This Week in Hallmark: Walking the Dog
The premise of Walking the Dog is allegedly about two lawyers who are fighting each other in court, while being dragged together in love through their dogs. It’s a premise that would call to me in normal circumstances, as a person who enjoys the shit out of a good rivals fall in love romance.
Except that Walking the Dog is not really a rivals fall in love romance. Sure, the two lawyers are on opposite sides of a case–a really boring one about a bike lane–but they also basically fall in love immediately to the point where the guy stops caring about the case they’re supposed to be fighting about. There’s about one scene where the female lead gets all snippy at the male lead who dares to destroy a bike lane, but after that it’s basically just watching to people tentatively falling in love. Like super tentatively falling in love.They’ll walk their dogs in formal wear and have a moment, and then nothing seems to happen for twenty minutes after that. It’s very weird.
Jennifer Finnegan plays the female lead, whose name I never cared to learn, and she’s an incredibly sweet actress. She’s so sweet that it becomes obvious that she’s woefully miscast in this movie. Walking the Dog wants to suggest that the leads have a tangible spark even when they’re fighting in court. She comes across way too whimsical and light-hearted to pull it off. There’s no bite to the performance, which lends the movie and airy quality that doesn’t fit with its premise. Sam Page does better, excelling in carrying the banter all by himself, but there’s still a feeling that he’s holding himself back a little bit to match Finnegan’s tone.
Walking the Dog feels like a missed opportunity to me. On paper it reads like a slam dunk for Hallmark, but somewhere along the way the crew ended up tripping up and missing their shot. The good news is that it’s the first of about a billion movies premiering in the next couple of weeks on the channel, so there’s hope that there will be a knockout Hallmark film soon.
This Week in Hallmark: Love Locks
The real miracle of Love Locks was that I was able to get my dad to watch a full hour of it without him murdering me. That’s right, kids, my 56 year-old father, who used to walk around Blockbuster screaming “violent movies are good!”, gave up watching Fox News for an hour to instead watch Jerry O’Connell and Rebecca Romijn fall in love again. He may have missed the ending, but maybe by the end of the year, he’ll watch a full Hallmark movie. Miracles can happen!
Aside from the miracle of my father watching it for a full hour, there really isn’t much to say about Love Locks. Like, yes, it’s a Hallmark Hall of Fame joint, which means an increased budget and a relatively increased amount of star power, but it feels like all of that increased money just went to Parisian location shooting. There’s nothing that feels special about Love Locks. In fact, I’m pretty sure it was a last minute addition to the Hallmark Hall of Fame line-up. Not to get all conspiracy theorist on you, but I was positive that the upcoming Love at First Glance was originally going to be under the Hallmark Hall of Fame banner but then got switched out for Love Locks last November. Why? I don’t know. It’s not a well-thought out conspiracy theory. But it’s a conspiracy theory I believe in my heart nonetheless. (Of course, my pet conspiracy theories are about Hallmark movies instead of Mothman or the moon landing, I live my brand to the fullest!)
If you swapped out the settings for Love Locks, you would have a very typical Hallmark film. Think about it: a single mother takes her teenage daughter to a special town from her youth. While her daughter falls in love with a dopey local teen, the mother reconnects with the ex her broke her heart years ago. Along the way, a past mentor tries to manipulate them into falling in love again, and the mother gives up her current high paying career to follow artsier dreams. I’m pretty sure I have seen at least ten movies with a similar plot description, it’s just that instead of taking place in swanky Paris, they took place in a small town in the Midwest that doesn’t believe in cell service.
Hallmark Hall of Fame films are supposed to be schlocky, inspirational, kind of ridiculous events. A man has to marry his very religious brother’s widow because of biblical teachings. A father forces his daughter, Keri Russell, to marry a farmer because she got pregnant out of wedlock and he wants to avoid a scandal. Christopher Walken hires Glenn Close to be his mail-order bride because his last wife died during childbirth and it takes a lot of work to raise a family in olden times. (There’s a lot of Hallmark Hall of Fame movies about arranged marriages.) And yet, ever since the series moved to the Hallmark channel, the movies have become less dramatic and more generic. Hallmark Hall of Fame movies are now just traditional romantic comedies that can afford Shirley MacLaine. While this is a move that is more suited to my interests as a person who loves generic romantic comedies, I can’t help but feel like we’re losing something in the process.
I have no idea if Hallmark plans on releasing another Hall of Fame banner movie this year, but if they do, I hope that they actually make it something that’s worthy of the banner. Hallmark produces about 50 generic romantic comedies a year, I think the audience can handle a movie or two that decides to switch it up.
This Week in Hallmark: The Birthday Wish
Throughout the opening moments of The Birthday Wish, I was positive that I was watching another surefire Hallmark winner. The premise–girl sees glimpse of future and realizes she may have been dating the wrong guy all along–was classic romantic comedy. Even better was the fact that the leading players, Jessy Schram and Luke MacFarlane, were two Hallmark Pros who have proven in the past to be good at selling the low-key charm the channel pushes. During their opening scenes of light banter, I settled in and was happy to just watch it all play out exactly the way I expected it to.
Then something horrible happened: Jessy Schram saw her future and then the film got incredibly boring. For some reason the scriptwriters decided the best way for the female lead to handle her confusion about a possible future she never planned on was for her to directly confront every minor detail of her vision. So, Jessy Schram ate some macademia nuts and realized she was allergic to them as the vision predicted. Then she went to a dog park and realized she wouldn’t necessarily hate dogs after all just as her vision predicted. And so on and so forth it went until I felt like screaming, but what about the dude she was married to in this vision? Isn’t that what this romantic comedy is supposed to be about?
Not for The Birthday Wish! Because for every scene where Jessy Schram and Luke MacFarlne get to cutely bounce off each other, we get a scene where Jessy Schram does something completely mindnumbing like go to the doctor or deal with her current boyfriend, a highly neglectful monster who seems to treat Jessy Schram as a live-in servant. Her current boyfriend is so terrible I had no idea why she was freaking out about not being married to him in the future. If I was her I would be celebrating. Congratulations girl! You did it! You married a guy who wasn’t a total scumbag. I wish I got to see more of your romance with the Right Guy, but I guess not all wishes come true.
As of right now, the plan is to try and review every new Hallmark movie for the year! Hopefully from here on out, the posts will go up on Mondays after new movies premiere. Pray for my sanity.
This Week on Hallmark Channel: Love on Ice & A Royal Winter
When it comes to writing, my biggest claim to fame is my made-for-TV Christmas movie review blog. It’s gotten enough (minimal) traction, that people actually come to me with thoughts and questions about Hallmark’s programming. There have been quite a few rants on the blogs about the actors I love, and the ones I don’t, and letting out all my inner-Hallmark musings to the public is one of my greatest joys in running that blog.
Since I watch Hallmark movies all year round, and not just during the holiday season, I thought it would be cool to try and write out my thoughts on the movies Hallmark produces the other ten months of the year as a 2017 resolution. So after a bit of a break, so that I could look at the genre with somewhat fresh eyes, I am ready to tackle the tropes Hallmark throws out when their isn’t a Christmas tree in sight. And if you are at all interested in that sort of thing, my reviews for the first two Hallmark premieres of the year are right under the cut.
(Note: If you’re wondering why A Rose for Christmas isn’t included here, it’s because– as it’s title would indicate–it’s a Christmas movie. That review will be posted in November on the appropriate blog.)
Top 10 Films of 2016
In 2015, I started my countdown of my favorite films of the year with a mea culpa for being absent because the year was tough and everything got away with me in the interim. There were promises to do better, and to get back to writing, because 2016 was going to be a better year.
Well, umm, 2016 was not a better year. It was a terrible year all around. Hilariously, you can use this blog to pinpoint the exact moment everything went haywire, which I find a useful historical artifact.
If there was one constant in the hellfire and misery that 2016 seemed to be, it was the movies. There was nothing quite as nice as being able to just ignore the entire world for a few hours in a movie theater, and so I spent a lot of 2016 just doing that. In total, I saw 195 new releases this past year, and under the cut you’ll find my picks for the ones I found to be the best of the lot.
Review: Pride & Prejudice & Zombies
I don’t think many people were walking into Pride & Prejudice & Zombies expecting it to be high art. It’s titled Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, clearly high art isn’t the concern here. However, with that title and its genre mash-up concept one would at least hope that it would be fun. The kind of stupid crazy movie that one doesn’t take too seriously, but enjoys for what it is.
Instead of being a kick-ass, hilarious romp though, Pride & Prejudice & Zombies is surprisingly boring. I have sat through many bad films, and yet I haven’t been as desperate for a movie to be over in a long time. There’s just nothing there. The Pride & Prejudice beats are underplayed, so the romance comes off as particularly half-baked. Even more disappointing are the fight sequences. So many of the zombie scenes involve a character looking across a field and noticing a zombie and then quickly shooting its head off without a fight. Not that the fight scenes are much better, as most are indistinguishable from one another.
There is nothing wrong with camp or melodrama or silliness in movies. There’s nothing wrong with reinventing famous works in new and crazy ways, but if you are going to do so, you better hope you are doing it to the best of your abilities. Otherwise, you create not only a bad film, but an annoying one. And boy, was Pride & Prejudice & Zombies so boring that it was annoying.
Final Rating: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Director: Burr Steers
Starring: Lily James, Sam Riley, Charles Dance, Lena Headey
Review: Hail, Caesar!
My hopes were that Hail, Caesar! would be like The Grand Budapest Hotel–an early release weirdo prestige comedy movie that works to brighten up the mediocre winter months. And there’s certainly a lot of bright spots in the movie. The performances are generally comically sharp, and certain scenes work as singular comedic sketches (the highlight of these being a scene where a fussy director played by Ralph Fiennes struggles to get a dopey western star played by Alden Elhenreich through a single line of dialogue in a swanky farce).
However, for all the fun Hail, Caesar! is in moments, the film as a whole doesn’t hang together. Allegedly, there’s a unifying story about religion and capitalism and Hollywood playing out here, but it all felt disconnected from one another. At one moment, George Clooney’s dumb movie star is talking to a bunch of screenwriters about communism and then suddenly Josh Brolin’s fixer is pondering on Christ before Channing Tatum does a dance number. It’s fine in moments, but it’s in no way cohesive.
Cynically now, I can’t help but get the sense that Hail, Caesar! was released in February so that we could overestimate its quality. It is leaps and bounds better than most of the weird horror pictures and half-assed Kevin Hart movies that this season produces. However, if Hail, Caesar! was released in October to survive among the glut of awards season bait, it wouldn’t stand a real chance. Because in the end it’s a nice enough distraction, but not much deeper than that.
Final Rating: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Director: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Starring: Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Elhenreich, Channing Tatum
Trailer Tuesday: The Divergent Series: Allegiant
A weekly look at upcoming films through the lens of a brief study of their trailers. Previous entries can be found here.
What’s the film?
Directed by Robert Schemke, The Divergent Series: Allegiant is the third film sequel in the franchise following the pretty dumb film Divergent and the incredibly dull and nonsensical film The Divergent Series: Insurgent. It comes out on March 18th, 2016.
What’s it about?
After the earth-shattering revelations of The Divergent Series: Insurgent,
Tris must escape with Four and go beyond the wall enclosing Chicago.
For the first time ever, they will leave the only city and family they
have ever known in order to find a peaceful solution for their embroiled
city. Once outside, old discoveries are quickly rendered meaningless
with the revelation of shocking new truths. Tris and Four must quickly
decide who they can trust as a ruthless battle ignites beyond the walls
of Chicago which threatens all of humanity. In order to survive, Tris
will be forced to make impossible choices about courage, allegiance,
sacrifice and love. (x)
My Awareness of the Film Before Trailer:
Just like I know that one day in the future I am going to have to endure a colonoscopy, I also knew that The Divergent Series: Allegiant was coming down the pike. Sadly, I have to deal with the latter way sooner than the former, even though both will result in a lot of shit.
Does the trailer make the film look any good?
It made me miss the days of the first Divergent, whose major crime was being boring. Now, these movies are both boring and inexplicable. The trailer tries to set up this vast, evil conspiracy of evilness, but instead of being intrigued I was just annoyed. Why does all of this matter? Why do I care? Why does anyone care?
I hate this franchise so much.
My Excitement for the Film After Seeing the Trailer:
There are *two* more movies in this franchise including Allegiant. There are two of them. I can’t believe I am going to force myself to sit through both. I expect a medal when I’m done.
Review: The Choice
For the first hour and ten minutes, The Choice is a mediocre romantic comedy. The two leads hate each other, become attracted to each other, fall in love and then become engaged after a cringeworthy spectacle. It’s completely fluff viewing and I was happy enough to turn my brain off and just enjoy it for the low grade romance of it all. In a way, it’s the perfect sick day viewing. It doesn’t require much for you to watch it, and it’s finely forgettable.
The last forty minutes though, which take place seven years in the future after the female lead is put into a coma after a car accident, is something else altogether. Suddenly, the cute forgettable romcom becomes a ridiculous, over the top melodrama. I have no idea if this part is better or not, because while it is far from good, it is also hilarious at times. There are moments that are supposed to be moving, that are just so overplayed that I wound up laughing. In particular, there’s one scene where the male lead cries over a pair of windchimes that had me nearly crying from stifling my giggles in the theater.
The Choice is not a movie that meets its aims. There was no point where I really believed in the romance or the tragedy playing out before me. Still, I was never put off by the endeavor. At first by its Hallmark-like affability, and then later on by its accidental camp. There’s value to that kind of accidental joy in the dreary winter movie months. I’m thankful Nicholas Sparks gave it to me.
Final Rating: ★ ★ (★) ☆ ☆
Director: Ross Katz
Starring: Benjamin Walker, Theresa Palmer, Maggie Grace, Tom Welling