MY SANTA
A single mother falls for a mall Santa, and he reawakens her belief in the magic of Christmas.
Jen Robbins (Samaire Armstrong) has been raising her perfectly revolting son Billy all alone since her piece of shit husband left her shortly after the little rugrat was born. The bag of dicks just stormed out on his family one night in a fit of rage, spewing vitriol from his sneering face like it was going out of style. This pivotal moment in Jen's life is illustrated in a flashback that the movie honestly would have been better off without, because the guy who plays Jen's soon-to-be-ex-husband is just the drizzling shits. He spends his entire minute of screen time with his eyes bulging out of his sweaty face, belching insults and snarling at an emotionally devastated young woman in such a grotesque, over the top manner that I just couldn't take him at all seriously.
He's screaming at Jen that she trapped him in a loveless marriage by getting pregnant and how he hates her for wasting a year of his life and that since the baby has been born he feels he's put in his time and can now walk away guilt-free, and on his way out he accidentally knocks over a goofy-looking figurine that Jen's mother gave to her before she died, and it shatters into a thousand pieces on the hardwood floor, symbolizing Jen's very broken heart. As soon as the jerk realizes what he's done, knowing full well how Jen cherishes this irreplaceable object, he just tells her how ugly the figurine was and how he always hated it anyway, then he slams the door and fucks off out of Jen's life forever.
I understand the scene was included because the movie felt it necessary to show its audience just how badly Jen's ex fucked her up, which is why she has such a hard time giving her heart to kindly mall Santa Chris (Matthew Lawrence. Yeah, the guy from Boy Meets World) when it's clear these two were made for each other, but the scene is such a dramatic spike in terms of tone that it just blows up the whole fucking movie when it's dropped in the middle of the third act. It's so hard to watch this scene and not just break up laughing despite the subject matter, because the whole thing is played so broad that it's unintentionally hilarious. Did Jen's ex-husband have to be the most unbelievably hateful son of a bitch in the entire world in order for her heart to be so broken?
No. The answer is no.
Chris is Santa, Jr., by the way. Not Santa, Jr., but the son of Santa Claus, although I suppose he was also the son of Santa Claus. But My Santa is not Santa, Jr. No, My Santa is so much worse. It's also got a bit of The Santa Clause 2 thrown into the mix for good measure, since Chris is acting on a deadline, needing to find his future Mrs. Claus by midnight on Christmas Eve, otherwise he won't be able to take over for his old man, who's getting pretty tired of the "delivering toys to all the children of the world every year" bit and wants to retire. I'm not sure exactly why Chris is operating on a deadline to begin with, since it's not like Christmas is ruined forever if he doesn't find his lady love out there in the world of man before time runs out. No, Chris just won't get to become Santa. Somebody else will take over the role if he doesn't make it, although it's never explicitly stated whom that somebody else will be.
Does Chris have siblings? I don't know. Is there some sort of Santa Claus understudy waiting in the wings just in case Chris doesn't make the cut? I don't know. And why, exactly, does Chris have to find his bride now, and what would prevent him from just taking over for his pappy anyway if he doesn't find somebody who loves him and Christmas and doesn't think he's barking mad? I don't know. The movie never explains anything.
Chris spends his holiday seasons traveling the world with his assistant... or his friend... or maybe his supervisor... or lackey... Jack, who might be an elf, but I don't know for sure, because the movie never explains exactly what he's supposed to be. Anyway, these two confirmed bachelors travel all over every Christmas season, with Chris playing Santa Claus in various malls and Jack playing his elf assistant, which is funny, because at first glance you'd just assume Jack would be playing Santa and Chris would be playing the elf, since Jack is old and fat and Chris is young and skinny, but My Santa exists to confound your expectations at every turn.
Chris has been searching for the perfect woman to be his future captive bride, forced to spend the rest of her miserable life trapped in a magical sweatshop surrounded by immortal toy-making slaves, for years now, and he's just about out of time, for some reason. But he thinks he's finally found the one with Jen, who has hated Christmas ever since that bastard whatshisface took off and left her high and dry with a baby boy to raise on her own. She works for a newspaper in whatever town she lives in, but the movie never tells me what town this is supposed to be, only that it looks like the sort of place where summer never ends, judging from the lack of any traditional winter trappings in the various drab landscapes showcased poorly throughout the narrative.
Seriously, this is one of the ugliest Christmas movies I have ever seen. There is nothing at all visually attractive in any frame of My Santa. It's a never-ending parade of earth tones and pervasive sunshine that washes everything out in the frame, flattening every exterior shot and making everything look generally unappealing. Nobody was trying their best with My Santa, that much is clear. The lack of effort is readily apparent in every single scene.
Jen's son Billy wants a Max Merkin action figure for Christmas, which looks like the single most generic toy the production designer could come up with after buying a bunch of knock-off crap from their local dollar store, but this thing's supposed to be the big toy of the year, like it's Tickle-Me Elmo, or something. Do kids these days even know what Tickle-Me Elmo was? I remember the days when everybody's kids needed one of those giggling monstrosities in their lives, and the endless stress tracking down those ridiculous toys placed upon their parents as they grew more and more desperate while the calendar inched ever closer to Christmas Day.
I'm not sure exactly why, but I do remember my mother buying a Tickle-Me-Elmo for my grandmother back during the big holiday rush. She found one of them chilling out on a shelf at Kay-Bee Toys in the mall one day while we were out shopping, and she just bought it, surprised to find one in the wild in the middle of November. My grandmother wasn't a big Elmo fan or anything, and she also wasn't four years old, so my mother's reasoning for this remains unclear. But I do remember my grandmother laughing quite a bit when she tickled the crimson beast, watching it writhe and giggle in her hands, so I guess my mother knew what she was doing.
Jen can't find a Max Merkin in any store since she's waited too long to start looking, because she had no idea her son- who wears a Max Merkin shirt every single time he's onscreen and talks about him incessantly -was interested in this particular toy. She can't even find any reasonably priced Max Merkins on the internet using her preferred search engine, Gooble, so she's completely fucked. She's completely fucked regardless, because Samaire Armstrong is a terrible actor.
I thought Kellie Pickler was bad in Christmas At Graceland, but Samaire Armstrong just made Kellie Pickler look like, well... LeAnn Rimes with her performance in My Santa. Armstrong never once appears at ease in front of the camera, with her entire performance so stiff and mannered that it looks she was never able to get out of her own head and just play her role. This is the kind of portrayal you might expect from a first-time actor, but Samaire Armstrong has been acting since the year 2000, with a slew of roles in various television shows and the occasional minor spot in a cheap theatrical film like Not Another Teen Movie or Stay Alive. I've seen both of those movies, as well as several of the television series' in which she has appeared, and I can't remember a single one of her performances, so I can't compare her starring role in My Santa with anything else. She must not have been terribly memorable in any of those roles since I can't remember her at all, but good lord I will never forget what she's done in this movie.
Armstrong speaks like Alexa, that disembodied voice from Amazon that supplanted Siri, that disembodied voice from Apple that everybody thought was just the coolest thing for a month six years ago. Alexa draws from a reservoir of words on a server to string together sentences when you ask your Echo Dot a question, and the responses sound reasonably close to what a real human being might say, but there is often no emphasis placed on any particular word in a sentence spoken by Alexa, and the words are all pronounced phonetically, so some of the stuff Alexa says just doesn't sound exactly right to your ears.
The illusion of talking to a living, breathing person is shattered pretty quickly if you spend any time talking with Alexa, and Samaire Armstrong's performance in My Santa is essentially the same thing, only her mannerisms and facial expressions somehow match the unnatural cadence of her speech patterns, giving the impression that you're watching an advanced robot attempt to act for the first time in this movie. It's really, really bizarre to watch, but fascinating in a morbid way.
But I don't want to just single out Samaire Armstrong like she's the only reason My Santa is a worthless mess, because none of the actors are really all that good in the movie. Matthew Lawrence is fine for the most part, but he never really does anything to bring his role to life, just disappearing into an ill-fitting Santa Claus costume for half of his role and fading into the background when he's dressed normally during the other half. He has no charisma at all as an actor, which is kind of a problem when you're the romantic lead of a movie. But every other actor in My Santa sucks, too, so it doesn't really matter.
Except for Julie Brown. I really liked Julie Brown. She plays Jen's neighbor and best friend Suzie, the big-hearted older woman who is always there to babysit Billy or be Jen's shoulder to cry on when she's feeling blue, but really she just wants to get laid. I've been a fan of Julie Brown since I saw Earth Girls Are Easy when I was a kid. My impressionable mind was blown when I realized that not only did Julie Brown co-star in the movie, but she also co-wrote and produced the thing, and that it was her idea in the first place, the story based on a song of the same name that she recorded in 1984.
I've loved Julie Brown ever since, watching her in three seasons of Just Say Julie on MTV, her sketch comedy show The Edge on Fox, the mockumentary Medusa: Dare To Be Truthful, Comedy Central's Strip Mall, and more. I own her album Trapped In The Body Of A White Girl on vinyl, and I listen to it more than I care to admit. So I guess you could say I'm a fan.
Brown's role in My Santa is thankless, but she shines in her limited screen time, bringing a sense of life and humor to her scenes that are entirely absent elsewhere, and she makes it look easy, walking in circles around her befuddled co-stars whenever they share the screen. Julie Brown is the MVP of My Santa, and if I still used my old Slumming It trope from last year, she'd have definitely earned it here.
I don't really have anything else to say about My Santa, because it's a boring waste of time and I felt miserable the entire time I was watching it. Chris and Jen get together in the end and save Christmas or whatever after Chris uses his magic powers to materialize a Max Merkin doll and an identical figurine to the one Jen's mother once gave her under their Christmas Tree, and nobody cares. Suzie gets hooked up with Jen's co-worker at the newspaper, some empty-eyed doofus with a tight bod who writes the city's crime beat, so she's going to have a very happy new year, and good for her. That's it. Everything else sucks, because nobody wanted to expend any effort to bring this movie to life.
Another ninety-minute waste of space from Sam Irvin, the director who couldn't. Between Christmas Land, I'm Not Ready For Christmas, Naughty Or Nice and now My Santa, this guy has got to be on the run of a lifetime. But he did direct Elvira's Haunted Hills, which I sort of love, so I guess I can't hate the guy. I can hate My Santa, though. And I do. A lot.
Christmas Magic - Chris has magical Santa powers. It doesn't matter.
Secret Santa - Chris is the son of Santa, and he keeps it a secret.
Christmas In July! - Does it count if the movie never tries to disguise the fact that they're filming in a warm climate? I don't know, but I'm including this anyway, because fuck My Santa.
Little White Lies - Chris doesn't tell Jen that he's the spawn of Santa until after she falls in love with him, and when he starts rambling about how all the elves at the North Pole are gonna be so excited when he brings home his future wife after Christmas, she thinks the guy she loves is absolutely out of his mind and gets the fuck away from him as quickly as she possibly can.
Assistant Chef Jen - Jen's ex-husband is an unbelievable nightmare of a human being in his brief flashback, just an utter laughingstock of a performance.
Scrooged! - Jen hates Christmas and everything about it until Chris uses his creepy hypnotic powers to make her love Christmas again. That's literally what happens. He just stares at her with his soulless eyes until she stops hating Christmas. She stared into Chris's deadlights, lost herself in their dancing patterns, and now she floats. You'll float, too, if you watch My Santa.
#HallmarkSoWhite - There were no minority actors with speaking roles in this movie, but I guess this should be #UPTVSoWhite since I saw My Santa on UP TV. It's racist, either way.
VERDICT: NOT MY SANTA
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| In this instance, Elvira represents myself, and the rabbit represents My Santa. Do you get it? |
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