Today's Feature: Falling For Christmas (A Snow-Capped Christmas)
An injured figure skater travels to a rehabilitation center and meets an ice fisherman who shows her that there is more to life than competing.
Drifting through the unearthly calm waters of Deep Cable, I've found myself approaching the shore of a shabby little island known as UP TV, a little-known network that nonetheless is available in over 67 million homes throughout the United States. Have you ever heard of UP TV? Probably not, but don't feel bad, because you're really not missing all that much.
Founded in 2004 as the Gospel Music Channel by the son of televangelist Rex Humbard, AKA the poor man's Pat Robertson, the network focused on, well, gospel music. That was pretty much GMC's entire lineup until 2010, when they began to incorporate popular family-friendly syndicated television shows such as Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman and The Waltons. In 2013, the channel re-branded, now calling itself UP (standing for UPlifting entertainment) TV, moving (not entirely) away from their exclusively Christian roots to become more of a general family destination channel.
UP TV likes Christmas quite a lot, airing a yule log for twenty-four hours straight each Christmas Day, as well as dedicating their weekends in December entirely to holiday-themed movies, but not original productions, because they don't have the operating budget to produce their own movies. Instead, the network buys cheaply produced, sub-Hallmark productions from various lesser-known, mostly direct-to-video outfits centered in Canada to populate their airwaves. One of their recent acquisitions is a film officially entitled Falling For Christmas, and yet IMDB insists that its real title is actually A Snow-Capped Christmas, although I've seen no promotional material to back up that claim, so I'm calling it Falling For Christmas because that's what it's fucking called.
Falling For Christmas stars Leah Renee (uh... she was in a TV series called My Babysitter's A Vampire) as a rising star figure skater named Claire who is shipped off to a sleepy little rehabilitation clinic in the Rocky Mountains to heal up before a big national tournament that will determine whether or not she qualifies for the big world-wide figure skating championships. Not the Winter Olympic Games, because that's a registered trademark of the International Olympic Committee, and the production didn't have the budget to afford the name. Claire's douchebag coach Jullian (with two l's because he's just the fucking worst) is a tyrannical control freak who is constantly pushing his charge to give 120% every single time she laces up her skates, and Claire's body is beginning to suffer the effects of this relentless lifestyle, worried she might not be physically ready for her all-important competition.
If you've ever bothered to scratch even slightly beneath the glamorous veneer that is professional figure skating, you'd probably be absolutely appalled to discover some of the horror stories these athletes (yes, they are athletes, no matter what your cackling dude-bro relatives claim) have endured. Many have suffered catastrophic, permanently crippling injuries in their pursuits to achieve international superstardom in what is one of the most grueling (not to mention corrupt) athletic occupations in the world. And truth be told, the character of Jullian is really a toned-down, family-friendly version of the industry's most successful coaches, who are some of the cruelest sons of bitches you're likely to meet while they're working.
The organizers of these competitions, the coaches of the competitors, and the audiences demand nothing less than perfection, and that obsession to be the absolute best has caused many professional figure skaters to self-destruct at distressingly young ages. And when the athletes get older, they realize as they fade from the spotlight that their professional options are quite limited, with many of them nursing chronic injuries that prevent them from effectively coaching the next generation of figure skaters, and prescription painkiller abuse among veterans of the sport is rampant. Basically, professional figure skating is a horror show with a very captivating, glittering exterior that attracts far too many young and impressionable people to their folly.
Now that I've bummed you out just a little, let's get back to this cut-rate chucklefuck of a movie. Arriving in... look, I've forgotten the name of the little town, so I'm just going to call it Town, so after arriving in Town to begin her rehabilitation, Claire meets the local jack-of-all-trades Luke (played by Niall Matter, probably best known as bad boy scientist Zane in Eureka, although I have no idea how many people actually watched that show, so maybe nobody knows this guy from anything. IMDB has made sure that nobody who visits the page for Falling For Christmas will ever know Matter from this movie, because according to them, the guy doesn't fucking exist) who brings her in on a snowmobile (I know people prefer the term "snow machine", but that's just stupid, because when you hear that term, you immediately picture a machine that generates snow, not a vehicle you use to traverse a snowy wilderness, so I refuse to call them anything other than snowmobiles) when her taxi gets trapped in a snowdrift. I'm using far too many parentheses, here.
Claire and Luke immediately hit it off when he and his pal Lou (played by friendly meathead entertainer Lochlyn Monroe, another actor IMDB insists simply isn't in this movie) drop off a bunch of firewood for the rehab center the same day, and Luke even invites Claire over to his house to share a home-cooked dinner with him and his daughter Chamonix. Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, or just Chamonix, for your information, is the name of a commune in the shadow of France's Aiguilles Rouges mountains that served as the location of the very first Winter Olympic Games in 1924. That has nothing to do with anything regarding the movie, I just wanted to share something I knew with you, because I think it's important that we all learn a little something new each day. It helps keep our brains from running out our ears.
Luke, as it turns out, knows a thing or two about being on the ice, having until recently been a professional hockey player. According to some of the locals, Luke was a pretty amazing player, to boot, a regular Bobby Orr, until he retired early to focus on raising his daughter with the obnoxious name after her mother abandoned them both three years prior to... yeah. Mommy couldn't hack it. Wonderful.
What else? Jullian shows up in Town to continue pushing his charge to be the very, very best during her rehab, no matter the cost, and his rampant douchebaggery really starts to get on Luke's nerves, but he doesn't do anything about it because he's a pussy. Claire's mother also comes to Town to spend the holidays with her daughter, and she hits if off with doofy Lou after he teaches her how to make S'mores over a roaring fire. It's all very charming. Claire almost falls through some thin ice on a frozen lake after ignoring a warning sign because she just had to skate somewhere, but Luke saves her from plunging through to her doom in one of the most boring "suspense" sequences I've ever seen in one of these movies, but at least they tried something, so an "A" for effort, I guess.
As Luke's folksy charms begin to soften her resolve, Claire eventually comes to the painful realization that she doesn't want to keep pushing herself so hard, and decides to drop out of the national figure skating championship, but Jullian angrily convinces Luke to convince her to stay in the game, because Luke doesn't want her to ever feel like he did anything to hold her back from realizing her dreams. So she fucks off to Toronto to skate her way into the hearts and minds of Canadians everywhere (the movie takes place in Canada), winning that gold medal and promptly telling Coach Hitler to goosestep off a pier, forsaking the Not-Olympics and retiring a national champion, catching the first magic sleigh back to Town to profess her undying love for Mr. Hockey, and they tongue wrestle before the approving gaze of Luke's grinning daughter as we fade to black.
That's Falling For Christmas, and I don't care. It wasn't as boring as Holiday Joy, but only just. There's just nothing to get excited about with this movie. It happened to me for a little while, and then it was over. The whole thing just feels like a product, with none of that fuzzy, warm feeling that the better examples of this genre can produce so well. And surprisingly, despite the snowbound setting, this movie doesn't really have that Christmas vibe, either. It's odd, but there's just nothing to this movie beyond its threadbare façade.
So far, my voyage to this unknown world of Deep Cable has been a complete fucking bust, much as I suspected. Maybe tomorrow I'll have better luck, because I'm not ready to give up on this foolish journey just yet. The Christmas spirit has to be out there somewhere on one of these forsaken channels, and I intend to find it.
VERDICT: WHATEVER
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