Today's Feature: Journey Back To Christmas
A nurse from World War II is transported to 2016,
What would you do if some dazed woman in strange clothes just showed up in your small town, claiming to be a nurse from the year 1945? You'd react with no small supply of suspicion, I'd wager, because people who claim to be time travelers are usually mentally ill. That's the rational reaction. But if you're the dumb cop from Journey Back To Christmas, you just accept her story at face value and invite her into your home, because what's the harm in letting a potentially unhinged individual spend a little time with your sister and her impressionable daughter? Don't hide the knives or anything, because I'm sure everything will work out for the best.
Obviously in Journey Back To Christmas, the time traveling nurse Hannah Whatever (Candace Cameron-Bure) really did emerge from an old barn into the year 2016 due to the magical intervention of a terrifying comet, because that's the premise of the damned movie. But these characters don't know that. But fuck it, let's just open our homes and hearts to an apparent babbling lunatic, because it's the Christian thing to do. And Officer Lunkhead does just that after he finds Hannah wandering the streets of Central Falls, staring wide-eyed at all the lustful teenagers brazenly kissing each other in broad daylight in this modern Sodom.
Our story begins with a brief, random shot of Tom Skerritt apparently paying his bills before we fade into the waning days of 1945, and there's nurse Hannah reading bedtime stories to little Billy in the hospital, who obviously turns out to be old Tom Skerritt in the future, but forget I said that because I'm pretty sure the movie thinks that's supposed to be a surprise. Hannah's feeling down because her beau Chet was a soldier in the war, missing and presumed dead, so I guess she's single. After telling Billy that nobody's going to adopt his orphan ass because nobody loves him, she finds a stray dog named Ruffin and takes him back to his home in the middle of a blizzard, and when the dog's owners offer to reward her for her good deed, she declines, because kindness is its own reward.
Then she gets zapped by the terrifying comet on her way home and winds up in the year 2016, a horrifying dystopia where people no longer keep Christ in Christmas, her house has become a trendy natural foods store, and Donald J. Trump is our President-elect. Christ, once again, the garbage spell check software used by Blogger is pushing my buttons, telling me that the word "dystopia" does not exist. That proves to me that we truly are living in a dystopia when our technology tries to convince us that even the word itself isn't real.
 |
| Pictured: a terrifying comet. |
After Lunkhead finds the crazy lady and takes her home to introduce her to his family, she has a bunch of those dumb "cute" fish out of water moments, like being introduced to the internet, iPhones, seatbelts in automobiles, Uggs, etc. Some random lady in town keeps following Hannah around as she marvels at the wonders of this modern world, proclaiming to her exasperated husband that the time-displaced nurse is part of some conspiracy on the part of the local thrift store owner to drum up additional sales for the old clothes in his inventory, which may be stupid, but it's definitely more of a rational explanation than "she's actually a nurse from the year 1945". So of course the movie ridicules the poor woman, portraying her as a kook, when she's the most level-headed individual in the whole movie.
Eventually, Hannah is introduced to Tom Skerritt, who is actually little Billy from the beginning of the movie, and he remembers his favorite nurse from back in the day, even keeping the old camera she left behind in his hospital room on the night she disappeared. He tells her that the terrifying comet is coming back on this very night, and she's going to get to return home to 1945 where her very-not dead husband is waiting for her, and this is supposed to be an emotional moment, but I just couldn't be bothered to give a damn.
That's the real problem with Journey Back To Christmas. It has no heart. The movie just keeps lumbering forward through a series of minor set pieces until the climax, when Hannah returns home and reunites with the husband we've never met before, and Officer Lunkhead arbitrarily falls in love with his partner on the force, some snooty blonde lady the story neglects to characterize beyond being around to make a few snide comments in a pair of scenes. This is supposed to be the big, sappy conclusion, but it just hits the floor with a wet thud, like an overstuffed bag of soggy garbage.
I didn't care about any of the characters in this movie. Hannah is portrayed by Candace Cameron-Bure as this over-the-top, golly gosh, gee-whiz caricature who never feels even remotely like a real person. And the lump of animated clay that portrays Officer Lunkhead is a blank slate with absolutely no personality who looks like a constipated asshole in a fedora.
 |
| Pictured: an asshole in a fedora. |
Tom Skerritt was okay, I guess, but even he seemed to be phoning in his performance. Still, Skerritt phoning in his performance manages to outclass everybody else in this senseless movie.
The climax reveals that the reason Hannah was transported to the year 2016 was to show her that the dog she saved in 1945 inspired that family to adopt little Billy, after they journeyed to the hospital the next day to properly thank the missing Hannah, falling in love with the little orphan with the broken arm and bringing him home to spend Christmas with them, and they eventually decided they loved Billy at least as much as the dog, so they chose to let him stay permanently. And Ruffin's descendants are being trained as service animals for the blind, so Hannah's good deeds bore some serious fruit in her community.
I don't know why she needed to journey to the future to be told all of this, when just not traveling to 2016 via a terrifying comet would have revealed all of this to her in the fullness of time. What was the point of all this? Oh, she needed to inspire the jerks of modern-day Central Falls that they needed to light the town gazebo for Christmas because traditions matter. That's it. Too many people didn't go caroling, so a terrifying comet needed to send some hapless nurse rocketing through the space/time continuum to teach these heathens that they should cut that shit out and sing "Good King Wenceslas" instead of just staring at their phones for a few extra minutes.
But hey, look at that! I finally found a Hallmark Channel original movie starring Candace Cameron-Bure that didn't work. It's a Christmas miracle!
VERDICT: FUCK COMETS
No comments:
Post a Comment