A PERFECT CHRISTMAS
A handsome mannequin in a Christmas display comes to life and begins dating an attractive ad exec.
Look at how shallow today's log line is, guys. Disgraceful.
So... a "mannequin comes to life" movie, eh? Wonderful. Is there really any point in making another one of these movies? I think the alpha and omega of this particular romantic sub-genre is 1987's Mannequin, don't you? You're not gonna top fucking Mannequin, so why even bother? That movie was my jam back in the day. I couldn't get enough of that ridiculous shit. I adored Mannequin when I was a kid.
Andrew McCarthy was the bee's knees playing some weirdo named Jonathan Switcher who made a mannequin and then found himself working in the department store where the mannequin he made happened to be on display. Then the mannequin comes to life at night, and when it comes to life it turns into Kim Cattrall in her prime, which is just a huge bonus. That's like winning the lottery twice in the same day. Then there was the late Meshach Taylor playing Jonathan's flamboyant gay pal Hollywood. He was the best.
I always looked up to Hollywood. He was a guy who knew exactly what he wanted to be and didn't give a damn if anybody cared. A fearless motherfucker, and a real role model. I wished I had a best pal like Hollywood growing up. Hell, I still wish I could find a pair of the sunglasses he wore in that movie. Pure '80s kitsch.
I haven't seen Mannequin in twenty years. I'm worried that if I watched it again, it wouldn't hold up at all. I found a blu ray copy in a discount bin at a Walmart last year. It's sitting on a shelf, unwatched, right next to my copy of that other Andrew McCarthy 1980s comedy masterpiece, Weekend At Bernie's, which I also haven't watched in at least twenty years. Maybe they're not sitting right next to each other, because my collection is in alphabetical order, but you know what I mean. I think I watched that movie fifty times when I was a kid. Mannequin, not Weekend At Bernie's. I only watched Weekend At Bernie's maybe twenty times.
Both of those movies eventually spawned sub-par sequels, yet only Weekend At Bernie's 2 managed to snag Andrew McCarthy to star. I guess there was really nowhere else for Jonathan Switcher to go in a Mannequin Two: On The Move, but so much was left unsaid and undone in the Weekend At Bernie's universe after the first film that the public just demanded a sequel be made to finally finish the story. The original movie was missing such indispensable elements as inept voodoo practitioners, dancing corpses and buried fucking treasure. Truly a tale that needed to be told.
I don't own Weekend At Bernie's 2 on blu ray. I don't know if it even is on blu ray.
I just checked, and it isn't. Probably for the best.
A Perfect Christmas is the story of some dumb lady named Holly who works for an advertising agency and her dumb friend Milo who also works at an advertising agency. The same one, they work for the same advertising agency. Milo takes photos, because he's a photographer, and he's a hipster asshole who aspires to create high art with his advertising work. He also gives Holly a fucking ViewMaster for a Christmas present, because he's just too cool for school.
Holly's boss, some British guy played by Mark Lindsay Chapman, who has less screentime in this movie than in A Prince For Christmas, so he doesn't really register as a character, tells his number one employee that they've just landed some big fish jeweler client who wants a new ad campaign out on the streets by Christmas Eve, which is just a few weeks away, and he wants it to be the best ad campaign anybody has ever seen in the history of the entire world of advertising, which is something of a tall order. But Holly tells Mark Lindsay Chapman that she can get it done, and she drafts her friend Milo, who is secretly in love with Holly but Holly doesn't know because if Holly knew the movie would be over in five minutes, to help her realize this incredibly important ad campaign before Christmas Eve comes and she's out on her ass.
The next morning, she catches herself gawking at a fucking mannequin in the store display outside of her building and trips on the sidewalk, knocking herself out cold, proving herself to be too stupid to walk in public unsupervised. Then she wakes up in the hospital, finds some random photo of a lady's hand on Milo's laptop, hastily cut-and-pastes a diamond ring to the hand and submits it as the perfect photo, which saves the campaign just in time for Christmas. And she loves Milo, now.
That's it. That's everything that happens in A Perfect Christmas.
I know you were thinking this is a "mannequin comes to life" movie, and I was too, but it's not. That's not what happens at all. Holly hits her head on the sidewalk, slips into a two-day coma, and hallucinates not only the department store mannequin coming to life and creepily romancing her, but also a whole bunch of other stuff that doesn't even involve her at all, which doesn't make any sense except as a feint, attempting to distract the viewer long enough so that they forget they're watching some dummy's dumb dreams, but it doesn't work. It's obvious from the moment Holly bumps her head when everything goes white and this Patrick Bateman-looking motherfucker is just suddenly looming over her with his empty smile and his empty eyes that what we're seeing isn't really happening.
So why should I care at all about approximately 80% of this movie? None of it really happens, so it is of no consequence. I just spent an hour and change watching a boring lead actress hang out with a boring lead actor with absolutely nothing to show for my trouble. I didn't even bother to learn the names of the actors, because they don't mean anything to me. Who played Holly? Who played the mannequin? Who played that little weasel Milo? Who fucking cares?
I did find it a little weird that during a scene when the mannequin was on his way out to return some videotapes an ATM he passed randomly told him to feed it a stray cat, but that's neither here nor there.
There were no mannequin shenanigans in A Perfect Christmas. I was sold a bill of goods. Would the movie have been any better had the mannequin shenanigans been real and not the product of a concussed brain? Of course not, but at least the weirdness in the story would have had some consequence. Instead, all of the character growth in both Holly and Milo takes place in a fucking dream, which means it doesn't really happen, but the movie wants us to conveniently forget that little factoid during its last two minutes, when these two are suddenly acting like newlyweds or something.
Why? Because the movie said so, I guess.
It's such a cheap and tawdry affair. I'm completely fucking miserable right now just thinking about this execrable bait-and-switch of a movie. I don't know if I've ever been less invested in one of these products before, and I've watched some terrible holiday movies in the past few years.
The only moment in the entire movie that I didn't loathe involved Mark Lindsay Chapman informing Holly and Milo of the new ad campaign during a meeting. He tells Milo that he trusts the hipster photog will be able to handle the project, and Milo poses a smart ass rhetorical question: Did Ansel Adams know how to photograph a tree? Mark Lindsay Chapman just fixes Milo with a dead stare for ten solid seconds and then rasps a flat "yes" before dismissing the meeting and getting on with his life. That was a funny joke. It happened two minutes into the movie. Nothing else during the next hour and twenty-two minutes even came remotely close to that one simple joke in terms of entertainment.
Look, if you don't know who Ansel Adams is, then obviously the joke isn't going to work for you, but that's not my problem. I thought it was funny. Sure, it wasn't the funniest joke I've ever heard, or even the tenth funniest thing I've heard in the past few hours, but it was the only shred of hope I had to hang onto while watching A Perfect Christmas and hating each successive minute more than the last, so cut me a little slack.
And none of my tropes apply, since the mannequin bullshit wasn't real, nobody's parents are dead, and nobody had to learn to embrace the spirit of the season or anything stupid like that. It's so bizarre, since I should be applauding a movie that embodies precisely none of the tropes I set up when I began this year's horrible mistake of a series, but what did A Perfect Christmas leave me with?
Ironically, nothing. Nothing at all. A true void of a holiday movie experience. A festive fucking black hole, its immense gravitational pull devouring everything that crosses its path, even hope itself.
VERDICT: THE ROTTING CORPSE OF BERNIE LOMAX
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| This doesn't happen in A Perfect Christmas. |
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