Last one for awhile, mebbe
Dec. 20th, 2022 05:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
impyOkay, I'm back with my holiday movie mini reviews. Sunday was my decorate day so I needed something in the background and I went back and picked up Dancing Through the Snow which I chose because it's a Lifetime holiday movie and they tend to be better.
...tend to be.
I'm going to try and cut this movie some slack because it's not bad. I have endured far worse and far weirder. It's not great, either and I don't think all of this can be blamed on me starting it just when I was really getting sick and then trying again while decorating and not having my full attention on things. There's not quite negative chemistry going on here but it's kinda close.
Short version: Michael's a single dad to Lily, a ballerina. One day his best friend, Noah, catches Mike helping Lily with her dancing and records them, then uploads it online and naturally it goes viral because dad dancing badly but with joy? Yes, please. Everyone in his life except maybe Lily wants him to maybe use this as a reason to get back into dating, but Michael has no interest in anyone who wants to date him because of his fleeting "fame". Instead he meets Lily in a cringe inducing scene and shortly thereafter they realize Olivia is Lily's dance teacher. Which Michael doesn't know because he's a firefighter and his mother takes Lily to and from dance class. Liv and Mike are instantly drawn to one another but Lily gets jealous at having to share her father (and is dealing with not remembering her mother very well, so having someone replace her is freaking her out) and Olivia's been seriously considering moving to Florida to live with her parents because the dance studio has been in the red for quite awhile. Guess it's a good thing she fell for someone who still has about twelve seconds left on the 15 minutes of fame clock, huh?
There are things that work. If nothing else, I've realized I think I like AnnaLynne McCord, as she was kind of fab here. Lily could be very sweet/cute. The father/daughter dancing? Also cute. I liked the friendships, even if they didn't get a ton of time.
But like I said, we're dealing with kind of negative chemistry at times. There's also a bit of an odd note with Noah who gets very flustered when Lily asks him questions about her mother and I swear to God, I thought we were going to find out he and the late, great Claire had been a thing at some point. But no. To be fair, I also wouldn't have been surprised if, before Liv showed up as the obvious love interest, we were getting M/N until I remembered the ballet bit and realized yeah, no, that'd be a big no. On the I'm not sure where to put this side, the realization that the actors playing Michael and Lily are a real life father/daughter pair made things make a lot of sense, as did realizing this came out in 2021 which explains the very, very small sets. Seriously, it's going to be a game in the future to play "no budget or COVID filming?"
It's a solid B- for me. It did the job of catching my attention enough to get some holiday spirit going but wasn't enough that I felt super invested, nor do I think I'll remember this in a year. *shrug*
Baking Spirits Bright is one I probably should've actually watched more than I did. It seemed to have a few more montages than I anticipated and I think that's how we had these two bonding, which can work...but it feels a bit cheap. I liked Mira's family and while I don't think I'm a fruitcake person, I do love a good tradition and Mira's alllllllllll about tradition. Not really sure how well Mira and Brady are going to work out given her life is very firmly rooted at home and Brady's centered elsewhere, though I guess he'd travel anyway so *shrug*
Ahhhhh, the guy playing Brady is on Sweet Magnolias. That's where I know him from. He reads a little too aloof here and the chemistry is off but I admit I was busy baking a cake and flipping through magazines so again, I'm not sure how much is really on the movie.
My only big issue with this is Brady's second in command, Finn, is given the Varma family account when Brady's father lands a huge account and needs Brady back home. Brady's just come up with the perfect ad that'll finally appease Mira and should still help sell fruitcake (in theory. I still think they were absolutely right when they had Brady scoff that it was too late in the season to set up an actual campaign for this year) before he leaves and then Finn takes over and goes in the exact opposite direction. It's EVERYTHING Mira did not want and honestly, it's terrible. I'd think it's meant to be terrible (there's literally a whiteboard with WOKE on it as a selling point for the campaign) except when Brady comes back to town, after Finn's campaign fails spectacularly, Brady promotes Finn to partner and assures him he's done a great job.
No the fuck he did not. I'm not saying he hasn't done wonderful work on other campaigns but in this instance he fucked up spectacularly. Y'all know you don't have to say something's good just because the character who did it is gay, right? He's allowed to make a mistake and be called out for it. o_O
Basically: love the Varmas, not so much love for the ad campaign or lead romance stuff. Jay and Finn were the better couple.
Lifetime, you're letting me down something fierce this year.
On the other end of things, I finally watched Wednesday and my glob, it has been a long time since the internet made me think a show was going to be one thing only to have it be something else entirely. The amount of Enid/Wednesday stuff I had to wade past ever since this first came out made me think that at the very least, Wednesday's heart would thaw towards Enid much sooner than it really did.
I liked it overall. I think it not coming out until damn near Thanksgiving was stupid as fuck.
Since I just finished it yesterday, it's going to take a little time to fully percolate in my brain, but here's some stuff off the top of my head.
People gave Luis Guzman shit for being Gomez. Those people can eat shit. He was a better Gomez than CZJ was Morticia, but I will freely admit that I think her issues were how Morticia was written and not her acting. Pugsley was adorable (how often do you hear that?) and I loved that Wednesday ended up at Nevermore because she was defending her brother. Thing is, it makes no fucking sense that Pugsley wouldn't go with her since the kid was being bullied to hell and back, and not in the fun way, so... what the hell, Morticia and Gomez?
Principal Weems was a delight but again, I expected them to do more with her. She knows Wednesday doesn't want to be at Nevermore and is going to try and escape ASAP (she flat out tells Wednesday this) and when she takes Wednesday to town for her court mandated shrink visit, Wednesday does try to escape and I swear, Weems looks like she notices this and is letting it play out for some reason but later it's played like she had no idea. Show, no. You can't play both sides right off the bat like this. Weems is done dirty, a lot, by the script. She's clearly got issues with Morticia and I'm ticked that we didn't really see that played out, and she's also dedicated to Nevermore but frequently gets outsmarted by Wednesday when Wednesday isn't even being *that* smart. Weems seems to have her number and I kept waiting for that to materialize but it really doesn't. They do eventually team up and it's kind of brilliant and also kind of stupid given they know the history of poison and specifically what kind of poison, and no one thinks that maybe that'll come back up again? Weems, I expected better of you. No, really, I did.
Holy shit does the kid who plays Xavier look wildly different when not as Xavier. Like WILDLY. o_O I'm guessing part of that is because he's pretty young but also duuuuuuude. I'm sorry, my brain needs a moment.
Lesse. In general, the cast felt a bit too big. I don't think it really was, it's just we spent more time than I would've liked with the Nightshades given how little they actually mattered and how we basically had a group of nearly nameless C-list characters who would've been B list in a book or maybe by season 2, but gun to my head, I could only name Yoko and I'm not even sure she had a single actual line in the whole show. Hmm. That sounds confusing. Lemme try again.
You've got the Addams family, but for the most part Wednesday and Thing are on their own at Nevermore. You've got ray of sunshine roommate Enid, who is a werewolf who hasn't ever fully shifted. You've got love interest #1, Xavier, who shares a bit of a past with Wednesday and saves her life pretty early on as payback for when she did the same to him. Turns out he used to go out with Queen B, Bianca, who is a siren and that little tidbit is also why the two aren't together anymore. Bianca and Wednesday get to a grudging respect because of course they do, and because we're given a reason to kind of root for Bianca and hope for that to be a big part of S2. But for a good chunk of the series, B spends a lot of time wondering why the actual fuck her ex, Xavier, is so hung up on Wednesday Addams.
Love interest #2 is normie, Tyler, who also has a history with Xavier, and works at the local coffee shop. Like Wednesday, he has to see the town shrink, and we realize that part of it's tied to his mother whose death seems to have made his father (the sheriff) turn in on himself, leaving Tyler to fend for himself. He's not afraid to call Wednesday on her BS and unlike Xavier, seems capable of not full on sulking when Wednesday doesn't immediately return his feelings.
You've got Tyler's former friends, the normie trio of stupidity who regularly get their asses handed to them by Wednesday, including the Mayor's son, Lucas, who occasionally shows signs of not being a complete shitbag.
There's Enid's love interest, Ajax, a gorgon who seems just this side of too dumb to live. He's in the popular clique and is a Nightshade (secret society) and I waffle on whether he's sweet and dumb but also endearing or not. Enid's third love interest (#2 is Lucas who plays her but then bounces back with Bianca) is Wednesday's other friend, Eugene, a bee loving dork who nearly gets himself killed trying to investigate the monster attacks on his own when Wednesday winds up at the big school dance after all. Eugene I love except for two things: he gets his big moment at the end and calls another character a bitch and I had the same reaction to that that I did back in HS when a friend's boyfriend would call her a bitch but in a "aww, I love you" way: didn't like it. Some words you don't get to use, and dudes calling girls/women bitches is on my thin ice list. Also, Eugene's hangup with Enid and the fear we're gonna play this for "aww, Eugene's gonna win the girl." Like yeah, I want him happy and I'm not sure Enid's happy with Ajax (please see too dumb to live) but eh. On the other hand, Eugene's also spent most of his life alone (I feel you, my dude) and the rest in a frickin' coma soooooooo... we'll cut the dude some slack.
You've got the town shrink who has more going on than you might think and there's Ms. Thornhill, the only normie teacher at Nevermore. She's Wednesday's dorm mother and shows up from time to time to tell us about weird plants.
And then you've got the Nightshades, who seem to mostly be Bianca's friends (they're named but I couldn't tell you their names) and Enid's friend, Yoko... oh, and Rowan, but Rowan's...different. Basically, if you're Wednesday's friend in this, you're going to get attacked at some point.
But this is very much Wednesday's show. Which is great fun...until she spirals trying to figure out who the monster is and accusing everyone, even though to the audience it's pretty fucking obvious that she's wrong, and not just because we've got too much of the season left to go for it to be _character_. I will say that for a good chunk of the show, I didn't want to be right about my suspicions because I still enjoyed the characters. By the time the veil was lifted and Wednesday realized she'd been duped, I wasn't as sad about things but still. Trying to keep this vague because there are spoilers and then there are SPOILERS.
This show also had a really big fucking problem with figuring out how rain works. There were MULTIPLE scenes where it would be absofuckinglutely pouring one minute and then dry as a bone the next and it would be central to the plot. WTF. Like, Wednesday is caught out in the rain and finds tracks left by the monster, only the tracks are washed away by the rain before another character can see them. We go back to town, where she'd be running late, btw, and town is dry as a bone nary a cloud in the sky. There's setting the mood, Burton, and then there's fucking up, and this reads as fucking up EVERY TIME.
ALSO. Did we change how arrows work? Because you cannot convince me that Wednesday Addams wouldn't know not to do what she did. I feel like this is also not the only time I went "wait, she'd know not to do that..." about something but the arrow happens in the last bit so it's what I remember now.
I am also old, so the much hyped dance scene did...not do it for me. I spent the entire thing wondering is this it?
A lot of this sounds very negative, but keep in mind that I liked most of the characters enough that the idea that I'd have to give them up because they were the bad guy(s) made me sad for like, 90% of the show. It's moody and atmospheric as well and I loved that, when it wasn't being dumb for the sake of rain. I legitimately laughed aloud, risking the coughing fits of doom. I definitely think they chose the right Wednesday.
A lot of my issues might be resolved in S2 or were writing choices that simply didn't work for me. I can get why people might not love the show but I enjoyed it enough that I'm like 99% sure my new AG doll is gonna wind up named Enid. :P
...tend to be.
I'm going to try and cut this movie some slack because it's not bad. I have endured far worse and far weirder. It's not great, either and I don't think all of this can be blamed on me starting it just when I was really getting sick and then trying again while decorating and not having my full attention on things. There's not quite negative chemistry going on here but it's kinda close.
Short version: Michael's a single dad to Lily, a ballerina. One day his best friend, Noah, catches Mike helping Lily with her dancing and records them, then uploads it online and naturally it goes viral because dad dancing badly but with joy? Yes, please. Everyone in his life except maybe Lily wants him to maybe use this as a reason to get back into dating, but Michael has no interest in anyone who wants to date him because of his fleeting "fame". Instead he meets Lily in a cringe inducing scene and shortly thereafter they realize Olivia is Lily's dance teacher. Which Michael doesn't know because he's a firefighter and his mother takes Lily to and from dance class. Liv and Mike are instantly drawn to one another but Lily gets jealous at having to share her father (and is dealing with not remembering her mother very well, so having someone replace her is freaking her out) and Olivia's been seriously considering moving to Florida to live with her parents because the dance studio has been in the red for quite awhile. Guess it's a good thing she fell for someone who still has about twelve seconds left on the 15 minutes of fame clock, huh?
There are things that work. If nothing else, I've realized I think I like AnnaLynne McCord, as she was kind of fab here. Lily could be very sweet/cute. The father/daughter dancing? Also cute. I liked the friendships, even if they didn't get a ton of time.
But like I said, we're dealing with kind of negative chemistry at times. There's also a bit of an odd note with Noah who gets very flustered when Lily asks him questions about her mother and I swear to God, I thought we were going to find out he and the late, great Claire had been a thing at some point. But no. To be fair, I also wouldn't have been surprised if, before Liv showed up as the obvious love interest, we were getting M/N until I remembered the ballet bit and realized yeah, no, that'd be a big no. On the I'm not sure where to put this side, the realization that the actors playing Michael and Lily are a real life father/daughter pair made things make a lot of sense, as did realizing this came out in 2021 which explains the very, very small sets. Seriously, it's going to be a game in the future to play "no budget or COVID filming?"
It's a solid B- for me. It did the job of catching my attention enough to get some holiday spirit going but wasn't enough that I felt super invested, nor do I think I'll remember this in a year. *shrug*
Baking Spirits Bright is one I probably should've actually watched more than I did. It seemed to have a few more montages than I anticipated and I think that's how we had these two bonding, which can work...but it feels a bit cheap. I liked Mira's family and while I don't think I'm a fruitcake person, I do love a good tradition and Mira's alllllllllll about tradition. Not really sure how well Mira and Brady are going to work out given her life is very firmly rooted at home and Brady's centered elsewhere, though I guess he'd travel anyway so *shrug*
Ahhhhh, the guy playing Brady is on Sweet Magnolias. That's where I know him from. He reads a little too aloof here and the chemistry is off but I admit I was busy baking a cake and flipping through magazines so again, I'm not sure how much is really on the movie.
My only big issue with this is Brady's second in command, Finn, is given the Varma family account when Brady's father lands a huge account and needs Brady back home. Brady's just come up with the perfect ad that'll finally appease Mira and should still help sell fruitcake (in theory. I still think they were absolutely right when they had Brady scoff that it was too late in the season to set up an actual campaign for this year) before he leaves and then Finn takes over and goes in the exact opposite direction. It's EVERYTHING Mira did not want and honestly, it's terrible. I'd think it's meant to be terrible (there's literally a whiteboard with WOKE on it as a selling point for the campaign) except when Brady comes back to town, after Finn's campaign fails spectacularly, Brady promotes Finn to partner and assures him he's done a great job.
No the fuck he did not. I'm not saying he hasn't done wonderful work on other campaigns but in this instance he fucked up spectacularly. Y'all know you don't have to say something's good just because the character who did it is gay, right? He's allowed to make a mistake and be called out for it. o_O
Basically: love the Varmas, not so much love for the ad campaign or lead romance stuff. Jay and Finn were the better couple.
Lifetime, you're letting me down something fierce this year.
On the other end of things, I finally watched Wednesday and my glob, it has been a long time since the internet made me think a show was going to be one thing only to have it be something else entirely. The amount of Enid/Wednesday stuff I had to wade past ever since this first came out made me think that at the very least, Wednesday's heart would thaw towards Enid much sooner than it really did.
I liked it overall. I think it not coming out until damn near Thanksgiving was stupid as fuck.
Since I just finished it yesterday, it's going to take a little time to fully percolate in my brain, but here's some stuff off the top of my head.
People gave Luis Guzman shit for being Gomez. Those people can eat shit. He was a better Gomez than CZJ was Morticia, but I will freely admit that I think her issues were how Morticia was written and not her acting. Pugsley was adorable (how often do you hear that?) and I loved that Wednesday ended up at Nevermore because she was defending her brother. Thing is, it makes no fucking sense that Pugsley wouldn't go with her since the kid was being bullied to hell and back, and not in the fun way, so... what the hell, Morticia and Gomez?
Principal Weems was a delight but again, I expected them to do more with her. She knows Wednesday doesn't want to be at Nevermore and is going to try and escape ASAP (she flat out tells Wednesday this) and when she takes Wednesday to town for her court mandated shrink visit, Wednesday does try to escape and I swear, Weems looks like she notices this and is letting it play out for some reason but later it's played like she had no idea. Show, no. You can't play both sides right off the bat like this. Weems is done dirty, a lot, by the script. She's clearly got issues with Morticia and I'm ticked that we didn't really see that played out, and she's also dedicated to Nevermore but frequently gets outsmarted by Wednesday when Wednesday isn't even being *that* smart. Weems seems to have her number and I kept waiting for that to materialize but it really doesn't. They do eventually team up and it's kind of brilliant and also kind of stupid given they know the history of poison and specifically what kind of poison, and no one thinks that maybe that'll come back up again? Weems, I expected better of you. No, really, I did.
Holy shit does the kid who plays Xavier look wildly different when not as Xavier. Like WILDLY. o_O I'm guessing part of that is because he's pretty young but also duuuuuuude. I'm sorry, my brain needs a moment.
Lesse. In general, the cast felt a bit too big. I don't think it really was, it's just we spent more time than I would've liked with the Nightshades given how little they actually mattered and how we basically had a group of nearly nameless C-list characters who would've been B list in a book or maybe by season 2, but gun to my head, I could only name Yoko and I'm not even sure she had a single actual line in the whole show. Hmm. That sounds confusing. Lemme try again.
You've got the Addams family, but for the most part Wednesday and Thing are on their own at Nevermore. You've got ray of sunshine roommate Enid, who is a werewolf who hasn't ever fully shifted. You've got love interest #1, Xavier, who shares a bit of a past with Wednesday and saves her life pretty early on as payback for when she did the same to him. Turns out he used to go out with Queen B, Bianca, who is a siren and that little tidbit is also why the two aren't together anymore. Bianca and Wednesday get to a grudging respect because of course they do, and because we're given a reason to kind of root for Bianca and hope for that to be a big part of S2. But for a good chunk of the series, B spends a lot of time wondering why the actual fuck her ex, Xavier, is so hung up on Wednesday Addams.
Love interest #2 is normie, Tyler, who also has a history with Xavier, and works at the local coffee shop. Like Wednesday, he has to see the town shrink, and we realize that part of it's tied to his mother whose death seems to have made his father (the sheriff) turn in on himself, leaving Tyler to fend for himself. He's not afraid to call Wednesday on her BS and unlike Xavier, seems capable of not full on sulking when Wednesday doesn't immediately return his feelings.
You've got Tyler's former friends, the normie trio of stupidity who regularly get their asses handed to them by Wednesday, including the Mayor's son, Lucas, who occasionally shows signs of not being a complete shitbag.
There's Enid's love interest, Ajax, a gorgon who seems just this side of too dumb to live. He's in the popular clique and is a Nightshade (secret society) and I waffle on whether he's sweet and dumb but also endearing or not. Enid's third love interest (#2 is Lucas who plays her but then bounces back with Bianca) is Wednesday's other friend, Eugene, a bee loving dork who nearly gets himself killed trying to investigate the monster attacks on his own when Wednesday winds up at the big school dance after all. Eugene I love except for two things: he gets his big moment at the end and calls another character a bitch and I had the same reaction to that that I did back in HS when a friend's boyfriend would call her a bitch but in a "aww, I love you" way: didn't like it. Some words you don't get to use, and dudes calling girls/women bitches is on my thin ice list. Also, Eugene's hangup with Enid and the fear we're gonna play this for "aww, Eugene's gonna win the girl." Like yeah, I want him happy and I'm not sure Enid's happy with Ajax (please see too dumb to live) but eh. On the other hand, Eugene's also spent most of his life alone (I feel you, my dude) and the rest in a frickin' coma soooooooo... we'll cut the dude some slack.
You've got the town shrink who has more going on than you might think and there's Ms. Thornhill, the only normie teacher at Nevermore. She's Wednesday's dorm mother and shows up from time to time to tell us about weird plants.
And then you've got the Nightshades, who seem to mostly be Bianca's friends (they're named but I couldn't tell you their names) and Enid's friend, Yoko... oh, and Rowan, but Rowan's...different. Basically, if you're Wednesday's friend in this, you're going to get attacked at some point.
But this is very much Wednesday's show. Which is great fun...until she spirals trying to figure out who the monster is and accusing everyone, even though to the audience it's pretty fucking obvious that she's wrong, and not just because we've got too much of the season left to go for it to be _character_. I will say that for a good chunk of the show, I didn't want to be right about my suspicions because I still enjoyed the characters. By the time the veil was lifted and Wednesday realized she'd been duped, I wasn't as sad about things but still. Trying to keep this vague because there are spoilers and then there are SPOILERS.
This show also had a really big fucking problem with figuring out how rain works. There were MULTIPLE scenes where it would be absofuckinglutely pouring one minute and then dry as a bone the next and it would be central to the plot. WTF. Like, Wednesday is caught out in the rain and finds tracks left by the monster, only the tracks are washed away by the rain before another character can see them. We go back to town, where she'd be running late, btw, and town is dry as a bone nary a cloud in the sky. There's setting the mood, Burton, and then there's fucking up, and this reads as fucking up EVERY TIME.
ALSO. Did we change how arrows work? Because you cannot convince me that Wednesday Addams wouldn't know not to do what she did. I feel like this is also not the only time I went "wait, she'd know not to do that..." about something but the arrow happens in the last bit so it's what I remember now.
I am also old, so the much hyped dance scene did...not do it for me. I spent the entire thing wondering is this it?
A lot of this sounds very negative, but keep in mind that I liked most of the characters enough that the idea that I'd have to give them up because they were the bad guy(s) made me sad for like, 90% of the show. It's moody and atmospheric as well and I loved that, when it wasn't being dumb for the sake of rain. I legitimately laughed aloud, risking the coughing fits of doom. I definitely think they chose the right Wednesday.
A lot of my issues might be resolved in S2 or were writing choices that simply didn't work for me. I can get why people might not love the show but I enjoyed it enough that I'm like 99% sure my new AG doll is gonna wind up named Enid. :P