Marching to the Beat of a Different Little Drummer Boy
Some people just glide into the holiday season as if on a poem. Others start off well, but have a few stumbles before they get the hang of it.
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Holiday Watch: A Holiday Engagement
This review for A Holiday Engagement almost didn’t get written. Why? Well, that’s what we’re here to talk about. In any form of storytelling, one of the worst thing you can do is…
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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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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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CJ’s Best Christmas Memories So Far
As you can imagine, after a half-century of Christmases a lot of them exhibit some degree of sameness. Traditions do that, being that you have a routine that is more-or-less followed year after year. Even so, amid the truckloads of presents and visits by Santa, I’ve managed to have a memory or two stick with me.
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Holiday Watch: The Most Wonderful Time of the Year
It seems to happen every Christmas: your beloved uncle brings home a perfect-for-you stranger just before the holiday and he makes your ill-suited boyfriend suspicious and jealous. Amazingly, The Most Wonderful Time of the Year does better than most at keeping an entertaining balance.
Read more...xkcd: Tree
Being a programmer-type-fellow, I found this hilarious…and a marvelous idea. (Yes, I’m a geek…how can you not know this by now?) xkcd: …
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Holiday Watch: A Christmas Story
What child can’t relate to the problem posed in A Christmas Story: Ralphie Parker wants a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas. He commits himself to the quest of getting his beloved present despite life tossing numerous obstacles in his path.
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Holiday Watch: Three Wise Women
This is what happens if you take equal parts A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life and set it in Ireland with the protagonist being a doctor who has sworn off love and is instead becoming married to her career.
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Holiday Watch: An Old-Fashioned Christmas
Following a young woman in this period piece, An Old-Fashioned Christmas, opts to break out of the traditional formula for a holiday film and delivers, instead, a solid story filled with choices, consequences, love, disappointment, greed, and good old-fashioned humanity. The question is: does it deliver on the holiday theme?
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Holiday Watch: Miracle on 34th Street (1947)
Calling Miracle on 34th Street a Christmas classic is a lot like calling chocolate just another candy. Some movies stand head-and-shoulders above the rest, and this classic stands even higher than that in the holiday pantheon.
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Holiday Watch: Farewell Mr. Kringle
Christmas movies are a lot like romance novels in that most of the time they must adhere to very familiar and well-worn tropes. Farewell Mr. Kringle succeeds in giving us a well-balanced amalgam of the familiar while still being not only engaging but likable.
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Holiday Watch: A Christmas Carol (1984)
Charles Dickens’ story, A Christmas Carol, has been done, re-done, re-imagined, re-gurgitated, re-thought, and just generally re’d. It’s easy to get jaded about it. What a wonder it is to be presented with what I consider to be the definitive filmed version.
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Holiday Watch: The Christmas Card
Cody Cullen is a soldier who returns from his latest tour to find the setting for an anonymous Christmas card he received while in-country. His adventure grows when he’s smitten by Faith Spelman; the woman who, unbeknownst to him, also happens to be the writer and sender of that card. What could go wrong?
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