CHRISTMAS IN THE AIR
A widowed father seeks help from a professional organizer who does some holiday planning.
This guy Derek and his brother Joe own a small-scale toy company in some boring little backwater town in Indiana or Ohio or maybe Iowa, nobody cares, and they're trying to attract the attention of one of those big department store chains to carry their worthless toy designs, so that they can cash in and live off the fat of the land, or something. Derek has two kids, and I'm sure they both have names and genders and all that good stuff, but I never bothered to learn them. One of them likes hockey or ice skating, and I think the other one collects snow globes or used bandages.
One of the kids, the one with the longer hair, is due to be in the elementary school's Christmas play, and it's a pretty big deal, because the kid gets to wear a sparkly hat and ring a bell on stage without getting scolded by the sadistic school principal, Mrs. Hatchet, who cannot abide the sound of ringing bells and has gone so far as to outlaw bells altogether in her school. This old bag runs her school like a fucking Nazi, and her behavior is really over the top, so much so that I'm surprised the writers never toned down this character's manic brand of villainy. I mean, just look at the name: Mrs. Hatchet? Subtlety is completely lost on this movie.
Derek's latest invention is a drone with a plastic red sleigh glued on top of it, and he thinks this stupid little thing is gonna blow the minds of children everywhere, but first he has to get Mr. Hennessey, the owner of Hennessey's Department Stores, the seventh-largest department store chain in the upper Midwest, to agree to carry his company's toys. So Derek, the guy who makes the dumb toys, and Joe, the brother with the real head for business who keeps Derek on track so their struggling company doesn't go bankrupt, invite Mr. Hennessey and his elderly wife Margen (that's not a typo, she really spells her name with an "n" at the end. I don't get it, either. Maybe she's Swedish) out to their neck of the woods for a charming traditional Christmas dinner and maybe some cherry pie if anybody has room after gorging on dry turkey and lumpy gravy.
Not the Frank Zappa album. I wish.
Also, Derek's wife is dead. It was either a car accident or full-blown AIDS, the doctors aren't sure. Luckily for Derek, the movie's writer (or writers, who knows) included a love interest to help pull him out of the holiday doldrums this season, and her name is Linda. She's a professional planner, with her own app and everything, and she's the best! Linda's gonna get Derek's life back on track in time for him to wow that grumpy old goober Mr. Hennessey this Christmas and save his family's shitty little toy company. Linda does this by... organizing... Derek's... house, I think, and maybe his office? No, I forgot about the office. She doesn't touch his office. But Linda does take Derek to the local Men's Wearhouse to pick out a new suit for work, because she thinks wearing a blazer and tie to his job as a toy maker, which is a very physically demanding and hands-on profession, is a good idea. Hey, I'm not the professional organizer.
When Linda's not invading the privacy of her clients and uprooting their lives because of her ridiculous feng shui obsession, she spends most of her free time in her plastic greenhouse, spraying water on store-bought Poinsettia plants that she just likes to have around because they remind her of her late mother Jereldine, who died from choking on a Poinsettia blossom ten years ago while tripping on LSD and imagining herself to be a very hungry goat. It's a very tragic story.
While working so closely with Derek over the days leading up to Christmas, Linda breaks the cardinal rule of professional organizers: never fall in love with your client. It's easy to see why: this guy Derek is a real dream, just the total package. He's schlubby, he has a lazy eye, he doesn't know how to dress himself or operate an oven, and his memory is so bad I'm almost positive he's suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's disease. What eligible bachelorette wouldn't want to hitch her wagon to his rising star?
But there's trouble in paradise when Linda catches Derek working on a last-minute project just two days before Christmas, something Derek's asshole brother just dropped in his lap with absolutely no notice because he was worried that their company didn't have any prototypes that would knock Mr. Hennessey's designer socks off. Derek didn't exactly have a choice in this matter, and he was just trying to save his company from financial ruin, but Linda acts like she caught him going down on a debutante, and she storms off to go cry in her greenhouse.
Seriously, that's what she does. She cries in her greenhouse and talks to a framed photograph of her dead mother, wondering how Derek could betray her in such a manner? Did all of her numerous lessons in organization mean nothing to him? She thought he was different from all the other guys who pretend to be totally into organization as a philosophy by which to live their lives, only to immediately stuff their boxer briefs in their sock drawers and forget to separate their recycling when her back is turned. Clearly Linda was wrong about Derek, and her heart is broken.
But Derek did manage to create the ultimate game board in a fit of terrifying inspiration, a small wooden box that carries the pieces for eleven different games, including Chess, Checkers, Chinese Checkers, Finnish Checkers, Backgammon, and Frontgammon. Each time the consumer pulls out the single drawer on the box, they are presented with the playing pieces of a different game, and the flat screen on the top of the box lights up, showcasing the playing board for that particular game. Mind you, these are full-scale versions of each game, including full-scale pieces, not some miniature bullshit. And the box is small. Impossibly small. As in "there's literally no way this tiny box could ever hold the full-size pieces for eleven different games at the same time, so this game box cannot possibly exist" small.
Mr. Hennessey creams his jeans over this dumb little nightmare contraption when he sees it during Christmas dinner, and he shakes everybody's sweaty hands and tells them they're gonna need to buy bigger pants to hold their soon-to-be morbidly obese wallets from all the fucking cash they're gonna be pulling in come January. I don't know why this Hennessey fellow is so obsessed with the dumb little game box, when Derek has already shown him an even more terrifying and morally questionable toy prototype that kids everywhere are sure to love: a tiny ballerina he has either created or miniaturized through some arcane means and trapped in a glass jar, forcing it to dance to the tune of "Dance Of The Sugarplum Fairies" whenever he so desires with a clap of his hands.
This guy must have been a pupil of Dr. Pretorius back in the day. But Hennessey's only got eyes for this nondescript, shoddy-looking wooden box. It takes all kinds, man. At least the toy company is saved, and all it took was Derek slightly breaking the laws of nature to do it.
Then Derek excuses himself from the celebratory orgy to attend his son or daughter's school play, which is being held outside in the middle of December for some strange reason, and the kid freaks out when they go to ring their bell on the stage only to find its been stolen by that fiendish Mrs. Hatchet and replaced with an old sock filled with top soil, and the kid forgets their lines and starts crying, ruining the play, but nobody cares because it's an elementary school play and not some expensive Broadway show. Also, it's being held outdoors, after dark, during wintertime, and everybody's dying of exposure, and they don't have the energy to boo this atrocious performance.
Linda shows up for no reason right before the end credits roll and decides she loves Derek too much to let a silly thing like his betrayal of everything she stands for get in the way of a potentially very mediocre and unmemorable romantic affair, so she kisses him awkwardly in front of a bunch of young children dressed as elves and that's Christmas In The Air, a movie not based on the song of the same name by Trans-Siberian Orchestra, much to my chagrin.
It's not a good movie, not by any stretch of the imagination. It's not even really tolerable, if I'm being honest. I found absolutely nothing of value in this movie. I can't say that there was anything in particular that really got my goat, so to speak, just a combination of everything being presented to the viewer with an apathetic shrug. None of the performances left any impression. None of the locations or all-too-familiar story beats hit any of the right notes. Everything was just slightly off, therefore nothing managed to really connect. It's kind of amazing to see a movie just miss the mark with every single element it displays. That doesn't happen very often. It's like finding a unicorn, if unicorns were made out of frowning children's faces and broken promises.
In short, Christmas In The Air is an abomination that laughs in the face of all that's good and sacred in this world. Nothing in the movie is truly offensively bad (except for that game board. Its introduction as an impossible object breaks the movie either way), but every element sucks just enough when working together that I was constantly irritated from beginning to end, making for a miserable and emotionally exhausting experience.
Man, I have really hit the wall. This is what, the nineteenth one of these movies I've watched in a row, and it's fucking killing me. I don't know how I managed to talk myself into doing this for a third consecutive year. I have six more days to go. Six more movies. I don't know if I can do it. These last few movies have been pretty terrible experiences, and I dread what lies in store over this final week. Screw it, it's too late to turn back, now. The only way out is through, so once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.
Mommy's Dead - Yeah, but she's clearly better off dead than being saddled with that flat-faced, spastic nerd Derek and those two dead-eyed little cretins he calls his children. Mommy's free from that chain gang, now.
VERDICT: "RELLIK" IS "KILLER" SPELLED BACKWARDS
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