LET IT SNOW
An executive with plans to update a rustic lodge has a change of heart when she falls in love.
Alan Thicke is in this movie. He plays the head of FALCON, some sort of resort company. I'm sure there's a big official name for what companies of this sort are really called, but I don't care about that shit, so I'm not bothering to look it up. He's this high roller with a heart as black as coal, and he just oozes sleaze. That's pretty much just Alan Thicke, though. He's a sleazy looking mama jama, and he just bought some cozy ski resort in Maine that he thinks he can transform into the next Cancun or whatever. So he summons Candace Cameron Bure into his office for a little confab.
The whole time these two are talking about how they're going to set fire to some poor family's livelihood, Alan Thicke is just gazing lustfully at this woman, and it's really uncomfortable. At the end of their conversation, when Alan Thicke chooses to send Candace to Maine to scout out their latest acquisition, he asks her out for lunch on Christmas Eve, and she says "sure, dad", I can't believe what I'm hearing. The whole exchange is so awkward, with Thicke playing the role of the inappropriately hands-on boss, and Cameron filling the role of the working woman who wants to keep her job and as a result puts up with far too much inappropriate behavior at her workplace.
I never in a million years would have guessed that these two actors were playing a mother/daughter pair. It's all so bizarre, and maybe it's just Alan Thicke, because it's so difficult for this guy to convey anything resembling genuine human emotion onscreen. Have you ever actually seen Growing Pains? It's just a terrible sit-com for a start, one that simply doesn't hold up after all these years. Family Ties, on the other hand, is still aces. But my point is that Alan Thicke never actually acts like a kind and loving father in that show. He tries, sometimes quite a lot, but he just can't seem to hit that mark of sincerity that is required in the role. It has something to do with his eyes, I believe. He has the cold eyes of a predator, and his gaze is chilling.
And I'm meant to believe that this old blue pill-popping creeper is actually supposed to be this woman's father? I could buy him wanting her to call him "daddy" in bed, but that's about it. Wait, Alan Thicke played Kirk Cameron's old man in Growing Pains, and he plays Candace Cameron's pop-pop in Let It Snow...
Christ, what am I doing? Two minutes into this movie, and I'm coming unglued. Alan Thicke managed to derail this train in record time, so congrats. I've got to get this back on track. But how? All I'm thinking about is that freaky old geezer Alan Thicke. I'm thinking about that creepy son of a bitch and I just can't get him out of my head. The warm and fuzzy Christmas spirit seems so very far away at the moment.
The ski resort? What ski resort? Oh, yeah, the one in the movie. I guess it's not really a ski resort, as much as it is a family lodge kind of thing, because it's open year-round and it caters to families? What the hell is that called? There's gotta be a name for that, but it's not in my brain. What happened to my brain? I'm so damned forgetful these says. My mind's turning to mush.
So this resort/lodge is really big into Christmas. They begin their celebration right after Thanksgiving, and it doesn't wrap up until fucking January, that festive time of year when nobody ever wants to even hear the word Christmas again, let alone be surrounded by grinning idiots singing goofy fucking carols and force-feeding them figgy fucking pudding every single night, but there it is.
It's a popular joint, being completely booked throughout the holiday season, and it makes plenty of money for the family that founded the place a century prior, so why did they decide to sell it to some vulture like Alan Thicke, who will do nothing to preserve their traditions, taking their quaint little rustic haven and transforming it into a slick and glossy pre-packaged Technicolor nightmare? I'll get to that.
But for now let's talk about all the wacky fish out of water shenanigans that Candace Cameron Bure gets into as she checks out the resort at her old man's behest! Her tour guide is Jesse Hutch, playing the restless son of the resort's owner parents, and he takes much glee in tormenting this poor woman at every turn, punishing her for her father's sins as he knows all too well what the demented Mr. Thicke intends to do to his beloved home.
That's not actually true. For the most part, he's a very well behaved dude who demonstrates great patience when dealing with his charge's naïveté. Apparently, this woman has never seen snow or even heard of Christmas before, judging by the manner in which she acts utterly baffled by every single holiday-related item or tradition she encounters during her vision quest in rural Maine. I guess after mommy died, daddy was always too busy dry-humping his office furniture around the holidays to expose his lovely daughter to the joys of Christmas. It doesn't matter. He was a shit father, and that's all there is to it.
Jesse Hutch falls in love with Candace Cameron, and Candace Cameron falls in love with Jesse Hutch, and together they team up to convince Alan Thicke not to rape the Hutch family business with his smarmy business tactics... and he fires his own daughter on Christmas Eve, because that's how Alan Thicke rolls. Then he shows up dressed as Santa Claus at the end of the movie and gives a bunch of traumatized children gift-wrapped boxes of his own feces, tells his daughter he's been a complete cunt and decides to take her advice and put her in charge of the resort, and it snows and Candace Cameron Bure has her first real orgasm and this movie's pretty good, despite its numerous faults and I'm very conflicted about admitting that because I'm in a terrible mood due to circumstances that have nothing to do with this delightful made-for-television trifle.
I'm trying to overcome my natural cynical mind-state, and it's just a little difficult. Yesterday, some bug-eyed elf pissed in my eyes for two hours and it kind of ruined my day, so I'm really trying to get back in the Christmas groove, and Let It Snow helped quite a bit. It's a sweet movie, and I was taken in by its simple charms.
At the heart of the movie is the story of two families trying to reconcile their differences, being brought together by the magic of the Christmas season, and learning to forgive and forget. Candace Cameron forces her father to confront himself, looking back at all the years he spent locking his heart away after the painful death of his wife, and in the end he decides to let love in once again, showing his daughter how much he cares by actually accepting her as an equal in business and in life.
And Jesse Hutch has been at odds with his father over the future of the family business since he got out of college, wanting desperately to prove his worth as the heir apparent by updating the resort, bringing it into the 21st century with a few solid innovations, but his father sees the resort as a legacy entrusted to him by his own father and grandfather, and can't imagine altering it in any meaningful way, seeing change as a betrayal of what his forebears created with love for future generations to cherish. To the father, their lodge is a sacred trust, and he can't imagine wanting to change it. To the son, it's a magical place that needs to adapt with the changing times lest it be left behind in the march of progress.
The father agreed to sell the lodge to FALCON because he was getting old, and he didn't trust his son with the future of their family business, but he assumed the corporation felt the same way about the lodge and wouldn't change anything because there was no reason to do so. Jesse Hutch spent years resenting his father for refusing to listen to him about anything regarding the future of the lodge, and this resentment spread to the lodge itself. He came to feel trapped in Maine, unable to leave his parents to maintain the old lodge alone, but his father never treated him like he was anything more than a valued employee, and as such he felt unappreciated in his thankless role.
Confronted with an end to his life at the lodge, Jesse realizes he doesn't want to leave, and he laments that he's powerless to stop the family business from being destroyed. Both father and son were too stubborn to reach any compromise, and this stubbornness nearly cost them both everything. Only Candace Cameron's intervention with her own father managed to save the day for everybody, and this woman was ready to bulldoze the lodge herself only a week earlier. But if Jesse Hutch and his father had managed to reconcile earlier, he never would have met the love of his life in Candace Cameron, so in the final analysis it all worked out for the best.
So the story won me over, and I enjoyed it quite a bit more than I expected to. Good on you, Let It Snow.
But Alan Thicke can still go straight to hell.
VERDICT: NICE (& THICKE)
Alan Thicke is in this movie. He plays the head of FALCON, some sort of resort company. I'm sure there's a big official name for what companies of this sort are really called, but I don't care about that shit, so I'm not bothering to look it up. He's this high roller with a heart as black as coal, and he just oozes sleaze. That's pretty much just Alan Thicke, though. He's a sleazy looking mama jama, and he just bought some cozy ski resort in Maine that he thinks he can transform into the next Cancun or whatever. So he summons Candace Cameron Bure into his office for a little confab.
The whole time these two are talking about how they're going to set fire to some poor family's livelihood, Alan Thicke is just gazing lustfully at this woman, and it's really uncomfortable. At the end of their conversation, when Alan Thicke chooses to send Candace to Maine to scout out their latest acquisition, he asks her out for lunch on Christmas Eve, and she says "sure, dad", I can't believe what I'm hearing. The whole exchange is so awkward, with Thicke playing the role of the inappropriately hands-on boss, and Cameron filling the role of the working woman who wants to keep her job and as a result puts up with far too much inappropriate behavior at her workplace.
I never in a million years would have guessed that these two actors were playing a mother/daughter pair. It's all so bizarre, and maybe it's just Alan Thicke, because it's so difficult for this guy to convey anything resembling genuine human emotion onscreen. Have you ever actually seen Growing Pains? It's just a terrible sit-com for a start, one that simply doesn't hold up after all these years. Family Ties, on the other hand, is still aces. But my point is that Alan Thicke never actually acts like a kind and loving father in that show. He tries, sometimes quite a lot, but he just can't seem to hit that mark of sincerity that is required in the role. It has something to do with his eyes, I believe. He has the cold eyes of a predator, and his gaze is chilling.
And I'm meant to believe that this old blue pill-popping creeper is actually supposed to be this woman's father? I could buy him wanting her to call him "daddy" in bed, but that's about it. Wait, Alan Thicke played Kirk Cameron's old man in Growing Pains, and he plays Candace Cameron's pop-pop in Let It Snow...
Christ, what am I doing? Two minutes into this movie, and I'm coming unglued. Alan Thicke managed to derail this train in record time, so congrats. I've got to get this back on track. But how? All I'm thinking about is that freaky old geezer Alan Thicke. I'm thinking about that creepy son of a bitch and I just can't get him out of my head. The warm and fuzzy Christmas spirit seems so very far away at the moment.
The ski resort? What ski resort? Oh, yeah, the one in the movie. I guess it's not really a ski resort, as much as it is a family lodge kind of thing, because it's open year-round and it caters to families? What the hell is that called? There's gotta be a name for that, but it's not in my brain. What happened to my brain? I'm so damned forgetful these says. My mind's turning to mush.
So this resort/lodge is really big into Christmas. They begin their celebration right after Thanksgiving, and it doesn't wrap up until fucking January, that festive time of year when nobody ever wants to even hear the word Christmas again, let alone be surrounded by grinning idiots singing goofy fucking carols and force-feeding them figgy fucking pudding every single night, but there it is.
It's a popular joint, being completely booked throughout the holiday season, and it makes plenty of money for the family that founded the place a century prior, so why did they decide to sell it to some vulture like Alan Thicke, who will do nothing to preserve their traditions, taking their quaint little rustic haven and transforming it into a slick and glossy pre-packaged Technicolor nightmare? I'll get to that.
But for now let's talk about all the wacky fish out of water shenanigans that Candace Cameron Bure gets into as she checks out the resort at her old man's behest! Her tour guide is Jesse Hutch, playing the restless son of the resort's owner parents, and he takes much glee in tormenting this poor woman at every turn, punishing her for her father's sins as he knows all too well what the demented Mr. Thicke intends to do to his beloved home.
That's not actually true. For the most part, he's a very well behaved dude who demonstrates great patience when dealing with his charge's naïveté. Apparently, this woman has never seen snow or even heard of Christmas before, judging by the manner in which she acts utterly baffled by every single holiday-related item or tradition she encounters during her vision quest in rural Maine. I guess after mommy died, daddy was always too busy dry-humping his office furniture around the holidays to expose his lovely daughter to the joys of Christmas. It doesn't matter. He was a shit father, and that's all there is to it.
Jesse Hutch falls in love with Candace Cameron, and Candace Cameron falls in love with Jesse Hutch, and together they team up to convince Alan Thicke not to rape the Hutch family business with his smarmy business tactics... and he fires his own daughter on Christmas Eve, because that's how Alan Thicke rolls. Then he shows up dressed as Santa Claus at the end of the movie and gives a bunch of traumatized children gift-wrapped boxes of his own feces, tells his daughter he's been a complete cunt and decides to take her advice and put her in charge of the resort, and it snows and Candace Cameron Bure has her first real orgasm and this movie's pretty good, despite its numerous faults and I'm very conflicted about admitting that because I'm in a terrible mood due to circumstances that have nothing to do with this delightful made-for-television trifle.
I'm trying to overcome my natural cynical mind-state, and it's just a little difficult. Yesterday, some bug-eyed elf pissed in my eyes for two hours and it kind of ruined my day, so I'm really trying to get back in the Christmas groove, and Let It Snow helped quite a bit. It's a sweet movie, and I was taken in by its simple charms.
At the heart of the movie is the story of two families trying to reconcile their differences, being brought together by the magic of the Christmas season, and learning to forgive and forget. Candace Cameron forces her father to confront himself, looking back at all the years he spent locking his heart away after the painful death of his wife, and in the end he decides to let love in once again, showing his daughter how much he cares by actually accepting her as an equal in business and in life.
And Jesse Hutch has been at odds with his father over the future of the family business since he got out of college, wanting desperately to prove his worth as the heir apparent by updating the resort, bringing it into the 21st century with a few solid innovations, but his father sees the resort as a legacy entrusted to him by his own father and grandfather, and can't imagine altering it in any meaningful way, seeing change as a betrayal of what his forebears created with love for future generations to cherish. To the father, their lodge is a sacred trust, and he can't imagine wanting to change it. To the son, it's a magical place that needs to adapt with the changing times lest it be left behind in the march of progress.
The father agreed to sell the lodge to FALCON because he was getting old, and he didn't trust his son with the future of their family business, but he assumed the corporation felt the same way about the lodge and wouldn't change anything because there was no reason to do so. Jesse Hutch spent years resenting his father for refusing to listen to him about anything regarding the future of the lodge, and this resentment spread to the lodge itself. He came to feel trapped in Maine, unable to leave his parents to maintain the old lodge alone, but his father never treated him like he was anything more than a valued employee, and as such he felt unappreciated in his thankless role.
Confronted with an end to his life at the lodge, Jesse realizes he doesn't want to leave, and he laments that he's powerless to stop the family business from being destroyed. Both father and son were too stubborn to reach any compromise, and this stubbornness nearly cost them both everything. Only Candace Cameron's intervention with her own father managed to save the day for everybody, and this woman was ready to bulldoze the lodge herself only a week earlier. But if Jesse Hutch and his father had managed to reconcile earlier, he never would have met the love of his life in Candace Cameron, so in the final analysis it all worked out for the best.
So the story won me over, and I enjoyed it quite a bit more than I expected to. Good on you, Let It Snow.
But Alan Thicke can still go straight to hell.
VERDICT: NICE (& THICKE)
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