CHRISTMAS SONG
Two music teachers face off in a Christmas-carol competition while also vying for a job.
Two private academies, one for the boys and one for the girls, have combined their forces like some sort of educational Voltron in upstate New York, and there are growing pains a-plenty. Girls music program director Diana Thiessen (Natasha Henstridge) is butting heads with Ken Stoddard, the boys music program director. Diana is a by-the-book type who prefers to teach her children the classics through lectures and reading, and Ken's more of a freewheeling fellow who likes to really get down with the kids, teaching them about the rhythm and power of music through what appears to be a series of cacophonous drum circles with his classes that fail to even carry a simple beat, which is just a crime.
Seriously, the noise this dude and his gormless students make in their classroom is just unreal. Endless pounding with no rhyme or reason is seemingly the only item on this guy's lesson plan. Needless to say, all that goddamn noise drives Diana crazy, and she marches next door during class to let him have it in front of his kids. Naturally, Ken thinks of Diana as a fuddy duddy of sorts, a real stick in the mud because she just doesn't get what he's trying to do by encouraging his students to just ceaselessly pound their sweaty fists on various percussion instruments until the bell rings and their class mercifully ends.
Sure, Diana's a little old-fashioned in her teaching methods, but as far as I could tell. Ken was never actually bothering to teach his students anything at all in his introductory scene. Sure, you could argue that his character is a freeform educator who has no patience for fancy booklearnin' or whatever, but that's not how he comes across here. Mostly, he just comes across as an idiot, which is unfortunate.
The bickering teachers are called in front of their exasperated principal, a nice lady named Ms. Gedler who's just trying to keep everything in her professional life from completely coming apart since the school merger has placed twice the workload on her already exhausted shoulders, Diana and Ken keep sniping at each other because they just can't help themselves, until Ms. Gedler finally just tells them to shut their mouths because the combined school doesn't have enough money in its budget to support two entirely separate girls and boys music programs and one of them is going to have to hit the bricks sooner rather than later.
Gedler hands the now-gobsmacked teachers a pamphlet touting a televised Christmas carol competition imaginatively called the "Christmas Carol Competition" that she desperately wants her school to win, since the $10,000 prize will help quite a bit around the campus, and she heavily implies that the music program director whose students win the competition will have the inside track to become the future unified music program director when the dust settles.
Diana jumps at the chance to defeat her bitter rival Ken at this prestigious competition, quickly cherry picking her two most promising students for the task: a sheltered wallflower named Amy and a pushy dame named Liz, who is identified by a fellow teacher to Diana as the straight-up school slut, which I'm not at all making up. Liz is first introduced exiting the boys bathroom with a sly smile on her face as she walks past a line of dudes waiting to use the toilet and she's accused of being voted "the girl most likely to" by gossiping teachers in the faculty lounge. This is highly unexpected, and might I add, highly inappropriate for a TV G-rated family movie.
And really, Liz is a decent gal. She's a little image obsessed, sure, but so are most teenagers, so you can't hold that against her. And she sticks by her teacher when things get rough, organizing a school campaign to raise awareness for the Christmas carol competition, rallying students to vote for Diana's team when the show goes live on television in order to help the team win, so Diana can keep her job.
So fuck that nosy teacher for judging Liz.
Meanwhile, Ken has chosen his team for the big contest: a sensitive, handicapped tenor named Carlo and a conceited jock douchebag named Billy who doesn't really give a shit about anything other than winning and looking cool. Carlo's a decent sort who has a heart-to-heart conversation with Amy over lunch on the eve of the big telecast. He confides in Amy that since the competition has heated up, he can't even enjoy the Christmas season, his favorite time of the year, and he can't wait for it all to just be over and done with. Amy confides in Carlo that since all the madness began, she's really come out of her shell and is pushing forward to win because she wants to prove to her domineering and overprotective mother that she's strong and capable, ready to take on the world.
That's nice and all, but it would have been nicer for the movie to actually show the audience Amy's evolution as a character rather than just telling the audience about this miraculous turnaround after the fact. When she's introduced, Amy can't even sing in front of Diana in an empty classroom unless Diana turns her back to the girl, afterwards unable to immediately commit to taking Diana up on her offer to join the competition. After one practice session with Diana and Liz after school early on in the narrative, Amy just kind of fades into the background until the final act, when she's suddenly a completely different character who walks with confidence and wears makeup and has absolutely no compunctions with singing in front of a live studio audience on a show being broadcast to a potential audience of millions. It's just a little too much to take seriously without the movie actually bothering to illustrate Amy's blossoming into a social butterfly.
But Christmas Song doesn't have time for any of that bullshit, because Amy's a supporting character, and the film's writer, Kevin Commins, was apparently physically incapable of focusing any of his limited character development skills on anybody who isn't Diana Thiessen or Ken Stoddard, who, to be fair, feel fairly well-rounded by the time the plot wraps itself up, despite the screenplay's bizarre dramatic device to give the characters some sort of conflict to keep them apart until the climax. They don't particularly like each other throughout the first two-thirds of the movie, because Diana looks down on popular music, while Ken thinks that the classics aren't the only method to teach children about the joys of music. That's it. That is literally their only personality conflict in the movie. Other than that little issue, the two characters are pretty simpatico.
That's a little ridiculous when you think about it. Shouldn't there be a more substantial problem standing between these two characters in order to make their conflict more realistic? Ken prefers to use popular music as a way to introduce his students to the fundamentals of the subject, and Diana thinks that not utilizing the centuries of classic compositions at her disposal to teach her students is patently absurd. Ken still enjoys classical music quite a bit, and Diana doesn't hate popular music at all, although Ken continues to callously insinuate that her comments mean that Diana despises any musical contributions to our culture that were composed after the 19th Century. It's flimsy and feels like too much of a contrivance to take seriously as a real plot point.
Luckily, the film does provide several scenes between Diana and Ken that allow their characters to talk to each other like actual human beings for a few minutes before the Great Musical Divide rears its ugly head to keep these two lovebirds apart, and bizarrely, both of these scenes involve the suspicious intervention of an unnamed online dating service. Both Ken and Diana are convinced by their best friends whose names I never bothered to learn to sign up for the hip new online dating service that the screenwriter never bothered to identify.
This dating service doesn't provide names to its users, setting them up anonymously via their location and compatibility scores based on a lengthy required quiz. Once the service's algorithm does its magic, it pairs two folks up and provides them with numbers that they can use to identify each other when they meet in the wild.
Diana and Ken are paired up and meet at a local restaurant, and when Diana realizes she's actually meeting Ken, she nearly ditches the sap while he's nervously chewing on a stale breadstick, but she decides to sit and share a drink with her colleague, and they have a nice, friendly chat for a few minutes until Ken takes offense at Diana's imagined disdain for modern music and Diana gets the fuck out of there. It's fine, I guess. Nothing to get worked up over as a scene, but it gets the job done.
The next day, both Ken and Diana decide to change their answers on the quiz, choosing the exact opposite of whatever they chose the first time, in order to get paired up with completely different people, and wouldn't you know it, but that darned algorithm just pairs them up again. That's like something out of a real fucking romantic comedy, I think. It's just so wacky. This time, the pair decide to actually share a meal and they really get to know each other over a shared dessert of Crème brûlée, in perhaps the best scene of the movie.
Ken talks about his itinerant musician father, a person he never really got to know due to the old man's distant nature, whom he built up in his head during his childhood as a near-mythic figure, developing a love of music from the rare moments they would spend together during his formative years. His particular fondness for one of his father's favorite albums, an old Elvis Presley record which he listened to so often while his father was absent that it eventually became unlistenable, really inspired Ken to make music an intrinsic part of his life. And Diana shares a story about how she caught her husband cheating on her during a Christmas party the couple was hosting several years prior, and how the shock of his infidelity has prevented her from attempting to move on in so many ways. It's a decent scene, and it really serves to humanize these two characters, grounding their particular quirks in a realistic manner.
On the day of the big, unbranded "Christmas Carol Competition", jock douchebag Billy sabotages Liz's car, draining the gas tank and placing a suspicious blinking box underneath the rear fender, and for just one brief moment the image of Liz climbing behind the wheel and turning the ignition followed by a tremendous explosion fills my fevered mind, but alas, Billy doesn't plant an explosive device on his rival's car. No, the device was actually a cell phone signal blocker, which he planted to prevent Liz from calling for help when her car breaks down due to a lack of fuel while she and Amy travel to the TV studio after school. Missing their dress rehearsal, the network executive in charge of the production disqualifies Liz and Amy, much to Diana's dismay.
Carlo finds out that Billy sabotaged Liz's car and rightly points out that not only is what Billy did inherently unethical, but something could have gone terribly wrong and Liz and Amy could have been injured or even killed due to Billy's selfish actions, and he challenges the prick to an arm wrestling contest to convince Billy to tell the truth and help get Liz and Amy reinstated. Billy scoffs at the challenge, but Carlo reminds his opponent that hauling himself around in a wheelchair his entire life has given him impressive upper body strength, and he soundly defeats Billy, who timidly makes that call to the TV studio.
When Diana finds out about Billy's treachery, she just naturally assumes that Ken had something to do with it(?) and decides to hate him again for thirty seconds, until Amy reminds Diana that Ken offered to give the girls a ride to the studio earlier and they declined, and why would he offer them a ride if he was planning to sabotage their car? Never mind that we never see this offer take place; it's just something Amy casually mentions during a phone call, as though we're already supposed to be privy to this information. Hearing this, Diana decides that thirty seconds of hating Ken is enough, and she makes up her mind then and there that Ken will be the one with whom she will mate, and their alien/human offspring will multiply and eventually take over the entire world.
Because Natasha Henstridge was in Species. The movie with the alien who wanted to mate and... you know, maybe it just wasn't a good joke. No, no it was terrible, and I feel ashamed. But she might be a human/alien hybrid in Christmas Song. It's not entirely implausible. Okay, maybe it is, but you have to give me something, here. My mind just starts wandering when I watch these damned movies, and I can't help but think that the narrative might be much improved if Diana Thiessen is actually an incognito alien/human hybrid who is attempting to build a life for herself in society while constantly keeping her innate desire to reproduce and bear nightmarish offspring that will surely conquer the world in check. It's not that crazy.
Anyway, this has gone on long enough, and I've just about had it with typing, so let's wrap things up. After being reinstated, Liz and Amy get the bright idea to join forces with Billy and Carlo to combine their two little, shitty carols into one big, shitty carol and they perform together on the broadcast, with Mr. Stoddard inexplicably popping up near the end of their performance to fart around on his daddy's old trumpet for a little impromptu accompaniment, which feels like it should be a disqualifying act, but isn't.
Their school wins the competition, and Ms. Gedler reveals that between the competition prize and the generosity of a few donors, she'll be able to afford keeping both boys and girls music programs around for at least another year, which keeps her from having to fire anybody for a little while longer, and Ken and Diana start making out because they're so excited to learn that neither of them will have to update their résumé for another twelve months.
That's Christmas Song, and it's just a shade above mediocre, which is technically a passing grade. The leads have good chemistry and the plot is only occasionally insulting, so I guess that's something like a C-, so congratulations. Natasha Henstridge demonstrates a natural charm and likability that goes a long way and makes her something of a natural fit for films such as these. And Gabriel Hogan's just a solid utility player for Hallmark Channel romances, having starred in many of them, including two holiday pairings with Alicia Witt, Christmas List and Christmas At Cartwright's, not to mention the endless series of Murder, She Baked mysteries, so he could play an affable romantic lead in his sleep by now.
Let's get to the tropes!
I Hate You! Kiss Me! - This one's self-explanatory.
Christmas In July! - The large, wrinkled blankets of fake snow strewn across every exterior shot are a dead giveaway. And the actors don't look particularly comfortable having to emote wearing coats and scarves in what is obviously not appropriate winter weather, judging from the lack of leafless trees and abundance of green, green grass in upstate New York in December.
And that's it. I briefly considered including Assistant Chef Jen for Billy, but he was never quite a sneering caricature of a villain, and he ended up redeeming himself in the end. So only two. Not too shabby.
VERDICT: NICE
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