A Christmas Miracle
Let's begin this chat by begging for money. Why? Because I see other people doing it. Admittedly, running this blog costs me ZERO actual dollars and though my time is worth something, I'm not doing anything that I don't want to do. Unlike my actual job where I do something I don't want to do all day long, so they absolutely have to pay me. What are the benefits to giving me a 'donation'? For you... nothing. No T-shirts, no coffee mugs, no tote bags... nothing. For me? I get to put money in my pocket! Which is very important to me. Money that I will quickly turn around, take to Costco and buy discount Kirkland brand liquor. If that's not a worthy cause I don't know what is. Please give today!
Anyway, Emma (Tia Mowry) is a single mom to the adorable Tyler (Gabriel Jacob-Cross) who has just moved to the Big City and is working a temp gig as an assistant at some magazine. Emma has a journalism degree and hopes to be creating hard hitting stories very soon. Tyler has a dad somewhere out there, a dad who is slightly mentioned as having a very good job involving international travel and whatnot, but he's clearly a terrible person, for as in no point in this movie, during Christmas, did he attempt to contact his five year old son.
Emma's job involves getting her boss Valerie (Kendall Cross) coffee and stuff, and observing Valerie brow beat everybody at this joint, especially poor Marcus the photographer (Brooks Darnell). The eternally optimistic and sunny Emma attempts to make Marcus feel better with cookies and stuff but he's kind of a downer this guy.
This is an important time for this magazine because they need a splash cover story for their magazine and Emma, in her attempts to get a reporter job, floats an idea about a real Christmas Miracle to Boss Valerie who claims she was going to take this idea to her big boss, but alas informs Emma it was shut down. That B was lying. She totally stole Emma's idea and presented it as her own which made the eternally chipper Emma a little less chipper, but did help bring her closer to Marcus as they became fast victimized friends. In fact Marcus gives Emma the idea of just doing her story anyway. Find a Miracle, write about it, and then present it to the big boss. They just need a miracle story. And without fail, the bosses at these fictional publications in these Romantic Holiday movies are all universally terrible for some reason, and constantly steal stories.
A miracle story does present itself in street piano player Santa Dean (Barry Bostwick) who plays Christmas songs on his electric and gives the money that people give him in tips to the needy, but you know... that's not really important. What's important is that Marcus, who is recovering from a broken heart, and Emma, who has a deadbeat ex-husband out there somewhere, are spending time together. Taking pictures, long walks, eating dinner, eating cookies, drinking cocoa, decorating trees, hating Boss Valerie, singing Christmas Carols... the works. And you know as well as I do that this is a bulletproof recipe for love.
So Santa Dean does has a story, though I question the 'miraculousness' of it, Emma writes this story and it is awesome, we are told, Boss Valerie's miracle story blows up in her face with Emma holding no hard feelings that her boss is a duplicitous fraud, and Emma and Marcus close the deal of love with a Christmas Kiss. At Christmas.
A Christmas Miracle does not color outside the lines, it delivers what most of us are expecting in a Hallmarky Holiday Romance movie at the expected beats, supplying us with appealing leads, and along with all the other elements we mentioned earlier, we also get lots of snow, ice skating, a cute kid who's half orphan, an old dude who sometimes spews wisdom and Christmas songs. The only semi-disappointment, at least for me, was at the end when Santa Dean reunited with his Jazz Trio to perform a Christmas concert, at which they was soon joined by his estranged daughter on violin and they were about to play Silent Night. Now that seems cool, a Jazz trio backing a violin lead, we're thinking some Jean Luc Ponty styled Christmas melodies coming our way, but instead what we got what Barry Bostwick kind of off key Spoken Wording the lyrics to Silent Night over the music which I must say sounded terrible. And we like Barry Bostwick.
This movie is also notable, at least to me, because Peter Shinkoda and Rebecca Staab are in it. Peter Shinkoda who played the villain Nobu in the Netflix Daredevil show in which he was treated terribly by the producers of that show, and Ms. Staab who played Sue Storm in Roger Corman's 1994 unreleased version of The Fantastic Four. Some would tell you that movie was terrible, and while I wouldn't argue with these people, it is still the truest Fantastic Four movie made to this point.
Yeah, we probably haven't spent too much time talking about A Christmas Miracle in this little chat but it was what it was. What more do you want me to say? Send me money!
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