Christmas Unwrapped
It’s a new Christmas season, in the year of 2020 which
is the worst year of most of our lives, and while my plan was to watch and mock
Romantic Christmas movies all year round, I’ve been running for my life from Maskless Zombies with Rights trying to cough on me since about April. It’s been touch and go, and they are still
looking for me, but we got Christmas Movies to talk about dangit! And we are going to start this season with
Lifetime’s Christmas Unwrapped.
Charity (Amber Stevens West) is career driven,
Christmas ambivalent reporter for what I am guessing is the fictional
equivalent of the New York Post. While
heading to this job with her bestie and roomie Tisha (Cherion Drakes), she runs
into the dashingly handsome, perpetually grinning Erik Gallagher (Marco
Grazzini). Erik is unflinchingly
charming, hitting this girl with all his best stuff but alas to no avail.
No worries though as fate will intervene in the form
Charity’s boss Janet (Cheryl Ladd) who’s awarding Charity this years plum
Christmas story, that being blowing the lid off of Erik’s charity. You see Erik gives away millions of dollars
in gifts every year at Christmas, beginning with his 12 Events of Christmas
extravaganza, but has no corporate sponsorship.
Something’s not right up there and Charity is gonna get to the bottom of
this charity.
Erik agrees to the interviews, as long as Charity participates
in all 12 days of the events, which of course she’d rather not do, but she has
a story to do. But then strange things
start happening. The more time Charity
spends with Erik, the more Christmas magic she sees, and every time she asks
Erik how it happened, he just said it was Santa Claus, sounding like some kind
of whackjob. Eventually, despite the
fact Erik is clearly unbalanced, love is starting to blossom My man even goes in hard for that first kiss,
but it’s not a near miss… but an outright REJECTION! Charity saying some rigmarole about ‘being professional’.
But by now Charity realizes that Erik is just good
people and there is no shenanigans behind what he’s doing and is going to write
a feel good story about the dude, but unfortunately early in the process
Charity set some things in motion which led to some other things, which led her
shrew of a boss rewriting her story and filling it with negativity, while still
putting Charity’s name on it for some reason, which I don’t think would really
happen, and now the man with the perpetual grin ain’t grinning no more. And where
love was growing, it is now wilting in the bitter New York cold. That is until true love finds a way through
magic, Santa, and just because.
So as you all know, there will be well over a 100 of
these movies this year spread out between Lifetime, Netflix, Hallmark, Ion,
Own, TVOne, BET and whoever else I might’ve left off the list, and all of these
movies, more or less, will be exactly the same.
We all know this It's kind of why we watch them. With that in
mind, when judging these movies we just need to know a few things, such as do
our two main characters have any chemistry leading us to believe they would
actually date? Well yes they do. Amber Stevens West, who we have seen in many
a failed Sitcom… Happy Together was great, even if I was apparently the only
one watching it… and she's beautiful and funny and charming, and the same can be
said about Marco Grazzini.
Also important is how tightly does this movie adhere
to standards that we expect to see in our romantic Christmas movie. They were skating the line with this one a
bit. For instance, no cookie baking, but gingerbread man cookie eating. No Christmas Tree
Shopping scene, but a Christmas Tree giveaway?
We did have caroling, hot cocoa drinking, ice skating, tree decorating, canned
Christmas music and Erik being an Orphan
Kid was a big plus because I’m all about orphan kids. But we did not get our snowball fight or
build a snowman or mistletoe even. We had our
near miss kiss, kind of, we had our break-up, as I have explained before we
have the Hard break up which is usually based on some kind of deception, then
the Soft breakup which is based on a simple misunderstanding, and this one was
actually both, with the typical ‘I have to tell you something’, which of course
she never gets the chance to tell so he can find out through a third party and
act all pissy about it when he finds out. Mind you she had plenty
of time to tell him this thing, but where’s the drama in that? But it does stick to convention, which in normal
movies we generally don’t like, but in these movie we kind of demand it. We were a little concerned because, at least
in the past, one of the few roles women of color got in these movies was the
Best Friend, but with Amber Stevens West as the lead and already being a woman of color, I
thought some sister might’ve lost out on a best friend gig. But no!
Congratulations Cherion Drakes for keeping the tradition going and
looking fabulous while doing it.
So if you like these kind of these movie, I think I
can safely say that ‘Christmas Unwrapped’ will give you most of what you should
be looking for. And if you don’t like
these kinds of movies… Come on now.
Comments
Post a Comment