A CHRISTMAS MELODY
A single mother moves back to her hometown with her young daughter.
Lacey Chabert wants to be a big-time fashionista, so she moves out to Los Angeles from Big Beaver, Ohio to open her own boutique, fall in love and make her fortune, but her husband is a Christian Scientist and dies of tuberculosis because he's too stupid to seek medical treatment, he leaves her all alone to raise their terrifying psychic daughter Emily, and nobody likes the hideous clothes she designs so she has to close up shop and move back to her old house that's been sitting there all empty in the middle of Ohio since her parents fulfilled their long-standing murder/suicide pact last Arbor Day.
Little Emily quickly makes a friend at her new elementary school in Creepy Janitor Santa, which as we all know is Santa Claus' ultimate form, and he sweats uncomfortably and leers at the little girl while she tells him all of her secrets near the dumpsters back behind the building. Meanwhile, Lacey reconnects with her Aunty Kathy Najimy, her only surviving relative, who owns the only diner in town and has no idea what "wi-fi" is because the entire state of Ohio is trapped in some sort of timewarp and everybody who lives there thinks it's always 1976 and Jimmy Carter is always the President and Star Wars is only a distant dream in the mind of a comatose nerd named Bobby who hasn't stirred since he was kicked in the head by an irate mule on his eighth birthday.
Mariah Carey is hanging around theset school, and she's an egotistical diva who wears a fifty pound pearl necklace around her neck 24 hours a day, and she married a dentist right out of high school and has three kids and is head of the PTA and is truly the world's greatest success story. She's hated Lacey Chabert since high school because Lacey Chabert's hair has always had more natural volume, and this has driven Mariah to the brink of madness in the ensuing years. But her character is entirely superfluous to the plot, so we're not going to talk about her again.
Warren from Cedar Cove (RIP) is the school music teacher, and he's been absolutely obsessed with Lacey Chabert since he sat behind her in biology class and smelled her hair every single day for eight months back in the 1990's, and he even made a shirt years ago that he wears at least once a week, featuring Lacey's old yearbook photo, the really awkward one that she's hated for years with the terrible feathered hair and the prominent braces on her teeth and the acne and the rosacea, and this shirt is his most prized possession.
Creepy Janitor Santa encourages his pal Emily to use her psychic powers to trick Warren the music teacher into featuring her in the annual school Christmas concert, and she composes a song designed to brainwash her dear mother and Warren, forcing them to love each other because she's bored and wants to play god, and it works because Emily's will cannot be denied.
Lacey's pal from back in L.A., some stick figure named Hailstorm, flies a Piper Cub all the way to the future Mrs. Warren from Cedar Cove's front yard to tell her that she showed her friend's garbage designs to a whole bunch of dirty people on the streets who ranted into their shoes and called themselves stock brokers or CEOs, and one of these big fishes took the bait. That's right: Dollar General Stores are getting into the fashion game, and they want Lacey to design their fall collection.
Then it's immediately Christmas Eve, and Lacey and Warren are handing Emily the most energetic Jack Russell terrier puppy anybody in this world has ever seen, and all it wants to do is get the hell away from these crazy people so it's thrashing around like mad, and it's so incredibly difficult to watch because this is supposed to be a sweet moment but it looks like a half-remembered holiday-themed nightmare I had years ago while under the influence of narcotics. Then Creepy Janitor Santa drunkenly flies his improvised dumpster-sled over the moon and pukes over the side because the night's only just begun and he's already blackout drunk on toilet wine, and roll credits on the latest Christmas classic.
Mariah Carey co-produced and directed A Christmas Melody, and the only thing I've managed to glean from this experience is that Mariah Carey really loves Mariah Carey. Her character, as I mentioned, has nothing at all to do with the plot. She's just a self-centered bitch when she's introduced who remains a self-centered bitch when she just disappears from the story in the last five minutes. There's no character arc there because there's no character. She's just in the movie because she's Mariah Carey and she's a big get for Hallmark Channel and they weren't going to not feature her in the movie.
Her character speaks only in close-up shots, never sharing the frame with any other actor at any point in the movie while talking, and her face is inserted seemingly at random into various sequences that don't feature her character in a series of silent, overly dramatic reaction shots that are frankly baffling. The movie features Mariah Carey's face as much as it possibly can, despite the fact that Mariah Carey's character doesn't influence the plot in any way, shape or form from beginning to end. Mariah Carey haunts this movie.
And she's not really a very good actor, either. She's very stiff and unconvincing, just reciting her dialogue in a flat, perfunctory tone, inspiring no strong emotions whatsoever. Everybody else is just okay, making a dumb movie that doesn't matter and would be quickly forgotten if not for the baggage of apparently being a fading pop star's vanity project. There's nothing else to say about A Christmas Melody, because there's nothing of substance here. It's just a thing that happened, neither bad nor good.
Aside from the ending, which seems to be missing a minute or two of footage. Emily's singing her ridiculous song, Warren and Lacey Chabert kiss, then the movie awkwardly dissolves in the middle of the song to a ten second-long snippet of Warren, Lacey and Emily sitting under the Christmas tree, with Warren holding an unhappy, squirming puppy that just wants to escape, and everybody's forcing themselves to smile while waiting for Mariah Carey to call cut, then we see Santa's sleigh flying away for precisely one second, then it smash-cuts right into the end credits. It's like the movie was running slightly long, and the editor was up against a hard deadline and just chopped out the ending of the fucking movie, leaving just enough footage to imply that things work out okay for everybody so that the viewing audience gets the happy ending they so crave.
Either that, or Mariah Carey simply didn't shoot enough useable footage to cut together into a satisfying ending and this is all we were left with. It still sucks, and it's sadly the only really notable aspect of this dumb, boring movie. The ending is such a bizarre fuck-up that sticks out from the rest of the product like a sore thumb, and I don't know why it worked out that way. I understand that the movie was filmed very quickly in the month of October, premiering on TV less than two months after principal photography wrapped, and as a result the final edit may have been rushed. But this accelerated schedule is relatively common for Hallmark Channel, and this is the only one of these movies I've seen that is simply missing most of its ending.
It figures that the only memorable thing I've taken away from A Christmas Melody is what's actually missing from the movie.
VERDICT: WHERE'S THE REST OF ME?
Lacey Chabert wants to be a big-time fashionista, so she moves out to Los Angeles from Big Beaver, Ohio to open her own boutique, fall in love and make her fortune, but her husband is a Christian Scientist and dies of tuberculosis because he's too stupid to seek medical treatment, he leaves her all alone to raise their terrifying psychic daughter Emily, and nobody likes the hideous clothes she designs so she has to close up shop and move back to her old house that's been sitting there all empty in the middle of Ohio since her parents fulfilled their long-standing murder/suicide pact last Arbor Day.
Little Emily quickly makes a friend at her new elementary school in Creepy Janitor Santa, which as we all know is Santa Claus' ultimate form, and he sweats uncomfortably and leers at the little girl while she tells him all of her secrets near the dumpsters back behind the building. Meanwhile, Lacey reconnects with her Aunty Kathy Najimy, her only surviving relative, who owns the only diner in town and has no idea what "wi-fi" is because the entire state of Ohio is trapped in some sort of timewarp and everybody who lives there thinks it's always 1976 and Jimmy Carter is always the President and Star Wars is only a distant dream in the mind of a comatose nerd named Bobby who hasn't stirred since he was kicked in the head by an irate mule on his eighth birthday.
Mariah Carey is hanging around the
Warren from Cedar Cove (RIP) is the school music teacher, and he's been absolutely obsessed with Lacey Chabert since he sat behind her in biology class and smelled her hair every single day for eight months back in the 1990's, and he even made a shirt years ago that he wears at least once a week, featuring Lacey's old yearbook photo, the really awkward one that she's hated for years with the terrible feathered hair and the prominent braces on her teeth and the acne and the rosacea, and this shirt is his most prized possession.
Creepy Janitor Santa encourages his pal Emily to use her psychic powers to trick Warren the music teacher into featuring her in the annual school Christmas concert, and she composes a song designed to brainwash her dear mother and Warren, forcing them to love each other because she's bored and wants to play god, and it works because Emily's will cannot be denied.
Lacey's pal from back in L.A., some stick figure named Hailstorm, flies a Piper Cub all the way to the future Mrs. Warren from Cedar Cove's front yard to tell her that she showed her friend's garbage designs to a whole bunch of dirty people on the streets who ranted into their shoes and called themselves stock brokers or CEOs, and one of these big fishes took the bait. That's right: Dollar General Stores are getting into the fashion game, and they want Lacey to design their fall collection.
Then it's immediately Christmas Eve, and Lacey and Warren are handing Emily the most energetic Jack Russell terrier puppy anybody in this world has ever seen, and all it wants to do is get the hell away from these crazy people so it's thrashing around like mad, and it's so incredibly difficult to watch because this is supposed to be a sweet moment but it looks like a half-remembered holiday-themed nightmare I had years ago while under the influence of narcotics. Then Creepy Janitor Santa drunkenly flies his improvised dumpster-sled over the moon and pukes over the side because the night's only just begun and he's already blackout drunk on toilet wine, and roll credits on the latest Christmas classic.
Mariah Carey co-produced and directed A Christmas Melody, and the only thing I've managed to glean from this experience is that Mariah Carey really loves Mariah Carey. Her character, as I mentioned, has nothing at all to do with the plot. She's just a self-centered bitch when she's introduced who remains a self-centered bitch when she just disappears from the story in the last five minutes. There's no character arc there because there's no character. She's just in the movie because she's Mariah Carey and she's a big get for Hallmark Channel and they weren't going to not feature her in the movie.
Her character speaks only in close-up shots, never sharing the frame with any other actor at any point in the movie while talking, and her face is inserted seemingly at random into various sequences that don't feature her character in a series of silent, overly dramatic reaction shots that are frankly baffling. The movie features Mariah Carey's face as much as it possibly can, despite the fact that Mariah Carey's character doesn't influence the plot in any way, shape or form from beginning to end. Mariah Carey haunts this movie.
And she's not really a very good actor, either. She's very stiff and unconvincing, just reciting her dialogue in a flat, perfunctory tone, inspiring no strong emotions whatsoever. Everybody else is just okay, making a dumb movie that doesn't matter and would be quickly forgotten if not for the baggage of apparently being a fading pop star's vanity project. There's nothing else to say about A Christmas Melody, because there's nothing of substance here. It's just a thing that happened, neither bad nor good.
Aside from the ending, which seems to be missing a minute or two of footage. Emily's singing her ridiculous song, Warren and Lacey Chabert kiss, then the movie awkwardly dissolves in the middle of the song to a ten second-long snippet of Warren, Lacey and Emily sitting under the Christmas tree, with Warren holding an unhappy, squirming puppy that just wants to escape, and everybody's forcing themselves to smile while waiting for Mariah Carey to call cut, then we see Santa's sleigh flying away for precisely one second, then it smash-cuts right into the end credits. It's like the movie was running slightly long, and the editor was up against a hard deadline and just chopped out the ending of the fucking movie, leaving just enough footage to imply that things work out okay for everybody so that the viewing audience gets the happy ending they so crave.
Either that, or Mariah Carey simply didn't shoot enough useable footage to cut together into a satisfying ending and this is all we were left with. It still sucks, and it's sadly the only really notable aspect of this dumb, boring movie. The ending is such a bizarre fuck-up that sticks out from the rest of the product like a sore thumb, and I don't know why it worked out that way. I understand that the movie was filmed very quickly in the month of October, premiering on TV less than two months after principal photography wrapped, and as a result the final edit may have been rushed. But this accelerated schedule is relatively common for Hallmark Channel, and this is the only one of these movies I've seen that is simply missing most of its ending.
It figures that the only memorable thing I've taken away from A Christmas Melody is what's actually missing from the movie.
VERDICT: WHERE'S THE REST OF ME?
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