SOUND OF CHRISTMAS
A music teacher is hired by a widower to give music lessons to his teenage daughter.
Lindy Booth makes a return engagement this season in Sound Of Christmas, playing a music teacher named Lizzie who works at a hole-in-the-wall music school in Brooklyn called "Music School". The building that houses the music school is also home to several other businesses, including the office of an unscrupulous dentist on the 4th floor who may or may not have botched a routine root canal procedure on the head of a financial firm several years earlier.
Travis McKinley, the aforementioned financial firm guy, just hates this dentist, and although he can't find any proof of the man's incompetence, he figures the next best thing to getting the tooth-obsessed bastard run out of town on a rail is to buy the building in which this mouth butcher keeps his office. That way, Travis can evict the son of a bitch at Christmas and turn the building into high-end office space for his financial industry chums. The music school is just caught in the middle, collateral damage in McKinley's private war, and right before the school's big annual Christmas recital, too!
Lizzie's boss and best friend Kola tries to convince her star teacher to take part in the recital this year, but Lizzie can't bring herself to perform in front of a crowd again, not after the embarrassing incident that marred her debut as a concert pianist several years earlier. You see, when Lizzie took the stage to thrill a packed house with her ivory-tickling skills, she got nervous when she noticed the size of the crowd and shat her pants. That's not the kind of thing somebody just gets over, and don't think Lizzie hasn't tried.
Kola just tells her that if she thinks she'll lose control of her bowels again that she can always wear an adult diaper, but Lizzie refuses, claiming that her grandmother was smothered with an adult diaper in a nursing home by a jealous rival after she caught granny making eyes with her boyfriend at a Bingo game when Lizzie was just a little girl, and the mere sight of an adult diaper is enough to send the poor girl into an hysterical fit.
Travis's underling, Bill With The Tall Hair (Robin Dunne, who is not a woman), is placed in charge of making sure this business deal is done by Christmas Eve, because Travis wants to be able to evict that dentist bastard just in time to ruin his entire new year. But uh-oh, Bill takes one look at Lizzie and falls in love, because who wouldn't fall in love with Lindy Booth? It's impossible. I guess to make up for evicting the music school and eliminating her job, Bill hires Lizzie to teach his daughter Effie how to play the piano, even though she already knows how to play the piano, so I don't know why this is even a subplot.
I'm not exaggerating, either. Effie can already play the piano, and Lizzie doesn't really teach her a damned thing, but the movie needed to provide some reason for Lizzie and Bill to spend time together, and the film's four credited screenwriters apparently couldn't keep their own story straight. Effie needs lessons so she can learn how to play the piano! Oh wait, Effie already knows how to play, but, um... she needs more lessons? Because she wants to play "Joy To The World", and she needs a professional music teacher to teach her how to play the one song, even though Effie can read sheet music and already knows her way around a keyboard. Whatever, man.
I can't wrap my head around this. Why did they bother with this subplot? Bill's already gonna see plenty of Lizzie since he's supervising the sale of the building in which the music school is located, and he has to visit the place frequently to obtain documents, and to drop off documents, and other document-related tasks that only a high-level executive like Bill is qualified to perform.
Oh. I know why. Lizzie needed to make a personal connection with Effie, because Effie's mom died around Christmastime a few years ago. And Lizzie's destined to be Effie's new mommy. Okay. And also Lizzie and Effie bake some cookies one night. Together. Like a mother and daughter would. And it looks like so much fun. Why is it always so much fun?
It feels like every single one of these goddamned movies includes a wacky baking scene, where everybody's laughing and carrying on, having the time of their fucking lives in the kitchen while they bake some bland fucking angel-shaped sugar cookies. When the super fun baking scene is over, everybody's always covered in flour, which never makes any sense to me. Who emerges from a kitchen after baking cookies looking like they just went to war with fucking Poppin' Fresh?
I've baked quite a bit in my life, and I've never had flour smudged all over my face after I'm finished baking, because I know what the fuck I'm doing in the kitchen. I don't goof around and make things fun when I bake, because there's nothing fun about baking. It's just a thing you have to do if you want warm, delicious treats. Who gets a rush every time they measure sugar or beat softened butter in a bowl? These movies try to make baking look like the coolest fucking thing you can do with the people you love, but it is, in fact, one of the most mundane tasks one can perform around the house. It's like trying to make mopping the bathroom floor look glamorous.
Or maybe it isn't. I'm fully prepared to admit that I'm probably just a huge asshole and don't know what I'm talking about. Maybe this shit is what happy families really do all the time in their cozy little homes all across the world, and I just missed out because nobody ever invited my humorless ass into the kitchen when the party was in full swing. Perhaps, but I highly doubt it.
In a coincidence of coincidences, Travis's daddy, old man and chairman emeritus of the financial firm Earl, is a student of Lizzie's and he convinces the company to keep the music school in the building in perpetuity after the sale without raising the price of their lease, and Bill and Lizzie make out at the school's big recital after Lizzie finally overcomes her crippling stage fright to play a shitty (no pun intended) jazz rendition of "Jingle Bells" on an out-of-tune piano. But that cocksucker dentist is still out on his ass, so it's a Merry Christmas for everybody!
I don't have time for this bullshit, anymore. Boring fucking assembly-line movies that just keep rolling in without end. Is Sound Of Christmas good? I don't know. I honestly don't know. I can't tell anymore. My senses have become dulled by constant exposure to these bland, sterile movies.
I think the actors were okay. Nobody sucked. Robin Dunne acted with his mouth a little too much, which got a bit annoying after a while. The guy doesn't seem to know what else to do with his face but contort his mouth constantly during reaction shots, like he's trying on different expressions in a mirror and can't decide which one he prefers. Lindy Booth was good, but that's no surprise. She's a talented and charismatic actress who deserves better roles than the romantic lead in yet another Hallmark Channel original movie.
The story was what it was, no more and no less. There are no big surprises, no solid monologues for any of the principal actors, and no stand-out set pieces. Just a series of low-key dramatic events that keep the plot lurching forward until it crosses an arbitrary finish line and fades away, like the memory of a ham sandwich on white bread with no condiments. You eat it, and it doesn't make you sick or anything, but it leaves no real impression on you after it's gone. Wow, I really need to work on my analogies.
What I'm trying to say is that the movie began, then it ended, and nothing about what happened between those two points left absolutely any impact. Maybe if I were in a better mood, I would have enjoyed Sound Of Christmas, but maybe Sound Of Christmas just put me in a bad mood. I want to like every single one of these movies that I watch. I never sit down wanting to hate anything. Just entertain me. I don't need you to change the way I look at the art of cinema or anything so lofty. Just fucking entertain me.
At least something like Snowmance, a truly terrible movie, was memorable in just how stupid it was. I haven't forgotten the plot of that ridiculous misfire of a holiday romance. I've already forgotten almost everything that happened in Sound Of Christmas, and I just watched the damned thing.
Just four more days. Just four more days...
Mommy's Dead - Mommy has a horrifyingly high mortality rate in these movies.
VERDICT: BAH HUMBUG
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| See, the address is 1225. Like Christmas. That's subtle for these movies. |
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