ROCKY MOUNTAIN CHRISTMAS
A woman heads to a ranch to cope with a recent breakup, only to meet an entitled Hollywood star.
So I watched this movie today called Rocky Mountain Christmas that the fine folks at Hallmark made last year for their annual 24/7 holiday marathon, and it stars Lindy Booth as a lady who makes stuff for people, or maybe for places with people in them, I'm not entirely sure. I do know that she lives in New York City, and there's a lot of talk in the first five minutes about how she's the best there is at whatever she does in the city, but I truly can't remember what all that actually was, so it must not have mattered too much. I think she worked in a fancy hotel. Maybe she was the manager. That doesn't sound right, though. The head chef? Nah, it's not coming back to me.
Lindy's big-shot tech giant boyfriend, some guy we never meet whose name I forget, apparently invented the Hallmark equivalent of Google; a search engine I called SwiftySearch, which I know has definitely popped up in several other Hallmark original movies that I've seen over the years, since the company is usually hesitant to use the genuine Google brand in their products. So instead of just using Google, Hallmark makes up dumb names for the made-up search engines the characters in their movies use when they're looking shit up on the internet, and I've seen names like LookItUp, U-Find-It, and my personal favorite, Search Engine.
But I do recall seeing SwiftySearch used before, and Rocky Mountain Christmas's lead character was actually dating the guy who invented that search engine, so do these movies really take place in some ever-expanding shared universe? I actually have never contemplated that possibility before this very moment. I suppose the off chance that there is some sort of Hallmark Cinematic Universe doesn't really change anything when you get right down to it. Probably the concept would just confuse things, since so many actors keep popping up in these movies playing completely different people each time they return, which would mean there are like twelve Danica McKellars and maybe twenty Lacey Chaberts wandering through this fictional universe, and a few of these doppelgangers are bound to run into one another eventually, and such an occurrence might cause the multiverse to collapse in on itself, utterly destroying the space-time continuum all because Winnie Cooper bumped into herself while Christmas shopping at Dougal's Department Store one snowy December evening.
Anyway, Lindy Booth's asshat boyfriend dumped her before Christmas, because he wanted to bump uglies with some supermodel since he's rich as fuck these days and can do whatever the hell he wants. So Lindy Booth is sad at Christmas, and that means there's only one thing left to do: fly back to her hometown of Hound's Tooth, Colorado to spend the holidays with her Uncle Treat Williams at his working ranch. So she, uh... she does that.
Lindy Booth's Uncle Treat Williams owns a working ranch in Colorado, where he used to live with his beloved wife Beemo, but she died earlier in the year and the whole thing's really bummed the poor guy out. Nowadays he mostly just sits on a bench outside in the cold and wears his sad cowboy hat, the black one with the crushed velvet lining, because he's still officially in mourning. It looks like the town of Hound's Tooth's annual Christmas parade (oh Christ, another Christmas parade?! That's two days in a row) won't be held this year, since Aunt Beemo was the only person in the entire community who was capable of planning this whole thing out, which doesn't make any sense to me, since the town itself consists of one fucking street and maybe eight quaint little brick buildings, so how difficult could planning one measly parade possibly be?
But the town of Hound's Tooth is in a bad mood this Christmas season because the only lady who could possibly organize a couple dozen yokels to march down a two-lane street for ten minutes while singing "Silent Night" died, so everybody's holiday season is screwed.
Luckily, Lindy Booth is back in town, and since she's got nothing much to do, she decides she's going to take over the Christmas parade from her late Aunt Beemo, and it all goes smoothly, and that's it. Everything works out just fine without any hitches of any sort. She plans everything out, even though we don't really see any of that stuff happening, then at the end of the movie, the parade goes on like it has every other year since Aunt Beemo took over the parade from her Aunt Beemo many years ago, and the Hound's Tooth tradition of underwhelming Christmas parades continues unabated.
Meanwhile, some movie star stud named Dirk Steele just shows up at the Uncle Treat Williams Ranch out of nowhere, telling everybody who will listen that he needs to pretend to be a ranch hand for a while because he's preparing for an upcoming role. Uncle Treat Williams agrees to let this asshole hang around for a few weeks, since he could use the help around the ranch, milking the cows and butchering the pigs and mending fences and shit like that. You might think that Dirk and Uncle Treat Williams would butt heads at first, since Dirk's a spoiled and incompetent Hollywood actor who has never had to really work a single day in his life, but no, he just does his work and gets along with everybody and that's it. No drama, no comedy, just a guy who does an honest day's work and makes a few new friends along the way, although we never really see any of that stuff happening.
I guess at some point Lindy Booth falls in love with Dirk Steele, but we never really see them fall in love over the course of the movie. They're just in love with each other around the halfway mark, but they can't act on their love because Dirk's on again/off again girlfriend from Hollywood has showed up in Hound's Tooth to cock block like nobody's business. Except she hasn't, not really. Instead of being an uptight actress who won't dare to perform any manual labor lest she spoil her fresh manicure, she just helps around the house for a few days and is generally nice to everybody she meets, never complaining about anything at all. She eventually tells Dirk Steele that she can see how in love with Lindy Booth he is, so she gracefully steps aside, flying back to Los Angeles all by herself so she doesn't get in between these two wannabe lovers. That's it.
That's it. Those two words basically describe everything that happens in Rocky Mountain Christmas. There is absolutely zero conflict in this movie. Any situation that would normally raise its head to generate conflict in a movie like this just doesn't, and it's painfully frustrating to watch. Dirk has one fish out water moment on the ranch, when he abruptly asks Lindy Booth if there's anyplace in Hound's Tooth where he can find a latte, and she just rolls her eyes and the story moves on. Nothing else happens. This guy just knows how to do ranch stuff, even though he came to the ranch to learn how to do ranch stuff, and we never see him do any ranch stuff at any point in this movie. He never acts like the "entitled Hollywood star" he supposedly is, which wouldn't be a bad thing if he ever acted like, well, anything else. He's just a nice guy who falls in love with Lindy Booth, and that's it.
And Lindy Booth is supposed to be a career-minded gal in New York City, but she never acts like she gives a shit about her career in this movie. The moment she learns that Uncle Treat Williams is planning to sell the ranch since he's an old man whose wife recently died and he's too worn out to keep running the damned place, Lindy Booth volunteers to take over the family business, and that's it. Fuck the life she built for herself in New York City, because now she gets to own and operate a ranch somewhere in Colorado that barely breaks even on a good year.
Lindy Booth's brother Zeke, who also works at the ranch, just mentions out of the blue in one scene that he thinks he'd like to work in Hollywood, maybe as a horse wrangler or a stuntman, then before Dirk's girlfriend leaves the ranch, she tells Zeke that she's made some calls and he's been hired sight-unseen to be her next film's assistant stunt coordinator, and he's going to go live his ridiculous dream out there in the City of Angels, and that's it. This dumb guy who is completely unqualified to be an assistant stunt coordinator, and doesn't even really know what an assistant stunt coordinator even is, is hired to be an assistant stunt coordinator for a major motion picture. He's handed his dream job, a dream job we only hear about a few minutes earlier in the movie, on a whim by a strange woman he doesn't know, just because.
There's no drama in this fucking movie, because everything just works out for these personality-free caricatures. Everybody's happy in the end, even though everybody was already happy in the beginning. The story pays lip service to all of these people being sad because Aunt Beemo died, but just saying "I'm sad" once before baking some Christmas cookies and having a flirtatious snowball fight with your future boyfriend isn't enough.
Treat Williams is the only person in this movie who feels even remotely like a real person, because he actually seems a little broken up about the fact that his beloved wife just kicked the fucking bucket. But even he can only do so much with such thin material, and by the half-hour mark he's been consumed by the mediocrity, sitting with Lindy Booth in the living room of his house, spouting some ridiculous "hang in there" bullshit about there always being sunshine after a storm like some rustic good ole' boy self-help guru while sipping egg nog in front of a festively decorated fir tree.
The plot of Rocky Mountain Christmas doesn't unfold; it just spreads like a stain until it reaches the margins of your television screen and threatens to spill out into the real world and destroy everything good and pure in your life with its suffocating genial miasma. There's nothing to recommend here because it's all terrible, every last minute of it. The movie looks shiny and inviting, but that seemingly harmless façade hides a disfigured horror, like the ruined face of Mr. Sardonicus, hidden behind his blank, expressionless mask. I hated watching this movie. At first, it seemed to be on par with most of the other movies I've watched so far this month, maybe a little better, maybe a little worse, but generally right down the middle. But as the story stretched on, a powerful distaste began to settle in the the pit of my stomach as I realized this movie had absolutely nothing to offer me as a viewer.
Rocky Mountain Christmas doesn't try to accomplish anything at all in its ninety-odd minute runtime. It just sits on the screen and gazes out at you, daring you to attempt to engage with its malodorous, rotting carcass of a plot as it slowly drains you of your will to live, like some kind of hideous parasite, a corpulent leech wearing a bloodstained Santa Claus costume.
Mommy's Dead - I guess Dirk Steele's parents died when he was young, and that was surely a real bummer for the poor fella.
Small Town Salvation - At the end of the movie, Lindy Booth decided to stay in Hound's Tooth, Colorado to run her family ranch after she fell in love with all of the rural bullshit, and Dirk Steele told his successful Hollywood career to go straight to hell since he's all about banging sheep in the mountains now and he's staying with his new girlfriend at El Rancho Fuck You.
VERDICT: THAT'S IT
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