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CJ, Page 15

Holiday Watch: The Christmas Pageant

They say that you can take the girl out of the city, but you can’t take the city out of the girl. The Christmas Pageant aims to have a town full of earnest characters worm their way into the heart of a career-oriented, driven, New York City director.

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Holiday Watch: Annie Claus is Coming to Town

Santa’s daughter heads south for a sabbatical in the gentle climes of Los Angeles. There, she is targeted by an actor hired by Santa’s chief of operations to get her to fall in love and decide to not return home. Obviously he won’t succeed in the end. The question is: will we care?

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Holiday Watch: A Princess For Christmas

This is one movie I’m not going to beat around the bush about—it’s a delightful holiday fairy tale that is tender without the treacle, a fantasy while still being grounded, and doesn’t take itself so seriously that it loses its ability to be unashamed entertainment. A Princess For Christmas is a fun melting pot that takes the familiar and creates its own magic.

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WPS – Will It Get Its Act Together?

It’s been pretty obvious that the WPS, the top-tier women’s soccer league in the U.S., has been hanging on by its fingernails for a couple of seasons. While the business model is sounder than the previous WUSA, that doesn’t mean it might not meet the same fate.

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Holiday Watch: Debbie Macomber’s Trading Christmas

In a nutshell, the premise is 2006’s The Holiday except played with different situations/characters. It basically is about two people finding unexpected romance after they swap homes for the holidays. However, while the premise is familiar, this isn’t just a slapdash redux of the previous film.

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Holiday Watch: Dear Santa (2011)

Crystal is an ambition-challenged woman who is unexpectedly united with a girl’s letter to Santa. In the letter, the girl asks for a new wife for her dad, one that would also be a suitable follow-on to her revered late-mother. When greeted by fate in this way, what’s a poor rich woman to do?

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Holiday Watch: Silver Bells

Silver Bells, a Hallmark Hall of Fame production, gives us a solid holiday movie that his more deftly written than most. While carrying with it the necessary tropes that attach themselves to most holiday films, they aren’t fumbled as is often the case with some of the less well crafted movies of the genre.

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A Few “Occupy” Thoughts

A few people have asked why I haven’t been posting a lot about the Occupy movement. After all, I have a blog and I don’t seem to be afraid to use it. It’s not like I don’t have opinions on the matter. So I figured I’d take a few moments and touch on a few things.

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Holiday Watch: A Christmas Wish

Sometimes life gives you lemons. Huge, lemonade-defying lemons. When your husband of dubious life choices takes everything of worth and runs off with some vixen who has caught his eye, leaving you with three kids, no home, a tank of a car, and the clothes on your back…well, those are some pretty darned big lemons. This is where we find Martha Evens in A Christmas Wish.

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Holiday Watch: A Christmas Wedding Tail

In A Christmas Wedding Tail, two dogs are the reason a job-seeking widow with three young boys meets and has a romance with a widower vintner with two girls. It’s a match made in “what could possibly go wrong” land?

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Holiday Watch: The Case For Christmas

Santa Claus sued for emotion distress? An earnest but untested lawyer? A lovable little girl? No, this isn’t an iconic street between 33rd and 35th. And that’s good. That’s already been done so well that the copies have only been poor imitations. Still, there is a lot that is familiar in The Case For Christmas.

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