![]() There’s a lot of exuberant singing and over-exuberant dancing (with choreography from director Debbie Allen), but it’s all done on a stingy community-theater set. With that said, her spangly 2020 Christmas musical, um… is not her best work. ![]() She has not only written some of the best songs of the past several decades, she has also done wonders for childhood literacy, and she basically cured coronavirus singlehandedly. Let’s get one thing straight: Dolly Parton is a national treasure. It’s all you could want in a Christmas movie, but with so little of the charm of other flicks that dispense the same clichés. (A million question marks on that plot point.) Ellen, of course, falls in love with small-town living, and the spirit of Christmas fills her, just as she hopes Jake will fill her later that night. In town, she meets cute with local innkeeper Jake ( Girls’ Jake Lacey) who is so nice that he houses the town’s entire homeless population in his establishment when the power goes out. She can’t tell anyone in town who she is, so she doesn’t get special treatment, and she can only spend $100. Her father tasks her with going to his hometown of Snow Falls (seriously) to deliver the annual Christmas letter to his business partner. Hard-partying city girl Ellen (Eliza Taylor) is the heir to a “multimillion-dollar gifts company,” though it’s impossible to imagine what that would look like. If you’re looking for a dose of Christmas-inspired schmaltz, this knock-off is the place to get it. No, making a Hallmark movie dark doesn’t make it cool, it just makes it stupid. Too bad they’re all wasted on this half-baked tale. ![]() Yang, Tim Allen, Dax Shepard, and Vincent D’Onofrio sporting the snazziest walrus mustache you’ve ever seen. It’s as if someone at Netflix said, “Can we do all that, but … it’s Christmas?” And the filmmakers said, “Sure!” The only good thing about this is the cast, including Jessica Alba, Jimmy O. Yes, most of El Camino Christmas is a hold-up drama with crooked cops and mistaken identities. There could be a small-business owner who needs to improve his business, but it’s a convenience store and there’s a hostage standoff in the mini-mart on Christmas Eve. You could get a kid who learns the miracle of Christmas, but he’s autistic, and the anti-vaxxer miracle is, he learns how to talk. He’s searching for his long-lost father, but it turns out the guy’s a no-good drunk. What if we took all these tropes, but made them dark? That would be cool.” You could get a guy coming to a small town, but it’s in arid Nevada instead of snowy Maine. ![]() Sometimes when watching a Hallmark Christmas movie, you think, “Hmm. ![]() There’s something on this list for everyone - it’s just that some of these somethings are much better than others. Christmas-themed scripted miniseries like Dash & Lily (well worth your time) and reality series like the baking competition Sugar Rush aren’t included, and neither are the movies Netflix licenses, but which also air on other platforms. Here are all Netflix’s original movies, ranked from worst to best. But don’t worry: Motion Picture Corporation of America, a major feeder in Hallmark’s Christmas deluge, is also making Netflix movies that are well within the Hallmark formula. While Hallmark’s movies follow a strict formula, Netflix has been smart enough to branch out into more genres, including animation, teen films, and even something akin to an action movie. The streaming service got into the original-Christmas-movie game in 2017. Last year, 50 million viewers tuned into it at one time or another.īut Netflix is actively out to disrupt the TV game in virtually all sectors of programming, including the realm of syrupy holiday entertainment. One of the few success stories on linear cable these days is the Hallmark Channel’s annual Christmas takeover, where the channel only shows its sappy, conventional, shockingly conservative original Christmas movies from Halloween until New Year’s Day. ![]()
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