Christmas on Wheels


 Christmas on Wheels (2020) - Lifetime

So Ashley, as played by the blindingly beautiful Tiya Sircar, is some kind of antique collector maybe?  I’m not sure.  Anyway, she’s at an auction and has her eye on a Christmas bell, which we she will be outbid on by the jerky lawyer Duncan (Michael Xavier).  Doesn’t matter because eventually they will fall in love and she’s gonna get that bell back without spending a dime.  Spoiler alert.

Ashley then has received word that her uncle Tony (Randy Thomas) has cracked his ankle and lady he’s shacking with could use some help around the house.  Ashley has been avoiding small town snowyville ever since her mom died a few years back, but waddayagonnado?  Family.

Upon arriving at her uncle home, Ashely is in for a couple of surprises.  One would be Duncan the jerky lawyer is there, because he’s her uncle’s lawyer.  What a coincidence.  Second is that her uncle has sold her mom’s classic Cadillac.  I mean he straight up asked her, back in the day, if she wanted it and she said no, but she’s still a little upset.   The thing that’s special about this drop top Caddy is that her mom used it to give gifts to the less fortunate every Christmas, and while Ashley understands she won’t get the car back, she would like to see it one last time for old time’s sake.  Duncan, being a dude who specializes in finding stuff, I think, promises to help, so these two kids travel up and down the freeway looking for a red Caddy.  Note that Duncan insisted they take his car because Ashley drives a Mini and there’s nothing Mini about Duncan.  Homeboy is like 5’9” and might weigh 170.  He would fit comfortably in the back seat of that car just fine.

Eventually they find the car, and Ashley is even gifted this car though it won’t start and could use a some TLC, which Ashley and Duncan give it, car cleaning montage style, but is still won’t start… until Duncan gets in.  The car is magic.  Or… possessed by the Devil.  Your choice. But since we’ve found the car, what is the rest of this movie about?  Restoring Christmas spirit to Snowyville, re-starting mom’s Christmas Caddy Gift Drop and reminding Ashley about what’s important. That being love.  At Christmas.

So one of the things I point that usually makes or breaks these Christmas Romance movies, recognizing most everything else is generally paint by numbers, is the chemistry between our two leads.  It’s not that Tiya Sircar and Michael Xavier don’t have chemistry together, they actually seem to get along fine… as friends.  I did mention earlier that in my opinion Tiya Sircar is of one the loveliest women on God’s Green Earth, and Michael Xavier is plenty handsome and charming, and they spent a lot of time together in this movie saying words back and forth to each other, but I just wasn’t feeling the romance!  I can see them having a beer, but I just can’t see them doing the other stuff.   And despite Ashley’s impassioned love speech at the end, they didn’t even kiss!  They just danced in the snow, like friends would do.  I mean I wouldn’t dance in the snow with any of my friends, but we’re weird like that.  

Otherwise most of the prerequisite boxes were checked.  Cookie baking, tree shopping and decorating, cocoa drinking, lots of canned Christmas music playing, I vaguely remember seeing some mistletoe but I don’t recall any snowball fights or snowman building.  Which might’ve been another problem with this little Holiday Romance movie, in that was also sort of inert.  Obviously most of these movies tend to blend together, but I literally saw it just yesterday and memories of it are already fading fast.  Unfortunately Tiya Sircar being super good looking can only carry a movie so far it turns out.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Wrong Teacher

Image
The Wrong Teacher All right then!  Got the most of the original Wrong crew back together again with Jessica Morris, Jason-Shane Scott, Eric Roberts, Dominique Swain and of course Ms. Vivica A. Fox in The Wrong Teacher.  Which is more The Wrong Student, but since we've used that one already, The Wrong Teacher it is.  Not that the title is completely off base because Charlotte (Morris), as an educator, isn't great. Our film opens with a woman (Swain) walking around her dark house in her lingerie, probably should put on a night gown or something, because she hears sounds.  Then she starts getting demanding texts from someone who she was obviously kicking it with, whom she wishes to kick with no more.  This person doesn't agree to this.  The woman walks around with her phone, hearing more sounds in her home because somebody's obviously in there, and I'm thinking this would be a good time to use the phones Dial Out feature to call the police, but it's not like s...
Read more

A Christmas Cookie Catastrophe

Image
  A Christmas Cookie Catastrophe (2022) - Hallmark Reviewed by Lisa Sue So the opening 10 minutes of this movie are promising. I came because of the word catastrophe in the title, but I stayed to learn who stole Grandma’s cookie recipe. I mean what Grinch of a person would do such a thing? Let me give you the set up.   Anne is a career focused MBA grad from the big city who’s just been handed the CEO role of her grandma’s cookie company, Cooper’s. Things aren’t great at Cooper’s, and Anne has been making the hard decisions like canceling the annual Cooper Christmas Light Up because they just don’t have the money, and Anne isn’t going to let Cooper’s go bankrupt, not on her watch. The day after the company holiday shin dig (which apparently wasn’t cut for budgetary reasons), Anne notices that Grandma’s cookie recipe, which had been prominently displayed without security, had been taken! The quick thinking assistant Jillian suggests they call the cops to investigate, but Anne pu...
Read more

The Wrong Cheerleader

Image
The Wrong Cheerleader Thirteen movies in I think we've kind of figured out what the Wrong Series wants to do, though I do miss the early Wrongs which featured some kind of cockamamie plan behind the psychosis.  Now the Wrong movies usually feature some unstable person, at varying levels of instability, trying to force somebody to love them via The Crazy, occasionally with a social issue buried within the almost always fractured narrative.  Today the social issue is domestic abuse, which I will say the creators did a much better job of handling than when they attempted to tackle sexual assault in 'The Wrong Friend'. Our film starts with a girl lounging by the pool at her home, minding her own business, while being observed by the ultimate representation of evil in a Wrong movie, a guy in a black hoodie.  The girl eventually retreats into her home when she hears some sounds, and like every movie ever made, she yells out 'Hello?  Is anybody there?' and like every movie...
Read more