ON STRIKE FOR CHRISTMAS
Neighborhood women band together when their families take them for granted during the holidays.
An overstressed, overworked wife and mother is pushed to her limits by her complacent family over the holidays, and she finally reaches her breaking point. So she goes on strike, refusing to lift a finger to help her husband and children prepare for Christmas until her very reasonable list of demands is met. The local media catches wind of this story and with their help, the wife's simple demonstration quickly becomes a city-wide phenomenon, with housewives all over walking out on their self-satisfied families in a show of solidarity.
That's a fertile premise, right there. A whole lot of possibilities in a premise like that. But On Strike For Christmas flat-out refuses to take advantage of those possibilities, coasting through its interminable length with a minimum of effort, the brave recipient of a shiny new "participant" award in the annals of holiday-themed made-for-TV movies.
This is what happens in On Strike For Christmas: Joy (Daphne Zuniga) is miserable because her husband is a dumb asshole and her twin teenaged sons are thoughtless pricks. With only ten days until Christmas, she finds herself on the verge of a nervous breakdown due to her family's pathological inability to lift a single finger to help her make any preparations for the big holiday, content only to add to her workload by agreeing to host parties at the family home for their friends and colleagues that none of them are willing to plan, because Joy will just take care of everything like she always does.
So Joy gets the bright idea to go on strike, presenting her careless family with a list of demands that they must meet to get their wife/mother back in the saddle, including such monumental tasks as baking cookies and decorating a Christmas tree. Being completely inept, the husband and sons just sit around for a week with their thumbs up their asses, then almost burn the house down twice trying to bake cookies while following a very simple recipe, then they finally half-ass everything on Christmas Eve, throwing up a bunch of dumb decorations in a hurry and calling a caterer to cook their family dinner, and Joy just shrugs and calls off the strike because at least these cretins made a token effort, then everything goes back to normal.
That's the whole fucking movie. It's just a poorly written, poorly acted mess. And the whole endeavor is so hyperbolic, to boot. None of these characters feel remotely realistic. The men are all morons who have to be told to close their eyelids before they rub their eyes, and they shriek at each other like baboons when they get agitated. Whenever they're asked to perform even the simplest task, these fuckheads just stand around with the most vacant looks on their faces, like they've never heard of such mysterious objects like "spoon" or "flour". They just want to sit in front of the TV and watch the sports and yell and fart and scratch their soft parts with their shit-encrusted fingers, because that's all their tiny brains can safely comprehend.
And Joy tries to stand up for her principles for five minutes, but she ends up acquiescing to the men in her life because without her they'll starve to death in a house filled with food because they don't know how to operate a fucking can opener without adult supervision. They're literally too stupid to survive on their own, so she has to go back to them and save the day, otherwise Christmas will surely be ruined. Whatever, Joy. This is all melodramatic garbage, and it's just about fucking worthless.
And what's up with Joy's mother? Joy's mother helps her run the knitting supply store she owns and operates, and she also loves to play the drums in her spare time. She's played by Julia Duffy (I loved her in Newhart as a kid and had a small crush on her for several years), who is only eleven years older than Daphne Zuniga, and through a strange twist of fate actually looks maybe a year or two younger than Daphne, who is supposed to be her daughter in the movie. The first time they appeared together onscreen, I just assumed they were sisters or best friends, and when Joy called her "mom" I didn't understand what I was hearing. Julia Duffy can't convincingly play Daphne Zuniga's mother. It's her fault for aging so gracefully, I suppose, but it just bugs me on a personal level.
I don't mean to sound callous, but Daphne Zuniga was 48 years old when she acted in On Strike For Christmas, and although she's meant to be playing a younger character, she looks like a 48 year-old woman. That's not a bad thing at all, but don't cast a woman only eleven years older than your leading lady to play her mother, especially if that woman looks significantly younger than her age, because it does your leading lady no favors. This isn't on either Daphne Zuniga or Julia Duffy. I blame the producers. I always blame the producers.
I wanted to like On Strike For Christmas. I liked the premise. I still like the premise. A good movie can still be made based on this story, which is itself based on a novel by Sheila Roberts, who also wrote the novel Hallmark Channel turned into 2014's The Nine Lives Of Christmas, which also sucked. So maybe Sheila Roberts is the problem. Maybe her books just suck, and the folks making these movies are being too faithful to the source material. Maybe. Either way, I don't care. I've got one more day of this bullshit, then I can finally hang up my weathered Santa Claus hat and put all of this behind me.
VERDICT: WHO GIVES A SHIT?
An overstressed, overworked wife and mother is pushed to her limits by her complacent family over the holidays, and she finally reaches her breaking point. So she goes on strike, refusing to lift a finger to help her husband and children prepare for Christmas until her very reasonable list of demands is met. The local media catches wind of this story and with their help, the wife's simple demonstration quickly becomes a city-wide phenomenon, with housewives all over walking out on their self-satisfied families in a show of solidarity.
That's a fertile premise, right there. A whole lot of possibilities in a premise like that. But On Strike For Christmas flat-out refuses to take advantage of those possibilities, coasting through its interminable length with a minimum of effort, the brave recipient of a shiny new "participant" award in the annals of holiday-themed made-for-TV movies.
This is what happens in On Strike For Christmas: Joy (Daphne Zuniga) is miserable because her husband is a dumb asshole and her twin teenaged sons are thoughtless pricks. With only ten days until Christmas, she finds herself on the verge of a nervous breakdown due to her family's pathological inability to lift a single finger to help her make any preparations for the big holiday, content only to add to her workload by agreeing to host parties at the family home for their friends and colleagues that none of them are willing to plan, because Joy will just take care of everything like she always does.
So Joy gets the bright idea to go on strike, presenting her careless family with a list of demands that they must meet to get their wife/mother back in the saddle, including such monumental tasks as baking cookies and decorating a Christmas tree. Being completely inept, the husband and sons just sit around for a week with their thumbs up their asses, then almost burn the house down twice trying to bake cookies while following a very simple recipe, then they finally half-ass everything on Christmas Eve, throwing up a bunch of dumb decorations in a hurry and calling a caterer to cook their family dinner, and Joy just shrugs and calls off the strike because at least these cretins made a token effort, then everything goes back to normal.
That's the whole fucking movie. It's just a poorly written, poorly acted mess. And the whole endeavor is so hyperbolic, to boot. None of these characters feel remotely realistic. The men are all morons who have to be told to close their eyelids before they rub their eyes, and they shriek at each other like baboons when they get agitated. Whenever they're asked to perform even the simplest task, these fuckheads just stand around with the most vacant looks on their faces, like they've never heard of such mysterious objects like "spoon" or "flour". They just want to sit in front of the TV and watch the sports and yell and fart and scratch their soft parts with their shit-encrusted fingers, because that's all their tiny brains can safely comprehend.
And Joy tries to stand up for her principles for five minutes, but she ends up acquiescing to the men in her life because without her they'll starve to death in a house filled with food because they don't know how to operate a fucking can opener without adult supervision. They're literally too stupid to survive on their own, so she has to go back to them and save the day, otherwise Christmas will surely be ruined. Whatever, Joy. This is all melodramatic garbage, and it's just about fucking worthless.
And what's up with Joy's mother? Joy's mother helps her run the knitting supply store she owns and operates, and she also loves to play the drums in her spare time. She's played by Julia Duffy (I loved her in Newhart as a kid and had a small crush on her for several years), who is only eleven years older than Daphne Zuniga, and through a strange twist of fate actually looks maybe a year or two younger than Daphne, who is supposed to be her daughter in the movie. The first time they appeared together onscreen, I just assumed they were sisters or best friends, and when Joy called her "mom" I didn't understand what I was hearing. Julia Duffy can't convincingly play Daphne Zuniga's mother. It's her fault for aging so gracefully, I suppose, but it just bugs me on a personal level.
I don't mean to sound callous, but Daphne Zuniga was 48 years old when she acted in On Strike For Christmas, and although she's meant to be playing a younger character, she looks like a 48 year-old woman. That's not a bad thing at all, but don't cast a woman only eleven years older than your leading lady to play her mother, especially if that woman looks significantly younger than her age, because it does your leading lady no favors. This isn't on either Daphne Zuniga or Julia Duffy. I blame the producers. I always blame the producers.
I wanted to like On Strike For Christmas. I liked the premise. I still like the premise. A good movie can still be made based on this story, which is itself based on a novel by Sheila Roberts, who also wrote the novel Hallmark Channel turned into 2014's The Nine Lives Of Christmas, which also sucked. So maybe Sheila Roberts is the problem. Maybe her books just suck, and the folks making these movies are being too faithful to the source material. Maybe. Either way, I don't care. I've got one more day of this bullshit, then I can finally hang up my weathered Santa Claus hat and put all of this behind me.
VERDICT: WHO GIVES A SHIT?
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