This Week in Hallmark: It Was Always You

Everything about It Was Always You was such a cliche, that it went from being boring to delightfully hilarious at a certain point. Every character would be introduced and you would know exactly why. Every scene would start and you would know exactly what purpose it would serve. To say the movie was full of Chekhov’s guns would be an insult to the nature of suspense. You see the guns. You know exactly how they are going off. You are positive they are full of love and good vibes and cishet white people having the quaint little times of their lives.

It Was Always You is about a woman (Erin Krakow) who is getting married to her childhood friend. They are both dentists. They are both boring. They fill their day with dentistry and lists. They are boring. Sometimes Erin Krakow thinks about not being boring and going to Europe (where not boring people go!), but she is getting married and being boring is fun. Or is it?

Boring Dentist Guy has a brother, (Tyler Hynes), you see. He is a free spirit who likes to travel the world and help people in a vague sense. He doesn’t eat vanilla, he eats peanut butter ice cream. He keeps yen in his pockets. He grates on Boring Woman’s nerves. But? Obviously, he doesn’t grate on her nerves for True Love Reasons. Of course not. (Of course, it is.)

Through made-up natural disaster Boring Dentist Guy can’t make it to the wedding planning for days. For days! Therefore, Freespirited Guy must help Boring Woman plan her wedding. They go to cake tastings and hate on vanilla. They go to a gift registry and hate on white plates. They go talk to a Grandmother Who Knows Better who tells us about marrying your opposite and the concept of “zing”, which is the closest Hallmark will get to acknowledging sexual compatibility in their movies every time soon. 

This movie is like a well-scheduled train. It is reaching every station in a timely fashion to get you to a planned destination and it’s making sure there’s limited pain for its characters along the way. In some ways, its admirable. In some ways, it feels like too much.

The movie culminates in a scene where one character (guess who!) tells another (guess who!) that he’s only been in love once and it never has stopped. “It’s always been you,” they say as they dance under the moonlight. There is not a speck of parody to be found in the scene. Just a very sincere title drop for a very sincere movie that plays through every one of Hallmark’s favorite tropes with absolutely sincerity.

I could not stop laughing.

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This Week in Hallmark: Mix Up in the Mediterranean 

For the past month or so I have been flirting with the idea of bringing back this column in some capacity. It seemed like the perfect low stakes way to start kick myself out of a PTSD fog that has settled in over the past couple of months that has not been helped by my lack of employment and complete self-isolation. Still, a variety of factors were holding me back from fully committing to jumping into writing again – there are so many podcasts that cover these movies now that to add to it would just be white, it can be hard to write anything when you are struggling mentally, I would have to watch the new movies as airing a majority of the time since I don’t have Hallmark on Sling anymore, etc. etc. etc.

But then I read that once again Hallmark was going to have its first gay lead (I guess more people called them out on how there was no way The Christmas House counted) and that this time it was going to happen because Jeremy Jordan (an actor who is at best not openly in the LGBT community, but is married to a woman) was going to play twins – one of them is gay and one of them is straight and they have to switch places for plot contrivance reasons so shenanigans can ensue! For the first time in a long time I was like, I have to see how this plays out. There is so much potential for messiness here and I want to form an opinion on it all. So here I am dusting off this column to do just that.

In the end, most of the most bewildering choices in Mix Up in the Mediterranean take place in the first twenty minutes. For instance, the event that kicks off the twins switching places plot is the Gay Twin Brother touching a medium-sized suitcase and throwing his back out. You learn that the initial character descriptions given to these twins is that the Straight Twin Brother works in a diner in Alaska and wears flannel while the Gay Twin Brother pretends that he’s French sometimes in New York City (also he has a weird French rival??).  There is the horrifying moment when you figure out that the movie takes place at an international cooking competition and yet every character with more than five lines is going to be white. On a personal level, there was the slow dawning realization that the Gay Twin Brother’s husband was played by Callum Blue aka The Guy Who Was Not Chris Pine in The Princess Diaries 2. These first twenty minutes also feature the most acting choices on Jordan’s part that remind you of James Corden’s acting in The Prom, a position that no actor should strive to be in. I felt like I was getting whiplash from all the choices this movie seemed to be making as it was starting out, and I thought that there was no way I was going to get through the whole movie with my eyeballs still in place in my head.

Thankfully, the movie mellowed out as it went along. It was still more bizarre than your average Hallmark joint – there is a subplot about obtaining illegal truffles – but as Jessica Lowndes’s character and her wane subplot with the Straight Twin Brother gains more prominence, the movie becomes happier to just ride the bland romantic comedy energy the channel is known for. 

In fact as I was watching it, I became less interested in the story and more interested in recognizing how Mix Up in the Mediterranean compares to other Hallmark films as an illustration of its diversity initiatives. In particular, I think there is a fascinating compare and contrast to be had with this movie and The Christmas House when it comes to representation– both movies revolve have stories that revolve around brothers of differing sexualities after all.  While Mix Up in the Mediterranean has a more prominent role for its gay brother and gives him more of an arc, all of it is centered around his relationship with his straight brother. At times the movie gives off a vibe that the only reason why one of the brothers is gay is to make it easier for the actor playing the twins to differentiate the performances which is … yikes. On the other hand, The Christmas House lets their gay characters actually have a plot that centers their romance. Their development is about them as a couple. The gay brother in the movie is also played by an out gay actor which leads to less cringeworthy moments. Still, they are a relatively minor plot of the story as a whole. These movies have strengths and weaknesses that compliment one another to a point where its frustrating. So many steps forward, so many steps back!

The other movie I thought of while watching, was Switched for Christmas, a 2017 Candace Cameron Bure vehicle that also involved twins switching places and shenanigans ensuing. Switched for Christmas was the movie I thought about while trying to determine if I should give Mix Up in the Mediterranean credit for having the first gay lead on Hallmark and its ultimately what made me decide it should not count. You see, in Switched for Christmas both of the twins have romantic arcs and career arcs and their shared family arc. Both twins get equal screentime and narrative footing and chances to grow. Mix Up in the Mediterranean does not let its twins have the same equality– everything the Gay Twin Brother does is directly in relation to his Straight Twin Brother. The Straight Twin Brother learns about having confidence and falling in love and repairing his relationship with his twin. The Gay Twin Brother just learns about repairing his relationship with his twin. It’s certainly more narrative weight than any gay character has been given on the channel before, but at best, the Gay Twin Brother is a deuteragonist and not a True Lead, especially when compared to the twins in Switched at Christmas.

Mix Up in the Meditterranean is by no means good, but it provides a lot to think about for a person who cares about Hallmark growing to be better. It was certainly worth dusting off the old blog. And who knows, maybe next week I will be back to talk about Erin Krakow’s bangs in It Was Always You. If Hallmark can continue to work on itself, I can continue to work on myself too and why not do that through talking about Hallmark films?

If you like this blog, please consider donating to my Kofi page! You can also donate money to kbange@gmail.com through either Venmo or CashApp. Thank you!

This Week in Hallmark: Wedding Every Weekend

Back in the day, before Facebook became known for election hacking and your aunt’s bad political opinions, Facebook had “groups”. They were little clubs you would display on your page that would show off your value system. Some of them were straightforward “High Schoolers for Barack Obama”, some of them were problematic in retrospect, “Finish Your Drink There Are Sober Kids in Africa”. The one I think about most often these days though is “My Friends are Getting Married, I’m Just Getting Drunk”.

“My Friends are Getting Married, I’m Just Getting Drunk” was a place where the perpetually single people of the world could allegedly come together and bemoan how the only thing about weddings they have to look forward to where the constant open bars. They did this mainly via Wedding Crashers quotes, because it was 2006 and society still thought Wedding Crashers had a lot to add to the cultural consciousness. I was fourteen at the time I joined and had no business really relating, but I thought it was funny and I knew I would get to that vibe someday. My friends would be getting married, and I would be getting drunk.

Wedding Every Weekend feels like what would happen if someone decided to adapt “My Friends are Getting Married, I’m Just Getting Drunk” for Hallmark. Since this movie is for Hallmark though, the friends would be getting married but the perpetual singletons would not be getting drunk. No, open bars as a concept don’t even merit a mention in Wedding Every Weekend. Instead the vibe of Wedding Every Weekend was, “My Friends Are Getting Married, I’m Just Thinking About My Small Business”.

Wedding Every Weekend is fine. For a movie that is only 83 minutes long, it feels incredibly padded. For instance the male lead, played by Paul Campbell, has an incredibly boring subplot where he thinks about what cars he is going to remodel to keep his business afloat. It’s entirely there just to make him a more rounded character, and normally I am all for more-rounded  characters but not when the plot devices are so boring. It’s especially insane because Paul Campbell’s character, Edgar Nate (he has two names because he hates his first name!) has a tragic romantic backstory that is supposed to explain why he is so cynical. This backstory is dealt with in about 30 seconds even though you would think it was a more natural romantic roadblock than the car thing, but Wedding Every Weekend really, really cares about small businesses. Edgar Nate’s car remodeling business, the female lead (played by Kimberly Sustad)’s plot line about opening up her own physical therapy clinic … they take up a lot of screen time. If you would ask me these small business are as important to the narrative as the weekend weddings that are in the title of the movie.

And well, that’s why we are here, aren’t we? I have buried the lede because the true story of Wedding Every Weekend isn’t the romantic comedy about two people who fall in love while going to weddings … every … weekend. No, it’s about Hallmark falling in love with diversity! For the first time, Hallmark has decided to acknowledge non-straight people exist. And they do so in a way that feels more than perfunctory, too! The two LGBT characters not only get married, but they kiss on screen. They not only kiss onscreen but they get to have multiple lines afterwards that allude to their domestic life. The couple mentions buying a home, and going on honeymoon and having people over to drink wine. They are decently rounded characters who are not just relegated as a blink and you miss it background wedding; they are one of the more important weddings in the plot of the movie. You have to give Hallmark like the world’s tiniest amount of props for not just hiding their first real case of representation in the background. 

But only like the super tiniest amount of props, because for all that this is a step forward for the channel, the representation is still very backgrounded and still came with a bevy of press that makes me feel cynical that this is more than making up for the Zales ad fiascos of 2019. Maybe Hallmark’s future line-up will prove me wrong on this front. Only time will tell. But I am a pessimist at heart, and that’s why I’m not getting married. I’m just getting drunk. Cheers!

You Can Not Be Putting Me in the Trunk!: Some Thoughts on The Bounty Hunter on Its Tenth Anniversary

People test their endurance in a variety of ways. Some people climb mountains. Others run marathons. Others still go into the wilderness for weeks on end without technology or means of communication and see if they can survive.

I watch bad movies.

If you know me and you love me, you will become privy to my habit of testing my fortitude against millions of poorly reviewed for fun. Frankly, you don’t even have to love me. If you are acquainted with me in the slightest, at a certain point you will become aware of the fact that a poor Rotten Tomatoes score is a fun and enticing challenge to me, the way qualifying for the Boston Marathon would be to a both mentally and physically healthier person. 

This weakness of mine began in earnest back in January of 2009, when my cousin and I paid to sit through the Anne Hathaway- Kate Hudson “friends ruining their lives because they want to get married at The Plaza Hotel” advertisement Bride Wars. I predicted all of its plot twists fifteen minutes in, wrote a pan of it for a journalism class assignment and realized that a movie didn’t have to be good in order to be a good time. 

(Honestly, it probably started way before that, but Bride Wars was when the lesson truly clicked for me.)

Therefore, the following year, when I read that The Bounty Hunter was in the single digits on Rotten Tomatoes, I called my cousin in excitement and told her that we had to go see it. It’s bad. It’s terrible. It must be fun! So on a weekend in March, ten years ago, my mother and I dropped us off to see a film that Roger Ebert wrote “had no reason to exist”. My mother could not understand the logic behind such a choice, but we were excited. We were gonna have some laughs! We were gonna see a terrible movie and we were gonna have a good time!

That did not happen. The Bounty Hunter was not full of laughs, or any good times. It was terrible though – just endless agony as you waited for it to end. Over the years, I have discovered that some films do not stick with you because they provide you memorable moments or characters. Instead, the feeling they give you leaves a mark on your soul. If you asked me what exactly happened in The Bounty Hunter a week ago, I would not have been able to tell you much outside of the fact that Jason Sudekis was annoying. However, I can still feel what it was like to sit in that theater without a watch wondering just how long this film could possibly go on for. I can picture the ceiling of the theater clearly in my mind as I counted tiles wondering if I was soon going to be free. The pain of sitting through that movie stuck with me so intrinsically, that if you asked me to name my top five worst movie-going experiences I would know to include The Bounty Hunter in that list even if I could not list off all the reasons why exactly I hated it. 

Rewatching The Bounty Hunter ten years later was a ride. Mainly because I was rediscovering all the many ways it was bad. For instance, the entire film revolves around a potential murder case where the victim remains an offscreen plot device we never care about. The reasons why Jennifer Aniston has a bounty on her head in the first place is given similar thought and nuance. There is a dumb sideplot with Jason Sudekis having a creepy crush on Jennifer Aniston that leads him to follow her across the state. This plot goes nowhere, but does waste what feels like hours upon hours of screentime as we hilariously watch him get tortured at a certain point. Every needledrop, including two Kesha songs, is lazy and uninspired. Really, the whole movie is lazy and uninspired. At least with an Adam Sandler joint, you realize that they were conning a studio to pay for their vacation. The Bounty Hunter doesn’t even give you that satisfaction. They were all just not trying just to not try.

The sad thing is that I think I would have forgiven The  Bounty Hunter all of its many flaws if Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler had any chemistry. They do not. There is not a single moment in this film where I believed those characters even liked each other and yet the movie wanted me to believe they loved each other. They loved each other so much that other characters kept commenting on how it inspired them! You were supposed to want these two people to get remarried so badly, and yet all I could think of was that it was for the best that they were divorced. These two are a chemistry black hole in this movie, and my standards for chemistry are not all that high (I watch a ton of made-for-TV movies). Honestly, I do not think Aniston or Butler could make When Harry Met Sally work and that’s a great movie with a great script. They are just that bad.

Does that mean that Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal could have made The Bounty Hunter work? I kind of doubt it, but the idea of Billy Crystal taking on that role did make me laugh so hard I cried. On that note, I do not think that Meg Ryan or Tom Hanks could have necessarily pulled this script off either, though I would have loved to see them try. You know who this script would have been perfect for? Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson in like 2006. The movie still would have been bad, but it’s not like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days was a cinematic masterpiece and still I have friends who swear by it mainly on the basis of their chemistry and few good set pieces. I think, if anyone could have made The Bounty Hunter not unbearably terrible, it could have been them. 

Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson were not the leads of The Bounty Hunter though. And while you can imagine them in your head if you want to, you will still have to settle for the boring, charisma-free leads you have when you are actually watching. Even ten years on, it’s still not very fun.

Top 10 of 2018

For the first time in a long time, I was able to have two feet on solid ground for an entire year. My personal life managed to avoid having grand tragedies for an entire year, and I finally found the sense of stability I was looking for.

As a result, it felt like I was finally able to enjoy watching movies in a way I couldn’t in previous years. It really made me aware of how half of the moviegoing experience is what you bring to it. Sometimes a movie reaches you, and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you watch something at a time when you shouldn’t and as a result it lands with a thud. Sometimes you watch something at the exact right moment and it hits a homerun. It’s impossible to watch every movie in ideal circumstances. It’s impossible to pretend that we did.

So I’m not going to pretend my Top 10 is filled with the objectively best films of 2018. I don’t know what that list would look like, or what it should be.  I don’t think anyone does. Instead this list is one of the films that stuck with me the most throughout the year. The films that managed to make me think or smile or cry at a moment when I needed to think or smile or cry. They are the films that had the most value to me at the end of the year. I saw 190 new releases throughout 2018, and these are the ones that managed to connect with me the most. There’s something to that, I think. Or well, at least, I hope.

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Top 10 of 2017

It feels like most everyone’s Top 10 lists for 2017 start with a discussion about how movies got them through an incredibly. That no matter how rough things had gotten, movies reminded them that there was still some good in the world, that not everything was suffocating and depressing.

I didn’t get that feeling.

It was hard to love movies this year. Was it because I went through a personal crisis of some magnitude over the summer? Was it because the world seemed to fall apart at its seems with a president who implicitly confirmed every fear I had about the country I lived in? Was it because the Weinstein Scandal, and all the scandals following made me feel guilty for even getting joy out of the film industry? Was it because movies this year were a little more mediocre than usual or that I didn’t have the time to deep dive into foreign releases like I usually do?

I don’t know. It’s probably a mixture of all these things anyway. 

But this year wasn’t a complete bust, and I refuse to let a bad year fully take me away from things I get enjoyment from. And I did get some enjoyment out of the 180 new releases I saw this year, and I love taking note of why I loved my Top 10 movies every year. So here it is, a little bit more lean than usual, but still a record of the best films I saw in 2017.

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This Week in Hallmark: Campfire Kiss

It’s becoming rarer and rarer for Hallmark to drop a movie without tying it to some big seasonal release. As Countdown to Christmas has become more of a behemoth, its become more and more likely for all the new movies to be tied into some sort of seasonal theme and released in a monthly bunch. You’ll get five winter movies in January, five Valentine’s Day movies crammed into the first two weeks of February, five wedding-themed movies in June and so on and so forth all through the year. Occasionally, you’ll get a straggler movie–usually released in September or March–that’s not part of some big holiday event and as a result feels like a misfit toy castoff.

What’s interesting about Campfire Kiss is that it’s a misfit toy which for some reason has a lot of Hallmark’s favorite bells and whistles. Danica McKellar stars, and even though she can’t screenkiss to save her life, Hallmark has easily made her one of their top tier actresses. Paul Greene, the male lead, has quickly become one of Hallmark’s favorite leading men. They previously were the stars of a June Wedding movie, Perfect Match, that a lot of people adored (I mainly remember it for making me aware of the exist of a Kansas City Confidential). You would think their big reunion would be saved for a Countdown to Christmas event movie, but it’s not. It’s thrown together into this random spring break camping movie that’s getting dumped in a long dry season for the channel with no more movies on the horizon until the Spring Fling event starts in April.

I’m sure it’s been shunted because it doesn’t easily fit into being either a winter or spring movie. The movie takes place over spring break, but there’s snow everywhere and everyone’s wearing winter coats. I certainly don’t think it’s a quality thing. Campfire Kiss is certainly on par with every other movie Hallmark has released this year, which is to say it’s perfectly fine and a little boring. If you like to watch people talk about parenting techniques than this movie is for you. If you like to watch kids geocaching, than this movie is definitely for you. If you want to watch a lot of pining and bantering, than you can probably skip Campfire Kiss because it doesn’t really provide on that front.

But then again Danica McKellar, Hollywood’s leaning mathematician, does sing a song about pi! So maybe it all evens out. (No, it doesn’t. You don’t need to see Campfire Kiss.)

This Week in Hallmark: Love Blossoms

Between last Saturday’s premiere of Love Blossoms and the start of the Spring Fling event on April 1st, Hallmark is only premiering one new movie and I am incredibly grateful. I need a break, and I think Hallmark needs one too.

This winter has been incredibly rough for Hallmark–maybe not in terms of ratings (I haven’t checked), but in terms of movie quality. We’re two events into Hallmark’s 2017 original movie slate and so far none of the films I have seen would have hit higher than a 2.5 star rating, if I was rating these things TV Movie Christmas style. Honestly, if Hallmark started a Christmas season with a slew of films of this low level quality, I would have considered quitting the blog. It’s been so rough. Not in the fun melodramatic cheesefest way either, but in the “watching these films may help me out with my insomnia problem” way instead.

God, Love Blossoms was a snooze.

It’s the story of a lady chemist (played by one of the female leads from the A Golden Christmas trilogy) who inherits her dad’s perfume business, and for some reason, she needs the best nose in human history to make perfume. That nose belongs to Victor Webster (whose name I only remember because he was in the vastly superior Summer Villa last year). The lady chemist is also in an unfulfilling relationship with a perfume investor or something? I don’t remember; I’m only mentioning this because he’s played by Callum Blue, who back in the day I had a total crush on. Also some rando is trying to steal her secret perfume recipe, but I couldn’t tell you much about that either, though I’m pretty sure Callum Blue was involved somewhere along the line.

Anyway, there’s also a lot of ridiculous nose related drama (he can’t eat spicy foods! there’s a crisis when he has allergies!), and at a certain point I literally just zoned out as if I once again was a 16-year old in last period algebra class. It wouldn’t be long before my mind would stop low key buzzing and I wouldn’t have to half pay attention anymore, but it felt like an eternity.

I didn’t retain much from my last period algebra classes, and I don’t think I’ll retain much of Love Blossoms either (obviously). However, while the lack of higher math knowledge may bite me in the ass someday, I don’t think even a top Hallmark executive would care if I fumbled up recalling the plotline of this movie. I bet they fell asleep while watching it too.

This Week in Hallmark: A Dash of Love, While You Were Dating and Love at First Glance

Countdown to Valentine’s Day is one of my least favorite Hallmark events. Not only is it a messily organized event that’s hard to keep track of (the schedule of movies kept changing even during the two week event), the movies it produces are usually a snore. For the past couple of years Hallmark has run Countdown to Valentine’s Day there hasn’t been a film that’s stuck in my head past its runtime, let alone a film that’s made me giddy. I’m usually happy to skip over it for the most part and watch its films in bits and pieces when they’re rerun with the June Weddings slate. Alas, I have decided to write up all the Hallmark movies this year, so I can’t skip over these films. But thankfully, you can just read my thoughts under the jump and avoid the hassle. You are all so blessed!

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