Today's Feature: Magic Stocking
A young widow's daughter is given a tattered old Christmas stocking at a holiday craft sale, but her mother is skeptical of its magic when it seems to create small trinkets on its own.
Christ. Here we go again. The protagonist of Magic Stocking, some sourpuss named Lindsey, lost her husband in an automobile accident three years prior to the events of the film on Christmas Eve, while he was out shopping for a puppy for their adorable daughter Billy. Now that a little time has passed, Little Billy just wants her forlorn mommy to find somebody else to love, but Lindsey just doesn't feel ready, and luckily some ruggedly handsome handyman is in town to restore the community gazebo for the holidays, and he's been making eyes at Billy's mommy, so maybe love will find a way or whatever.
Little Billy happens upon a creepy old lady at a basement rummage sale who gifts the child with a cursed stocking that irregularly pukes out little baubles that seem insignificant at first, but prove their worth later on through a series of mundane clichés, like an antique ornament having a numerical engraving that Lindsey's meddling mother uses at a charity event to guess the number of coins in a fucking cookie jar in order to earn a spot on the dais at the town's tree-lighting ceremony and worm her way into the mayor's tight khakis. It's just... it's not a very "magical" stocking at all, because that's the best it can do.
The ruggedly handsome handyman, Scott (played by Victor Webster, who portrayed Alyssa Milano's Cupid paramour in the final season of Charmed, because everything always comes back to Charmed with me) is back home in cozy Anytown, U.S.A. to keep a promise to his late grandfather and restore the town gazebo that the old man built with his own two hands back in the 1940s, but unfortunately nobody in town seems to remember what the damned gazebo looked like, and there are no existing pictures of the fucking thing, because apparently nobody in this ridiculous town ever owned a camera. So Scott's just kinda twisting in the wind, unable to actually begin restoring the damned gazebo until the magic stocking magically intervenes.
Earlier in the movie, at the same rummage sale where little Billy found the eponymous stocking, her mommy Lindsey bought an antique desk from some other creepy old lady, and the creepy old lady is coincidentally Scott's loving auntie, so he delivers it to her house as a favor, but he can't find the key to open the desk's big drawer, so that's that. Until the stocking shits out an ancient key in the third act and Billy finds it, unlocking the drawer of the desk, that coincidentally belonged to Scott's grandfather, and lo and behold the drawer contains the only existing photos and blueprints of the fabled gazebo, allowing Scott to finally complete the restoration, and just in time for the big tree lighting ceremony.
Then there's some kissing, and a new puppy, and blah, blah, blah. That's Magic Stocking, and I guess it's fine, but I just couldn't connect with the movie on any level. The plot just plods along, hitting every required point to tell its tired old story, and then it all wraps up in a convenient little bow, and it means absolutely nothing. There's nothing of note to mention regarding any aspect of this production, because it's all just so rote and uninteresting. Mediocre is the most apt descriptive term. But holy cow, that dead husband...
This is the only trick these twisted fuckers have up their tattered sleeve, isn't it? There's always some kind of fucking tragedy involved with these damned movies. Somebody's always fucking dead, and their death is always somehow inextricably linked to Christmas. But all it takes is the love of the right man (or woman) to shake our star out of their funk and help them see the magic of the season and all that crap.
I'm so sick of this tired plot contrivance. There is more than one way to tell a satisfying Christmas story, you revolting hirelings! Not every single one of these movies needs to be weighed down by the anchor of spousal tragedy. And it wouldn't even be that big of a deal with Magic Stocking if it weren't for actress Bridget Regan's portrayal of Lindsey. She plays up the character's grief to such a ridiculous degree that she seems like she's being utterly crushed by every single small reminder of her dead husband. This woman is drowning in her sorrow, and it's just so dispiriting to watch.
I'm not saying that the character shouldn't still be mourning the loss of her devoted husband, but for pity's sake, Bridget Regan plays the character like the star of some misbegotten silent-era melodrama, her large eyes always wet with tears, her lips twisted in a perpetual frown whenever anything (and I mean anything) even vaguely reminds her that she used to have a husband, and now he's dead. And wouldn't you know it, every single thing in her house reminds her of her dead husband. She's constantly chastising her daughter for wanting a puppy, because the mere mention of the word "puppy" calls to mind her husband's tragic puppy-related death, and her visiting mother can't even decorate the family Christmas tree with the only ornaments in the house, because Lindsey bought those ornaments with her dead husband, and they all have special meaning, because her husband, who is dead, is actually dead.
Regan plays this character like she's constantly on the verge of a complete emotional breakdown, until the very end of the movie when she's suddenly a-okay about becoming Mrs. Victor Webster because she found a light bulb in a fucking stocking. For the first ninety percent of the movie, she's such a complete downer to follow because she's constantly daydreaming about joining her dead husband in the lake of fire, and then she just gets over her grief and furiously dry humps Carpenter Cupid in front of the whole town at the big tree lighting ceremony. Whatever gets you through the night, lady.
So Magic Stocking is just a dumb, boring movie that is ultimately undone by its terrible miscalculation of a lead character.
VERDICT: SUICIDAL TENDENCIES
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