THE FLIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
Two strangers share a room at a bed-and-breakfast when an unexpected snowstorm delays their flight on Christmas Eve.
Stephanie (Mayim Balik) is a competitive eater living in Los Angeles who dreams of being the next Takeru Kobayashi, she's half Jewish and celebrates Christmas and Hanukkah, her boyfriend just dumped her because he's a skeevy little prick, she dresses like a Technicolor Quaker, she has a generally bad attitude regarding most everything, and all she wants to do is fly home to Connecticut to spend the holidays with her loving family of vegetarian carnies.
Michael (Ryan McPartlin) sells baby parts to medical research firms, also lives in sunny L.A., wears glasses without a prescription because he thinks they make him look smart, is long-distance dating a professional gargoyle who lives in his hometown of Boston, MA and flies back to the east coast once a month to spend time with her on her church rooftop, and as a child he once met Dudley Moore in an airport bathroom and considers this to be the high point of his entire life.
These two garbage people meet while sitting together on a sold-out flight to Boston on December 23rd and don't like each other at all, because why would they? They're both horrible human beings who have no redeeming value. Their flight is forced to make an emergency landing in Dick Cheese, Montana, and they're forced to share the honeymoon suite at a packed bed-and-breakfast run by a leather vest-wearing Reginald VelJohnson and his darling wife, Wife.
These two hateful caricatures fall in tolerance during their layover in Hell, and decide they probably belong together because nobody else in the world could possibly stand to hang around them for more than two seconds without seriously contemplating suicide. But they can't be together because there are fifteen minutes left in the movie and the producers need to pad the narrative a little in order to stretch this horror show to feature length. So when Stephanie leaves for the airport alone, Michael follows after her but then just lets her get on the plane and leave him all alone, which makes absolutely no sense, but then again I have a working brain so none of this movie makes any sense.
Then these two kids get together on New Year's Eve and make out like a pair of starving cats desperately trying to lick every ounce of moisture out of each other's gaping mouths before they die of dehydration. Can I just mention something weird? Stephanie plays a competitive eater, but we never see her at a competition. She keeps talking about this big eat-off she's signed up to attend on New Year's Day, and she claims to be in training, so she's eating hot dogs in almost every single scene in this movie. The context doesn't matter at all, she just periodically whips out a hot dog and swallows it whole like a python eating a rat.
And we never see where she keeps all of the hot dogs, either. She just jams hot dogs into her mouth from somewhere outside of the frame, and there's never any explanation as to where she stores all of them. She's not carrying a purse in most of her scenes, and there's a stretch of about twenty minutes where she's wearing nothing but a dress sans pockets, so where are all of these hot dogs coming from, and why does nobody acknowledge that this woman is just deep-throating wieners left and right throughout the film? It's like nobody else can even see the hot dogs, like I just hallucinated all of this because I was so mind-numbingly bored throughout this movie that I needed to manufacture something, anything just to entertain myself in order to retain what remains of my sanity.
And why does Reginald VelJohnson wear a leather vest? It's such a bizarre fashion choice that I just don't understand. Reg and his wife, Wife, are probably the only two black people living in the entire state of Montana, and none of their white neighbors ever acknowledge their presence, treating these two innkeepers like they don't even exist. I'm not sure if this was a deliberate decision on the part of the filmmakers, or if they just forgot to write any interactions between these two characters and anybody else outside of out romantic leads. It's really off-putting, and at least casually racist.
Mayim Bialyk looks like Adam Driver in a long wig. It needed to be said.
The Flight Before Christmas is a pile of shit. It's just the worst fucking thing, and I hate it so much. This was not a Hallmark Channel original movie. I decided to switch over to Lifetime this morning for my holiday fix, and I regret that decision. Nobody is good in this movie, not even Brian Doyle-Murray playing Santa Claus on tranquilizers. He uses his lazy magic to bring these two lost souls together, because I guess he was bored and felt like manipulating these shitheads to kill a little time before Christmas. Whatever. Fuck this movie. I'm done.
VERDICT: ADAM DRIVER IN A WIG
Stephanie (Mayim Balik) is a competitive eater living in Los Angeles who dreams of being the next Takeru Kobayashi, she's half Jewish and celebrates Christmas and Hanukkah, her boyfriend just dumped her because he's a skeevy little prick, she dresses like a Technicolor Quaker, she has a generally bad attitude regarding most everything, and all she wants to do is fly home to Connecticut to spend the holidays with her loving family of vegetarian carnies.
Michael (Ryan McPartlin) sells baby parts to medical research firms, also lives in sunny L.A., wears glasses without a prescription because he thinks they make him look smart, is long-distance dating a professional gargoyle who lives in his hometown of Boston, MA and flies back to the east coast once a month to spend time with her on her church rooftop, and as a child he once met Dudley Moore in an airport bathroom and considers this to be the high point of his entire life.
These two garbage people meet while sitting together on a sold-out flight to Boston on December 23rd and don't like each other at all, because why would they? They're both horrible human beings who have no redeeming value. Their flight is forced to make an emergency landing in Dick Cheese, Montana, and they're forced to share the honeymoon suite at a packed bed-and-breakfast run by a leather vest-wearing Reginald VelJohnson and his darling wife, Wife.
These two hateful caricatures fall in tolerance during their layover in Hell, and decide they probably belong together because nobody else in the world could possibly stand to hang around them for more than two seconds without seriously contemplating suicide. But they can't be together because there are fifteen minutes left in the movie and the producers need to pad the narrative a little in order to stretch this horror show to feature length. So when Stephanie leaves for the airport alone, Michael follows after her but then just lets her get on the plane and leave him all alone, which makes absolutely no sense, but then again I have a working brain so none of this movie makes any sense.
Then these two kids get together on New Year's Eve and make out like a pair of starving cats desperately trying to lick every ounce of moisture out of each other's gaping mouths before they die of dehydration. Can I just mention something weird? Stephanie plays a competitive eater, but we never see her at a competition. She keeps talking about this big eat-off she's signed up to attend on New Year's Day, and she claims to be in training, so she's eating hot dogs in almost every single scene in this movie. The context doesn't matter at all, she just periodically whips out a hot dog and swallows it whole like a python eating a rat.
And we never see where she keeps all of the hot dogs, either. She just jams hot dogs into her mouth from somewhere outside of the frame, and there's never any explanation as to where she stores all of them. She's not carrying a purse in most of her scenes, and there's a stretch of about twenty minutes where she's wearing nothing but a dress sans pockets, so where are all of these hot dogs coming from, and why does nobody acknowledge that this woman is just deep-throating wieners left and right throughout the film? It's like nobody else can even see the hot dogs, like I just hallucinated all of this because I was so mind-numbingly bored throughout this movie that I needed to manufacture something, anything just to entertain myself in order to retain what remains of my sanity.
And why does Reginald VelJohnson wear a leather vest? It's such a bizarre fashion choice that I just don't understand. Reg and his wife, Wife, are probably the only two black people living in the entire state of Montana, and none of their white neighbors ever acknowledge their presence, treating these two innkeepers like they don't even exist. I'm not sure if this was a deliberate decision on the part of the filmmakers, or if they just forgot to write any interactions between these two characters and anybody else outside of out romantic leads. It's really off-putting, and at least casually racist.
Mayim Bialyk looks like Adam Driver in a long wig. It needed to be said.
The Flight Before Christmas is a pile of shit. It's just the worst fucking thing, and I hate it so much. This was not a Hallmark Channel original movie. I decided to switch over to Lifetime this morning for my holiday fix, and I regret that decision. Nobody is good in this movie, not even Brian Doyle-Murray playing Santa Claus on tranquilizers. He uses his lazy magic to bring these two lost souls together, because I guess he was bored and felt like manipulating these shitheads to kill a little time before Christmas. Whatever. Fuck this movie. I'm done.
VERDICT: ADAM DRIVER IN A WIG
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| I farted this out in Photoshop in a minute. Enjoy. |
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