12 GIFTS OF CHRISTMAS
Anna is hired to become a personal Christmas shopper for Marc.
What the hell is a personal shopper? The Oxford Dictionary defines a personal shopper as "an individual who is paid to help another to purchase goods, either by accompanying them while shopping or by shopping on their behalf." This is a genuine occupation. People get paid to shop for other people. This is real shit. You know you've got too much money when you pay other people to do your shopping for you. At that point, you should probably just hang it up, and by that I mean hang yourself in your walk-in humidor, because you've got nothing left to offer as a member of the human race.
Am I being unfair to personal shoppers? Not at all. These people have found a means to exploit the wealthy and lazy assholes of this world, and I'm all for that. Keep on keepin' on, you personal shoppers. And I know I'm not being too hard on the wealthy and lazy assholes of this world, because nobody could ever be too hard on those fuckers. They're the ones who have allowed this bizarre subculture to thrive in the first place.
The personal shoppers are like the remoras of this gilded ecosystem, latching onto their wealthy host organisms and feeding on all the crap they can find clinging to their bloated bodies as they swim through endless seas of cold, hard cash. You don't blame the remora for doing what it must to survive. No, you applaud their ingenuity, because they cleverly filled a gap in their food chain that nobody else even knew was there in the first place. Blame the shark for being such a parasite-infested, messy-eating bastard that it created a place for the remora within the food chain.
So fuck the wealthy, I guess is what I'm saying. But sharks are really okay, so this whole analogy is kinda fucked. I have no animosity toward sharks whatsoever. They serve their purpose in the natural order, and they are greatly misunderstood by the vast majority of people. And I think anybody with a conscience can agree that shark fin soup should just be phased out worldwide, because the methods used to create this delicacy are absolutely deplorable.
So never mind the shark analogy. That's unfair. But fuck the wealthy. That part stands.
12 Gifts Of Christmas follows the adventures of Anna, a quirky young woman who lives with her restaurant manager sister and her two tween daughters. I don't know what happened to the father in this situation, as he is never mentioned at any point in the film, but I believe I can safely assume the father is merely out of the picture and not actually dead, because movies like this can't help but exploit a tragedy like that.
Anna's true passion lies in painting insipid portraits of Santa Claus, the kind of cheaply-rendered garbage that usually winds up on shoddy decorations found at your local dollar store. None of the local posh galleries want to display any of her paint-by-numbers dreck, and this really frosts her cupcakes. So to help make ends meet this holiday season, Anna gets the bright idea to offer her services to the world as a personal Christmas shopper, because she loves to shop, she loves to spend other people's money, and she has no other discernible skills.
Enter Billy, some highfalutin' ad executive with absolutely no personality whatsoever. His mind is as blank and white as the pure, driven snow, and his face resembles the awkward blandness of a police sketch artist's composite rendition of a criminal's face based on conflicting eyewitness testimony. Every moment this guy fills the screen with his utter lack of presence is a waking nightmare, because he seems too hollow and uncharismatic to possibly exist. He's an impossible thing, some entity whose simple existence defies all known universal laws, and he unsettles me to my core.
This asshole can't find the time in his busy schedule of not doing his job properly to go out and shop for any Christmas presents, so he hires Anna to do all the hard work for him. She immediately falls in love with his painted mannequin face and decides then and there that she's going to marry him and give birth to his freaky half-mannequin babies as soon as humanly possible. After a trial run as Billy's personal shopper goes over like gangbusters when she buys his token black friend tickets to a basketball game, he hires Anna full-time, and her grand plan involves convincing Billy to gift his employees with a week-long vacation for Christmas, and that's it. That's her entire career as a personal shopper. Basketball tickets and a vacation. That's all it takes for Billy to realize that she's the one for him, because she was the only person on the entire fucking planet who had the brain cells to rub together to come up with the word "vacation".
Then he takes her to meet his mother, played by the ghost of Donna Mills, and they hit it off like nobody's business. It's all very bizarre, because Billy's mother almost immediately warms up to Anna, treating her more warmly than she ever treats her own son, which makes sense when you think about how cold and mechanical Billy acts.
I'm not even convinced Billy's a real human being. This might be an A.I. situation, where Donna Mills and Mr. Donna Mills bought a "Billy" robot in secret from some mad scientist years ago after their real son died tragically in a tanning bed accident, and this automaton stuck around so long that all of their friends just assume that Billy is their real, flesh and blood son, so the parents have spent decades going through the motions for the sake of outward normalcy, and the moment Billy-bot introduces his human girlfriend they both remember what it's like to love again and accept her warmth and love unquestioningly. I'm pretty sure that's accurate.
Billy's having trouble at work landing the big fish tech company for their big holiday ad campaign, so he steals one of Anna's thrift-store Santa paintings, glues a photo of a laptop computer to it, and shows it to his boss, who loses his fucking mind when he sees it because it's the single most amazing thing this old motherfucker has ever seen in his long and storied career.
Anna learns about this and is upset at first, because she never wanted her art to be exploited for commercial means, but then she thinks about it for a few minutes and realizes that her art is rubbish, and she eventually embraces selling out with as much gusto as she embraces her Real Doll boyfriend at the conclusion of this experiment in failure, unveiling a new family portrait she claims to have painted for Donna Mills and her kin to replace the old horror show resting over the fireplace, but I want you to take a look at both of these portraits and tell me if you see anything slightly amiss about either of them.
Here's the old portrait:
And here's the new portrait:
First off: what the fuck am I looking at? They're both just awkwardly composed photographs with run-of-the-mill paint filters applied to them. The second one's filter is so toned down that it doesn't even really resemble a painted image at all. How did this shit get approved by anybody with authority? Nobody would ever hang that first portrait in their house. That thing looks like a cursed object, something the Winchester brothers would have to burn to exorcise an unclean spirit at the climax of some unaired episode of Supernatural. And the second one is just a fucking photograph. It's just so slipshod and cringe-worthy, and it's representative of the movie as a whole.
The soundtrack is populated with slightly reworked public domain holiday standards, which is pretty normal for these movies, but 12 Gifts Of Christmas is saturated with this stuff, I'm talking wall-to-wall, and it gets old fast. They even managed to sneak one of Shannon Elizabeth's songs from Catch A Christmas Star into the background of one sequence, which is just sleazy. Hallmark has officially begun cannibalizing some of their older, better movies to help pad out their newer ones.
Look, the movie's terrible. The story sucks, the cast sucks, the soundtrack sucks, the production design sucks, and that's just scratching the surface. Katrina Law is basically the only bright spot in this endless night of horrors. She should team up with Danica McKellar and Olympia Dukakis for a new Hallmark movie next year. Even if it absolutely sucks, the mere presence of those three actresses would elevate it beyond just about everything else the "heart of television" will manage to excrete from its fetid loins in 2016, since the bastards canceled Cedar Cove.
VERDICT: THEY CANCELED CEDAR COVE!
What the hell is a personal shopper? The Oxford Dictionary defines a personal shopper as "an individual who is paid to help another to purchase goods, either by accompanying them while shopping or by shopping on their behalf." This is a genuine occupation. People get paid to shop for other people. This is real shit. You know you've got too much money when you pay other people to do your shopping for you. At that point, you should probably just hang it up, and by that I mean hang yourself in your walk-in humidor, because you've got nothing left to offer as a member of the human race.
Am I being unfair to personal shoppers? Not at all. These people have found a means to exploit the wealthy and lazy assholes of this world, and I'm all for that. Keep on keepin' on, you personal shoppers. And I know I'm not being too hard on the wealthy and lazy assholes of this world, because nobody could ever be too hard on those fuckers. They're the ones who have allowed this bizarre subculture to thrive in the first place.
The personal shoppers are like the remoras of this gilded ecosystem, latching onto their wealthy host organisms and feeding on all the crap they can find clinging to their bloated bodies as they swim through endless seas of cold, hard cash. You don't blame the remora for doing what it must to survive. No, you applaud their ingenuity, because they cleverly filled a gap in their food chain that nobody else even knew was there in the first place. Blame the shark for being such a parasite-infested, messy-eating bastard that it created a place for the remora within the food chain.
So fuck the wealthy, I guess is what I'm saying. But sharks are really okay, so this whole analogy is kinda fucked. I have no animosity toward sharks whatsoever. They serve their purpose in the natural order, and they are greatly misunderstood by the vast majority of people. And I think anybody with a conscience can agree that shark fin soup should just be phased out worldwide, because the methods used to create this delicacy are absolutely deplorable.
So never mind the shark analogy. That's unfair. But fuck the wealthy. That part stands.
12 Gifts Of Christmas follows the adventures of Anna, a quirky young woman who lives with her restaurant manager sister and her two tween daughters. I don't know what happened to the father in this situation, as he is never mentioned at any point in the film, but I believe I can safely assume the father is merely out of the picture and not actually dead, because movies like this can't help but exploit a tragedy like that.
Anna's true passion lies in painting insipid portraits of Santa Claus, the kind of cheaply-rendered garbage that usually winds up on shoddy decorations found at your local dollar store. None of the local posh galleries want to display any of her paint-by-numbers dreck, and this really frosts her cupcakes. So to help make ends meet this holiday season, Anna gets the bright idea to offer her services to the world as a personal Christmas shopper, because she loves to shop, she loves to spend other people's money, and she has no other discernible skills.
Enter Billy, some highfalutin' ad executive with absolutely no personality whatsoever. His mind is as blank and white as the pure, driven snow, and his face resembles the awkward blandness of a police sketch artist's composite rendition of a criminal's face based on conflicting eyewitness testimony. Every moment this guy fills the screen with his utter lack of presence is a waking nightmare, because he seems too hollow and uncharismatic to possibly exist. He's an impossible thing, some entity whose simple existence defies all known universal laws, and he unsettles me to my core.
This asshole can't find the time in his busy schedule of not doing his job properly to go out and shop for any Christmas presents, so he hires Anna to do all the hard work for him. She immediately falls in love with his painted mannequin face and decides then and there that she's going to marry him and give birth to his freaky half-mannequin babies as soon as humanly possible. After a trial run as Billy's personal shopper goes over like gangbusters when she buys his token black friend tickets to a basketball game, he hires Anna full-time, and her grand plan involves convincing Billy to gift his employees with a week-long vacation for Christmas, and that's it. That's her entire career as a personal shopper. Basketball tickets and a vacation. That's all it takes for Billy to realize that she's the one for him, because she was the only person on the entire fucking planet who had the brain cells to rub together to come up with the word "vacation".
Then he takes her to meet his mother, played by the ghost of Donna Mills, and they hit it off like nobody's business. It's all very bizarre, because Billy's mother almost immediately warms up to Anna, treating her more warmly than she ever treats her own son, which makes sense when you think about how cold and mechanical Billy acts.
I'm not even convinced Billy's a real human being. This might be an A.I. situation, where Donna Mills and Mr. Donna Mills bought a "Billy" robot in secret from some mad scientist years ago after their real son died tragically in a tanning bed accident, and this automaton stuck around so long that all of their friends just assume that Billy is their real, flesh and blood son, so the parents have spent decades going through the motions for the sake of outward normalcy, and the moment Billy-bot introduces his human girlfriend they both remember what it's like to love again and accept her warmth and love unquestioningly. I'm pretty sure that's accurate.
Billy's having trouble at work landing the big fish tech company for their big holiday ad campaign, so he steals one of Anna's thrift-store Santa paintings, glues a photo of a laptop computer to it, and shows it to his boss, who loses his fucking mind when he sees it because it's the single most amazing thing this old motherfucker has ever seen in his long and storied career.
Anna learns about this and is upset at first, because she never wanted her art to be exploited for commercial means, but then she thinks about it for a few minutes and realizes that her art is rubbish, and she eventually embraces selling out with as much gusto as she embraces her Real Doll boyfriend at the conclusion of this experiment in failure, unveiling a new family portrait she claims to have painted for Donna Mills and her kin to replace the old horror show resting over the fireplace, but I want you to take a look at both of these portraits and tell me if you see anything slightly amiss about either of them.
Here's the old portrait:
And here's the new portrait:
First off: what the fuck am I looking at? They're both just awkwardly composed photographs with run-of-the-mill paint filters applied to them. The second one's filter is so toned down that it doesn't even really resemble a painted image at all. How did this shit get approved by anybody with authority? Nobody would ever hang that first portrait in their house. That thing looks like a cursed object, something the Winchester brothers would have to burn to exorcise an unclean spirit at the climax of some unaired episode of Supernatural. And the second one is just a fucking photograph. It's just so slipshod and cringe-worthy, and it's representative of the movie as a whole.
The soundtrack is populated with slightly reworked public domain holiday standards, which is pretty normal for these movies, but 12 Gifts Of Christmas is saturated with this stuff, I'm talking wall-to-wall, and it gets old fast. They even managed to sneak one of Shannon Elizabeth's songs from Catch A Christmas Star into the background of one sequence, which is just sleazy. Hallmark has officially begun cannibalizing some of their older, better movies to help pad out their newer ones.
Look, the movie's terrible. The story sucks, the cast sucks, the soundtrack sucks, the production design sucks, and that's just scratching the surface. Katrina Law is basically the only bright spot in this endless night of horrors. She should team up with Danica McKellar and Olympia Dukakis for a new Hallmark movie next year. Even if it absolutely sucks, the mere presence of those three actresses would elevate it beyond just about everything else the "heart of television" will manage to excrete from its fetid loins in 2016, since the bastards canceled Cedar Cove.
VERDICT: THEY CANCELED CEDAR COVE!
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