BEST CHRISTMAS PARTY EVER
A powerful corporation threatens to pull the plug on a toy company's holiday celebration.
I can't even remember the protagonist's name. I'm racking my brain trying to recall the first name of Best Christmas Party Ever's female lead, and I'm drawing a blank. This is a small problem, because I literally just finished watching the damned movie. I'm honestly having trouble remembering any details, which should speak volumes as to how memorable Best Christmas Party Ever really is.
So an uptight lady is a professional party planner in New York City, and her saintly employer announces her impending retirement after the upcoming Christmas season. The uptight lady sees this as her opportunity to climb the corporate ladder and take her employer's place as head of the almighty party planning industry, but her employer brings in her actor nephew for a trial run during the holidays, grooming him to take her place at the head of the table. That's nepotism for you.
The term is actually quite fitting in this case, as the word nepotism is based on the Latin root word nepo, meaning "nephew". Usage of the word can be traced back to the Middle Ages, where many bishops in the Roman Catholic Church would use their authority to give their nephews positions within the hierarchy, usually appointing them cardinals, as their vows of chastity denied the bishops (legitimate) heirs of their own.
I find this historical discussion much more fascinating than anything in Best Christmas Party Ever, but I have to stay on track. Unfortunately.
So the actor nephew is an imaginative free spirit, which hilariously contrasts with the uptight lady's... uptightness. But of course they make a pretty great team after satisfying a group of elderly artists with a tacky "Hawaiian Christmas" theme party, which we never actually get to see because this movie didn't have the budget to show us the splendor of a bunch of old fogeys shattering their hips as they attempt to limbo surrounded by a gaggle of cardboard Palm trees with ukulele music blaring from portable speakers.
But their group's annual account, a big Christmas party held by a local toy store, is threatened by the corporate bigwigs who bought the small company from the kindly old man who almost ran the business he founded into the ground due to his own incompetence. On any other year, this Christmas party would be an all-inclusive, family-friendly affair, providing free gifts and a hot meal to the city's impoverished families while they cut a rug in a festive environment.
But this year, the evil corporation wants to transform this simple, charitable fete into an exclusive soirée catering to their wealthy shareholders, with no room for the less fortunate. Oh no!
Then our two leads decide to go rogue and throw their own big party for the poor with a "Nutcracker Suite" theme, presumably bankrupting their small business in the process without a corporate client to provide the budget, the event is a big success, and their retiring employer puts them both in charge of her party planning company because it takes two of them to do the same job she's been doing all by herself for so many years.
And they fall in love because they're obligated to do so. That was a foregone conclusion.
I'd like to know why this movie is so obsessed with hot dogs. In every other scene, our lead characters are eating hot dogs they purchased from a roadside vendor, devouring them with abandon. Is this just something that people in New York City do? Are hot dogs like crack to white people in the big city?
These people do all their obligatory bonding over fucking hot dogs, and they keep acting like these meat tubes are the most delicious things that have ever passed between their quivering lips. I'd wonder if this was a product tie-in, but no specific brand of hot dog is ever mentioned, so I assume it's just some stupid quirk the screenwriters came up with to give their characters an excuse to walk around outdoors.
But there is some egregious product placement in the film, courtesy of VISIONWORKS, an optical retail company that I must assume provided a sizable portion of this movie's budget.
On two separate occasions, the weathered old broad who owns the party planning company slowly removes her eyeglasses from the strategically placed VISIONWORKS eyeglass case on her desk, serruptitiously tapping the case several times to draw the viewer's eye to it, as the camera sloooooowly zooms in on the VISIONWORKS logo. It's so blatant, so impossibly crass, that I couldn't help but laugh. This lunkheaded product placement just made it abundantly clear to me that the movie simply didn't give a shit, so I stopped giving a shit.
Best Christmas Party Ever is boring, predictable garbage, so ephemeral that I still can't remember the names of the lead characters. Clearly the only thing the producers wanted me to remember was that big VISIONWORKS logo, so congratulations, you soulless assholes for missing the point of your own fucking story!
And the final insult? At the end of the movie, after our two leads kiss under the mistletoe at their magical party, surrounded by grinning ballerinas and holiday cheer, she looks at him with a twinkle in her eyes and says...
"Greatest Christmas party ever."
Fuck you!
VERDICT: NAUGHTY
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