleep in the same way I use QVC. The monotonous romances with a chaste, conservative edge are calming.
To those people, I am happy to announce that Right in Front of Me will help you fall right asleep. If you watched He’s Just Not That Into You and wanted a really sexless version of the Justin Long and Ginnifer Goodwin romance, than you are in luck here. She needs help landing her crush. He gives her advice from behind a bar. Eventually, they realize they are in love after a few G-rated “adventures”. It is exactly as memorable as you think it would be.
Right in Front of Me is so insanely bland that there were scenes that would normally confound me that I just let slide. The “meet-cute” between the central couple revolves around him harassing her for not loving his fusion food before realizing that she was right. This scene last minutes, it’s supposed to be charming. It is not.
Less frustrating, but more bizarre is the set-up for the advice giving gambit, which revolves around the female lead just like happening upon some random floormate from college’s wedding and everyone just being like “absolutely, please crash this event, woman I have not seen in years”. There’s some justification in the fact that the female lead does help with some last-minute wedding planning but these characters go from “Who are you?” to “advice-giving best friends” in a way that would be mindboggling.
I say “would be” because at the end of the day, it was all presented so blandly that I couldn’t feel myself getting outraged about it. I was bored into complacency. Maybe that is worrisome. More likely, that is the Hallmark way. You come, you watch, you don’t internalize anything you just saw. Perfectly, wonderfully average.
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This Week in Hallmark: As Luck Would Have It
Back in December, I read a rumor that alleged that Hallmark was working down to the wire with it’s late of Christmas movies. That movies wouldn’t be finished until mere days before they were supposed to premiere (if not an closer timeframe than that). Obviously, I do not live in the Hallmark scheduling offices and have no inside sources, so I can’t say for sure that it’s true. But it certainly feels true. COVID made it even harder for a channel known for a quick turnaround on its movies, and the need to create vast amount of product in a short amount of time probably led to some very, very rushed movies.
As Spring Fling continues on though, I can’t help but think that the trend continued. It’s no longer Christmas so Hallmark has the ability to free up its calendar a little more and make adjustments when need be. So when One Winter Wedding can’t be finished in time for the winter months, it becomes One Perfect Wedding and is weirdly slotted into their Spring Fling event. As Luck Would Have It was clearly designed to be a St. Patrick’s Day movie, but it wasn’t going to make that premiere date. So now it is premiering randomly in April. Less egregious than the One Perfect Wedding situation, but still noticeable.
As Luck Would Have It is a Hallmark movie I feel that I have seen before, a long, long time ago before anyone cared what I thought about these movies. Emma Thompson’s husband did one once upon a time! There was another one called Chasing Leprechauns? In the days when Hallmark Channel was more holiday focused beyond Christmas, St. Patrick’s day existed to create a weird one-off movie set in Ireland. As Luck Would Have It follows in that tradition. It just premiered in April.
Beyond the scheduling, As Luck Would Have It was fine. It hits every single trope you expect from a Hallmark movie just with more exposition about Irish culture in between. Even though it’s the best Spring Fling movie so far this year, I still found it to be a little disappointing because I have liked the leads in other projects before (and both are Hallmark newbies, apparently) and perhaps hoped they could further spark the material. Still, you can’t expect miracles all the time. As is, As Luck Would Have It is forgettable fluff and as that is what Hallmark makes it’s money on, so it will have to do.
Spring Fling has been a weird event for Hallmark, one that is more interesting for the scheduling antics behind the scenes than anything that has been put forth on the screens. They still have one more movie to premiere next week before the event is through, but I am not banking on it singlehandedly making it an above-average slate of movies. That’s a lot of pressure. For now, I will keep my eye towards May when the movies don’t have to fit a theme and maybe will give me less headaches as a result.
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This Week in Hallmark: One Perfect Wedding
For the most part, I am relatively oblivious when it comes to how COVID-19 has caused problems for Hallmark productions. I am not one to nitpick about how many background characters are in a shot, and if the characters don’t kiss that makes sense. This is Hallmark. The movies are made on the cheap and as chaste as possible.
However, when the franchise movies come around suddenly it’s very hard not to notice how COVID-19 has changed things. Christmas in Evergreen: Bells are Ringing was notably hampered by the pandemic with a lot of plotlines being awkwardly sidelined to Zoom calls and returning characters kept to one-off mentions. It made for the weakest entry in the series so far, which was a disappointment.
One Perfect Wedding also seems to suffer from the same problems. As someone who had never watched any of the previous entries in the series, I was surprised at how noticeable it was to me. Still, there were awkward conversations where they tried to write off family characters in a way that seemed to Streisand Effect the problem to me. Would I have noticed the mother was missing from the wedding? No. But Hallmark had to let you know why she wasn’t there so the non-engaged viewer suddenly knew there was an absence.
Even worse was the plotline saved for the bride’s best friend who is deaiing with wanting a proposal from her long distance boyfriend. In non-pandemic times, I am sure this would be a plotline that would involve them both helping to plan a wedding while he tries to hide his proposal. In pandemic times, we get him amazingly getting Zoom to work on a mountain so he can propose via Facetime in the strangest moment of the movie. It was laughably absurd and I am not sure that is how Hallmark intended it.
The pandemic’s footprints can’t only be seen in the movie though, the scheduling also definitely had to be affected by it. The previous two entries in the series were called One Winter Weekend and One Winter Proposal. Using common sense, this movie was probably supposed to be called One Winter Wedding with a premiere in either January or February. Fate interverned to make that impossible and thus the title was changed to One Perfect Wedding so that it would not seem too weird it was premiering in the middle of Hallmark’s Spring Fling event instead of its winter ones. It still was kind of weird.
In an ideal world, Hallmark would stay away from sequels until vaccine rollout is strong enough to make traveling to film things less hampering. I doubt that will happen, but it would probably be better for the films themselves if that was in the realm of possibility.
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This Week in Hallmark: Don’t Go Breaking My Heart
As someone who attended Christmas Con in 2019, I am aware that Ryan Paevy is hot. The people love him and his face! Good for him.
However, as hot as he is, I always thought he was a bit stiff as a performer. He does not banter well. He is not naturally charming. He always comes across as guarded as a way that feels like a hindrance in a lightweight romantic comedy. Sometimes it feels like Hallmark is aware of this, and casts him as characters who are intentionally supposed to feel out of place and awkward. He did a series of films where he played the dog show version of Mr. Darcy. His last Christmas film had him playing a man from the 1800s who time traveled to this century. These roles work with his limitations and make them feel like a part of the character. It feels like Don’t Go Breaking My Heart is trying to go down that route somewhat by saying that his character ( a journalist writing an article about a break up seminar) is guarded because of a past broken heart that he does not want to acknowledge, but this time around it doesn’t really work.
My guess is that it doesn’t work this time around because we are supposed to find him charming when he’s avoiding being emotionally vulnerable. Look at him failing at rock climbing! Look at him knocking people over at kickboxing! Look at him offering to photoshop George Clooney into his sister’s old photos with his ex! We are supposed to find him naturally likable right away, just a little wounded. Paevy can’t pull this off. It’s even worse when the movie requires him to be emotionally vulnerable and charming at the same time. There are emotional lynchpin scenes where we are supposed to believe that him and the break-up seminar counselor lady (played by Italia Ricci) are falling in love by bantering over their past wounds and it doesn’t work. The chemistry isn’t there. The personalities aren’t there to make you want to pretend the chemistry exists. It just is.
While I was watching this movie, I could not help but think about Italia Ricci’s old Freeform series Chasing Life, a show I was briefly obsessed with back when I was 22. One of her love interests on the show was played by Scott Michael Foster. That character is supposed to be guarded and wounded but Foster was also so charming in that role that the romance basically pushed itself to the forefront of the narrative when it was not intended to work out that way (he could only recur due to a series commitment to Blood & Oil, of all things). Yes, Foster was good looking but the romance between the characters worked for reasons beyond attractiveness levels, as any good romance should.
Sadly, Don’t Go Breaking My Heart only has hotness going for it. And if Paevy isn’t your cup of tea, well then, I don’t think you’re going to find much here.
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This Week in Hallmark: Chasing Waterfalls
After a week off, Hallmark is back for springtime! That s right – it is time for Spring Fling! Hooray? Not really. Since it’s not Christmas or June wedding season, the theme doesn’t really matter. In fact, one of the “spring” movies this year seems to take place at a winter sports resort. Thematic unity is not the name of the game this time of the year. Instead, it’s all about content, content, content. Any content will do as long as it has bland romances and vaguely conservative ideology.
The first of the 2021 Spring Fling movies is called Chasing Waterfalls, a name that is begging everyone to make a joke about it. But I won’t. Not because I am a strong person, but because I have other things that are bothering me more. People, we need to talk about hiking.
Now, I am not a hiking aficionado. In fact, I would say I am the exact opposite of that person. I was the child who would get monstrously bored on hiking trips as a Girl Scout and that was when I was young and filled with energy. Now, I am old and filled with laziness. Hiking is not my area of expertise.
Still, I am not stupid and I resent that Chasing Waterfalls thinks that I am. This is a movie about a photographer who lands a big photography gig that revolves around finding a secret waterfall. Hijinks abound because she knows nothing about how to go about this project. She first goes hiking with non-athletic sneakers. Later on, she struggles with picking out hiking boots at a resort store. She does not know about warding off mosquitoes. She is highly out of her depth when it comes to hiking. That is what her whole arc seems to be about!
Chasing Waterfalls never once seems to address the fact that the photographer might not have the hiking fitness to find this super secret waterfall that only one person has allegedly seen before. It’s so out of the way that most of the townsfolk can’t confirm that it exists and yet not once is that seen as a reasonable obstacle in her path. Instead, it’s just about charming the local sad single father/tour guide into showing her where this waterfall is located. And that is something my brain refuses to process.
Could this movie not make the photographer a seasoned hiker who knew what boots were? Could this movie not make this waterfall so secret that by having some newbie hiker reach it feels like a cheat to the story? I feel like there were simple ways around this conundrum. And if they took this route, maybe I could have focused on other stupid things about this movie like its title or the eleven-year olds falling in love or the dumb karaoke sequence that only seems to be there to waste time.
Sadly, they did not do that. So instead, we will all suffer through my pedantry. About hiking! I never knew I could be this person! About hiking! Ugh.
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This Week in Hallmark: Fit for a Prince
The most interesting thing about Fit for a Prince is it’s sense of timing. For one thing, it’s a movie without a seasonal home. Hallmark Channel decided to dump it in between their Love Ever After and Spring Fling events so it feels like an after thought. I thought it was just there to have something new to premiere on Saturdays (their new calling card) but next week is not a new movie premiere, so it really is just getting dumped to be dumped so to speak.
The more eerie sense of timing is that Fit for a Prince premiered the day before the big Harry and Meghan on Oprah interview where they were going to be discussing all the reasons why they felt it was necessary to leave the British Royal Family. Personally, I watched this movie after the interview aired and it was an incredibly weird experience to go from reading a Twitter feed full of tweets about the terrors of being a royal to a movie that makes being a commoner falling in love with a prince seem like a dream. As this is Hallmark, of course this experience is presented with a nearly all-white cast. So I suppose the whiplash could have been weirder, but it still existed. This movie was not given a timeslot that was super beneficial to it in any way.
Outside of when it premiered though, Fit for a Prince is just like your average, low tier and low budget Hallmark movie. Not that many Hallmark movies are high budget spectacles, but you could really tell from the production values that this was not a high priority movie. For instance, the lead works at a major fashion company which apparently consists of four employees who work in a one room store who work overtime a lot. The big events all take place in the same two rooms. There is barely any jewelry. The afterthought nature of this movie is apparent in every aspect.
All that has happened in this movie has happened before and all of it will happen again. It’s Hallmark Channel. I expect average American girls will be falling in love with unhappy royal men from fake European countries on the network for as long as their audience buys into this fantasy. And knowing what I know about Hallmark’s audience, I’m pretty comfortable that they will keep buying into this fantasy for some time.
Hopefully next time, it will be better timed and better budgeted though.
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