CHRISTMAS JOY
Joy Holbrook returns home to help her aunt pull off a winning cookie crawl.
There's this lady named Joy (Danielle Panabaker) who works at a market research firm in Washington, D.C., and she's a real workaholic, never taking any vacation or sick days, because she apparently just loves market research so much that her coworkers think she might be a little deranged. Her current big client is the beloved Weatherton's Department Store in D.C., which is run by a kindly, old-fashioned lady who prefers things the way they were to the way they currently are, what with all of this newfangled online shopping and whatnot. Joy fervently agrees, relaying to old Mrs. Weatherton stories of visiting her favorite department store as a child at Christmastime and all of the warm, nostalgic feelings that a walk through the festively decorated aisles of the Beltway shopping institution stir up at this time of year.
Joy can't wait to attend this year's big company Christmas gala in D.C., and she even has the perfect dress for the occasion that she can't wait to show off in front of all of her jealous friends, but Satan throws a monkey wrench in her plans when Joy's Aunt Bilbo falls off a ladder and breaks her ass in Crystal Falls, North Carolina, requiring the beleaguered market research wonk to travel back to her hometown to check up on the old lady who took Joy in and raised her right after her parents kicked the bucket when Joy was just a simple child.
Arriving at Crystal Falls's hospital late at night, Joy is surprised to find that she hasn't missed visiting hours, since apparently in small towns hospitals don't have set visiting hours and people can just come and go as they please, which sounds less like small town hospitality and more like plain anarchy to me, but I'm sure everything's fine. There's never any security presence in the hospital either, so I'm also sure that prescription medications never just disappear from the pharmacy all the time, either. Nobody wonders where are all the Fentanyl has gone. Because they all know.
It's at the hospital that Joy meets Ben Andrews (Matt Long), Christmas-obsessed hospital administrator and perhaps the single most vapid and unappealing romantic foil I've ever found in a Hallmark Channel original movie, and I've unfortunately seen more than my share. Matt Long's the kind of actor that looks great on paper for a movie like this, with a perfectly adequate, almost entirely symmetrical face that will never land him on the cover of US Weekly but will keep him busy with shallow television roles until he finally throws in the towel and goes back to selling used Toyotas at the car lot his old man owns in Snoqualmie, Washington or wherever. His line delivery is sufficient, never approaching a stilted monotone and often nearly approximating something close to actual human speech patterns.
The problem lies in the fact that the man has absolutely no screen presence or charisma to speak of. Whenever his character is onscreen, he just sort of fades into the background, even when he's meant to be the focal point of a given scene, and that's just disastrous. He has a bland, mannequin-esque smile affixed to his face and he recites the script's banal dialogue like any competent professional, but his eyes are so flat, unfocused and non-expressive, like they're just painted on his boring face, and it's so bizarre to see this unusual trait in action. I've never seen an actor performing in such a detached, under-baked manner, as though his entire performance was filmed alone in front of a green screen, and the producers just added him to every scene in which he was featured during the post-production process.
I don't know how to adequately describe Matt Long's performance in Christmas Joy. I'm at a loss for words. This man is the personification of white noise.
And Danielle Panabaker really isn't that much better, if I'm being honest. I generally enjoy her work, but she's not what you would ever call a versatile actor. Panabaker has two default expressions: endearing crooked smile and wide-eyed open-mouth pout, and you see them in almost every single scene of Christmas Joy, no matter what the context. She brings out that pout when she's confused, when she's sad, when she's shocked, when she's thinking about cookies, when she's thinking about Christmas, and whenever she thinks about her dead parents, which is more often than you might think. And she's basically tossing out that crooked smile whenever she's not pouting, so you see it a lot.
Looking through a series of screenshots I took while watching the film, I was actually startled to see the two same expressions on Panabaker's face in almost every shot. It was bizarre, because I didn't exactly consciously notice it while watching the movie, only coming away with a vague sense of unease, as though I were missing something obvious that I just couldn't quite articulate. And while scrolling through the pictures, it hit me like a lightning bolt, because in still frames Panabaker looked more like a wax figure with a permanent expression stuck on her face than a real human being. She's a fine actor, I guess, but she really needs to look at herself in the mirror when she rehearses from time to time. Do some facial exercises to loosen up a little bit, would ya?
So there's a cookie crawl in the movie, and Aunt Bilbo is the fucking queen of the cookie crawl, but since she tore her asshole apart falling from a two-foot ladder while trying to reach some Christmas decorations in her garage, she will be unable to participate this year. So Aunt Bilbo guilts her wayward niece Joy into taking her place in the big event, but Joy doesn't know how to bake! Oh no! Luckily, that empty-faced mutant Ben is willing to help out, because he secretly wants to munch on Joy's Christmas cookies, if you know what I mean.
I literally mean he just wants to munch on some Christmas cookies that Joy bakes, because nobody in these movies has functioning human genitalia. Underneath their festive holiday sweaters, the characters in Hallmark Channel movies are about as anatomically accurate as your average Barbie doll. But at least you can mash your Barbies together and pretend that they're performing sinful acts when your mother isn't watching. For these sexless freaks, "third base" is sipping hot cocoa together in front of a roaring fireplace while still wearing their winter coats and knit caps. And a "home run" is a chaste dance at a Christmas-themed party, making sure to leave just enough room between them both for the Holy Spirit to cut in, should the Holy Spirit feel so inclined, which the Holy Spirit never does, because the Holy Spirit doesn't exist.
Don't you just love cookies? Excuse me, Christmas cookies. They're always Christmas cookies, cut in festive shapes like trees or elves or throbbing cocks. A never-ending parade of fucking Christmas cookies, movie after movie, day after day. Hallmark has transformed the simple act of baking fucking cookies into a serious holiday courtship ritual. I can't count how many times I've seen a Christmas cookie-making montage in these movies this year, but maybe I should have tried. That should have been one of my tropes. I feel like I've really missed an opportunity here. C'est la vie.
I forgot to mention that when Joy first visits her stupid Aunt Bilbo at the hospital she brings the clumsy old lady a copy of the brand-new issue of Southern Living magazine, which she holds at chest-height in order for Camera 2 to focus directly on the attractive cover, featuring a cake shaped like a Christmas present, for about ten solid seconds. This might be the single most egregious example of product placement I've ever seen in a Hallmark Channel product, and there have been plenty of contenders in the past. Wait, no, that's not true.
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| She's just standing there in the middle of the sidewalk like some gender-swapped knock-off holiday Jason Voorhees. |
I distinctly remember a scene in an episode of Cedar Cove where Dylan Neal's character prepares breakfast for himself and his ne'er do well son, and when the son comments on how delicious breakfast is this morning, Dylan Neal tells him that breakfast was a snap to prepare thanks to whatever current product Jimmy Dean was trying to foist on Hallmark Channel's impressionable key demographic that month. The scene kept the bright red packaging in the foreground of the shot the entire time, just dominating the frame. That was the most shameful example of product placement I've ever seen in my life.
But this Southern Living bullshit might be a close second. Sure, I've noticed most of the films I've watched thus far this year prominently feature the Balsam Hill © logo on a box or two that are not-so-tastefully framed to draw your eye directly to them, but those are fleeting shots that don't really affect the overall narrative. This single shot of Danielle Panabaker showcasing an issue of Southern Living like a paid spokesmodel stops the entire movie dead for over ten seconds. The characters continue to talk over this shot while it drags on, but I didn't hear a word they were saying, because I was too busy feeling the blood begin to boil in my veins.
And what really pisses me off is that during the next scene, when Joy goes to her Aunt Bilbo's house after the hospital visit to make herself at home (since she's staying at the house while Bilbo convalesces), there's a cake in the kitchen that looks exactly like the cake on the cover of the Southern Living issue, implying that Aunt Bilbo already had that fucking issue before the accident and actually baked the cake she saw on the cover before she fell off a ladder and shattered her asshole into a thousand pieces, so Joy just wasted her time and money buying this magazine for the old crone, who was too polite to tell her niece that she already had that particular issue at the hospital, since Aunt Bilbo probably has a fucking subscription to Southern Living because she lives in North Carolina and it's probably against the law not to have a subscription to Southern Living if you're a woman over forty living south of the Mason-Dixon line, and Joy would already know that if she ever bothered to come home before now.
There's a bunch of shit that happens between the first ten minutes and the last ten minutes of Christmas Joy, but absolutely none of it is of any consequence, I assure you. There's a lot of baking scenes, people drinking hot chocolate, fake snow galore, a few scenes of Joy and Ben or Bill or whatever his name is walking down Main Street talking about nonsense, and some other crap that my brain has already thankfully purged from my memory.
The cookie crawl happens, but by this point the movie just sort of shrugs and forgets about it, since we only see a handful of people eating cookies and chatting benignly in Aunt Bilbo's home while Joy and Biff look longingly at one another's empty eyes. I honestly can't remember if this cookie crawl scene takes place before or after Joy returns to D.C. to attend the big Christmas gala where she quits her job because she wants to go back to Crystal Dick and move in with her worthless Aunt Bilbo full-time. After she announces she's moving the fuck out of our nation's capital, she makes a toast with her work friend Sin Nombre, just as Benny arrives at the party to tell Joy how he feels about her, after being encouraged to follow his heart by his chubby papa during a father/son pep talk that for some reason took place in the middle of the woods.
Benny sees Joy having so much fun laughing it up with her anonymous friend at this fancy schmancy party and, after being mistaken for a member of the waitstaff by a guest (since he's coincidentally wearing the exact same tuxedo all of the waiters are also wearing), he storms out of the gala, climbing into his pick-up truck and driving back to Crystal's Balls to go drink his weight in egg nog and die of exposure in the woods. It's the same fucking trick that completely derailed Pride, Prejudice & Mistletoe for me twelve days ago, and I almost actually liked that movie before it decided to shit its pants during its third act.
If it's at all possible, the climactic misunderstanding in Christmas Joy feels even more forced and unnecessary because Bork doesn't even see Joy laughing it up with another man at the party. He just sees her smiling while talking to her only friend in the world for ten seconds and decides that he's not welcome in her big-city world and pouts all the way back to his rural home in his trusty pick-up truck, the beginnings of a clichéd country song coming to life before my very eyes. Then Joy comes back to Crystal Fuck to spend Christmas with her Aunt Bilbo and Bimmy realizes he was a huge idiot who jumped to conclusions and they get together and kiss and problem solved, I guess.
Then old lady Weathertop shows up at the big cookie crawl (I guess the cookie crawl does take place after the Christmas gala) to tell Joy that she's decided to end her association with the marketing research firm in D.C., choosing to open her own internal market research department that will be stationed in nearby Charlotte, and she'd just love Joy to run the new department for her, since they're such good friends after sharing one banal conversation at the beginning of the movie, and I hate Christmas Joy with a burning passion because it might be one of the single most boring experiences of my miserable life.
Being boring is the worst sin a movie can commit, and Christmas Joy is just so effortlessly lifeless and uninteresting that I almost can't believe it actually exists. It has all the same elements that are included in so many other, better movies on the very same network, but instead of actually wasting any effort to do anything special with these elements, Christmas Joy just puts them all in a straight line and presents them to the viewer in the most superficial and disinterested manner I've ever witnessed. Is it a mere coincidence that Christmas Joy is based on a novel by Nancy Naigle, the harridan responsible for the source material behind the also appalling Hope At Christmas? I think not.
Christmas Joy feels like an off-brand facsimile of an actual Hallmark Channel original movie, which is a truly astounding feat to behold. There's absolutely no life, no vitality captured at any point between the movie's opening titles and closing credits. As a viewer, you would be better off just looking at any promotional image for Christmas Joy and making up the movie's plot in your head. I guarantee whatever dreck your brain cobbles together will be so much more satisfying than anything this movie has to offer.
Mommy's Dead - Joy's mommy and daddy died when she was a little kid, so she was raised by her baking-obsessed Aunt Bilbo on a farm with goats and stuff.
Small Town Salvation - We all know that's where the real heart of Christmas lies.
Third Act Shenanigans - FUCK YOU.
Christmas In July! - FUCK YOU, TOO.
VERDICT: WE EACH MAKE OUR OWN HELL
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