Christmas Solo
Jennifer the sexy vet (Kelli Williams) and her daughter Charlotte (Pippa Mackie) are new to the sleepy town of Brookfield after Jen's husband died a couple years ago. I'm not sure they told us how died, he could've been murdered for all we know, but the important thing is that he's dead. Across town we have Nate the Handy Man (Jonathan Scarfe) and his psychotic daughter Melissa (Kayla Wallace). We know Nate isn't married anymore because his ex-wife is a F'N WHORE! Apparently in the small town of Brookfield Nate's ex-wife slept with anybody not named Nate. This ex-wife has since moved to New York City where there are more men to sleep around with and her behavior is more accepted. Clearly Jennifer and Nate need to meet and fall in love. At Christmas. But their daughters will be a problem in this happening. Well, Melissa will be a problem with this happening because she psychotic.
Our heroes meet cute, trying to exchange tacky lawn reindeer and the love is almost instant, but back home Nate's daughter is throwing one of the 75-80 temper tantrums she will experience in this movie. Mainly that whore of a mother cancelled bringing Melissa to NYC for Christmas, for which Melissa blames Nate for some reason. Then there's the Annual Christmas Festival which is always opened by a soloist, and Melissa feels she's a lock, because she and her other other Mean Girl friends have terrorized everybody in the school into conceding this to her. Where as some schools are run by jocks, this high school is run by the Mean Girls of the Choir. Unfortunately Charlotte didn't get the memo which makes her the target of numerous brutal attacks at the hands of Melissa. Truly, this child needs the kind of help that 90 minutes of good will from a sappy Holiday movie simply can't fix. It will, we know this, but in reality there's no coming back from a lot of the things Melissa has done.
Now Charlotte is super sad and super miserable and doesn't want to sing anymore and misses her murdered father. Jennifer is also super upset at Nate because clearly a man who raises a psychotic daughter can't be too terribly okay his own self. Which is sound logic. Eventually Melissa goes too far which gets her a stern talking to by her dad, kicked off the choir, grounded and worst of all... her cell phone taken away. But Charlotte, who to be honest is lucky to be alive at this point because Melissa would've cut her brake line if Charlotte knew how to drive, has a solution which will fix everything. Everything! And thus years of therapy which will be needed by both of these young ladies is now avoided, and Nate can now enter into another relationship which we predict is also doomed because the critical question has yet to be asked... why did this ex-wife cheat on her husband and abandon her child? Women generally need a reason to do this... men, not so much.
For a movie rated TV-G, Christmas Solo sure has a lot of adult content. Cheating wives, hyper Cyber Bullying, a dude singing while playing acoustic guitar... which is something we simply just don't think kids should be exposed to, unless that dude singing is named is James Taylor. Also, our filmmakers might've wanted make the character of Melissa just a little more sympathetic. I kid you not, this kid is straight up nuts. If this were a Lifetime movie, with their oddly descriptive movie titles, the title of this film would be called 'My Christmas Psychopathic Daughter'. Gotta throw Christmas in there to maintain the holiday spirit. Thus a lot of your enjoyment of this movie, me thinks, is how much of Melissa's behavior you can deal with. I was pretty much through with her maybe twenty minutes in, but your tolerance may be greater than mine. And since we were forced to split time between the business of Charlotte and the Psycho, also a decent title, the romance between Jennifer and Nate didn't get the attention it deserved, which is too bad because that looked to be the most interesting part of this movie, not that this stopped them from making out at the end.
The vomit worthy Christmas elements were fair to middling. It had a fairly solid Christmas theme, but it was a tenuous one because while the movie is about singing a Christmas Solo, it's hard to maintain a consistent Christmas vibe with a virtual psycho running around terrorizing everybody. Still, the background sound track was generically Christmassy, Christmas ornaments adorned everything, there was hot coco drinking in the cold, no cookie baking but gingerbread man eating and coco dipping which is near equivalent. But there were no cute kids, teenagers certainly do not count, nor were there any wise old people. In fact I don't remember even seeing an old person in this movie. What's up with that, city of Brookfield?
Truth be told the entirety of 'Christmas Solo' is fair to middling. It's not terrible enough nor good enough to be all that memorable, with the exception, of course, of the Melissa the Psycho, and I'm pretty sure that's not how this movie wants to be remembered.
Hilarious Review!
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