Schlock-Mas: Day Six

CHRISTMAS AT GRACELAND

A Chicago-based business executive travels to Memphis to secure one of the city's oldest family-owned banks. While in Memphis, Laurel reunites with an old flame Clay, a local music promoter with loftier aspirations.

Kellie Pickler, AKA "that dumb lady who reached sixth place on the fifth season of American Idol", is acting now, I guess. And don't jump on my ass about calling her dumb. Her rough-hewn, "simple" personality was part of why so many people came to like her on that damned show in the first place. She came across as more relatable and approachable than a lot of the other contestants, just a small town girl trying to make her big dreams come true. She isn't exactly the sharpest tool in the shed, and you all know it.

Oh Christ, this fucking spellcheck software is trying to tell me that "relatable" isn't a fucking word right now and I just want to pick up my computer and throw it out the goddamned window. Where do you get off telling me that "relatable" isn't a word? You've got a lot of nerve, spellcheck. How do you not recognize "relatable"? It's not some obscure word I plucked out of a dusty old thesaurus because I wanted to sound smart. I used "relatable" because it's a relatable word. Everybody knows the fucking word. Right now, there's a sea of little red squiggly lines on my screen because I'm using the word "relatable" so much, and I'm resisting the urge to ball up my hands into fists and just start punching my keyboard until it explodes into a shower of plastic and rage.

Is that relatable?

Probably not.

So anyway, Kellie Pickler's an idiot, and now she's starring in Hallmark Channel original movies, starting with Christmas At Graceland, which was made with the full cooperation of the estate of Elvis Presley, allowing the production to film at Graceland and even lending a few of Elvis's better-known Christmas hits to include in the movie. None of this does anything to improve the overall quality of the movie, however. The story follows Pickler, who lives in Chicago but was born and raised in good old Memphis, Tennessee, when her dickhead boss at the company she works for, one of those businesses that seemingly exists only to consume other, smaller businesses, dispatches her to The King's old stompin' grounds to negotiate the sale of a well-known bank, and the journey serves as a homecoming for the wayward daughter as she reconnects with old friends and then abandons her adorable daughter Billy with them so she can go out on dates with her old boyfriend, whose name I have forgotten.

The flavor text at the top of the post informs me that his name is Clay, which is probably why I kept wanting to call him Gumby. Or maybe I just wanted to call him Gumby because he has a similar-shaped head.

Anyway, Gumby's organizing the big annual Graceland Christmas Concert, and blah, blah, blah... If this movie spent half the time it spent sucking Elvis Presley's rotting cock as it did developing its fucking story, maybe I would have something nicer to say about it. But I don't because the movie is a complete mess.

Everybody at Graceland and the adjoining hotel is so insufferably kind to Kellie Pickler and her daughter that it just makes me sick. Nobody in the service industry is that fucking nice, I don't care where you work. You want to erect a Christmas Tree in your room? No problem! The more the merrier! Have a box of complimentary cookies, hand crafted just for you by our friendly kitchen elves! Elvis-shaped mints on the pillows! Solid-gold toilets, so you can shit yourself to death in style, just like Jesus would have wanted!

Kellie and Gumby, who looks like one of those weasels from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, only in live action, used to sing together when they were younglings, and he eventually convinces her to join him onstage at the big concert he's organizing for Graceland's Christmas celebrations, and they rehearse so often I wanted to drive knitting needles through my ears by the seventh time I heard this country songbird warble the opening bars to "Silent Night" while her greasy paramour leered at her from behind a piano.

There's a bunch of cutesy bullshit involving the two old lovers reconnecting at ice skating rinks, and at parks, and in diners, and in front of Graceland itself, all decorated in its seasonal finery, and none of it feels real. These two actors have absolutely zero romantic chemistry. And Kellie Pickler is absolutely one of the single worst actors I've ever seen, even for a Hallmark Channel movie. Every single "acting" choice she makes for her role is wrong, mostly because she obviously can't act. At all. Her large eyes are so alarmingly empty in her every scene, conveying no emotion whatsoever, and she delivers her lines in a stiff and mechanical manner, as though she were still learning them during the scene.

She has no idea where to place inflection or emphasis as she speaks, so all of her dialogue is delivered consistently off-kilter and without rhythm, which works like gangbusters if you're Bela Lugosi playing an un-dead Transylvanian madman in 1931's Dracula and learning all your dialogue phonetically because you can barely speak or understand the English language, but not if you're North Carolina-born and native English speaking Kellie Pickler playing ostensibly an average human being in a Hallmark movie made in 2018. She never, not for one moment, believably portrays her character in this movie, and it is a truly astounding thing to behold, a veritable master class in how to make every single wrong choice as an actor. This is a performance Tommy Wiseau would trim from The Room for being too unrealistic. And she's the lead, so this movie was doomed from Jump Street.

I don't want to give the impression that I hate Kellie Pickler, because I don't. I generally don't mind her music. As far as pop country goes, it's really not bad at all. But she shouldn't act. She really, really shouldn't act. So this means she'll probably be in a dozen more of these damned productions, joining the likes of Candace Cameron-Bure, Danica McKellar and Lori Loughlin as a staple of Hallmark Channel original movies for years to come.

In the end, Kellie Pickler sandbags her company's acquisition of the bank in Memphis because she'd rather just move back to her childhood home and make mutant babies with her polecat boyfriend, so the kindly owner of the bank she just saved offers her a job on Christmas Eve, which she gladly accepts when he informs her that all of his employees are dismissed promptly at 5 PM, so they don't miss any quality time with their families, and that's what's really important, after all.

Who cares if you're making half of the salary you pulled down back in Chicago, because now you get to hang out with your family more often. Some parents actually don't have a fucking choice in this matter, and work their fingers to the bone to give their families the lives they deserve, but I'm sure glad Kellie Pickler can afford to take that financial hit and move out of the big city to spend more time with her daughter in the small town of Memphis, Tennessee, with the 42nd largest metropolitan area in the United States. That may not be as big as Chicago, but Memphis is not some podunk town out where the buses don't run. It's a full-fledged fucking city with a rich and varied history, but Christmas At Graceland treats it like quaint little Anytown, U.S.A., where nobody locks their doors and everybody knows your name.

Whatever. It's not worth getting upset over. I'm done wasting my time talking about this festering shit heap of a movie. I want to say that I don't believe I could possibly see a movie this year that I could hate more than Christmas At Graceland, but the month has only just begun, and there are plenty of opportunities left for some disreputable fiend of a movie to limbo under this particular bar.

Assistant Chef Jen - Kellie Pickler's boss is just a one-dimensional asshole who only ever barks at his subordinate for not being obedient enough for his liking, so fuck this guy.

Christmas In July! - Christmas At Graceland was actually shot in July in Memphis, Tennessee, and boy, does it show. Interns just sprayed white shit all over everything they could reach, and what they couldn't reach the camera operators barely bothered to keep out of frame. Half of the time, the actors weren't even wearing seasonally appropriate clothing because the working conditions were already unspeakably hot and I don't think the production wanted any members of their cast passing out due to heat exhaustion because they were wearing heavy coats and scarves in triple digit temperatures.

Small Town Salvation - Memphis is not even in the ballpark of a "small town", but this movie sure treats it like one, with our heroine once again succumbing to its hillbilly appeal after many years away in Chicago. But that's okay, because even though Memphis isn't a big, fancy city, it's filled with normal people who are down to earth and still understand what's really important in life, not like those out of touch fools who dwell in Chicago, who live only for the accumulation of wealth and engage in premarital sex and wear leather gloves instead of woolen mittens when it's cold outside.

VERDICT: CHRISTMAS HAS LEFT THE BUILDING