Christmas on Repeat
It's Christmas Groundhog Day again my friends! At least that's what we call this time loop genre because that's the movie most of us remember, but surely 'Groundhog Day' can't be the first time loop movie, can it? What say ye, Google? Well, it looks like there were others, kind of, such as 'The Time Travelers (1964), 'Le Mai 15 (1967)' and 'The Girl who Leapt through Time (1983)' but 1993's Groundhog Day looks to be first one to actually focus solely on one single day. Who knew? For disclosures sake, this movie, as all of the movies I am watching this year, was chosen by my Excel Randomizer, not me.
Andrea (Jennifer Taylor) is a hard working Advertising executive, wife, and mother. In just that order of importance it would seem. Andrea sleeps at the office and has her assistant run all her errands for her family, including buying them this years Christmas gifts. Worst still is that it is Christmas Eve and her jerkoff boss Larry (Matthew Lawrence) needs her to come in on Christmas day to supervise some commercial shoot.
On her way home Andrea stops at some store and sees a Goodwill Santa who knows way too much about this woman and says some cryptic nonsense that she seriously needs to be paying attention to, because that dude is up to stuff. When she gets home Andrea's family is used to her selling them out and takes the news of her having to work on Christmas Day with no sweat, they retire for the evening and Christmas Day arrives.
Christmas Day doesn't go so good. The commercial shoot was a disaster, her boss is pissed, her husband John (Gary Poux) is disappointed, her mother in law Millie (Roberta Hanlen) expected as much, her daughter Lexi (Julia Terranova) doesn't care and her son Matt (JJ Whyte) is sad. And the gifts her assistant bought her family were total ass. While taking out the garbage, which is something the boy should probably be doing, she wishes she could do that day again, under a shooting star, which Malevolent Santa told us was magic.
Sure enough, it's Christmas Day again, though she doesn't know it yet, but it doesn't take long for her to figure it out even though everything happened terribly just like it did the first time. After a few more terrible Christmas Days and another chat with Warlock Santa, Andrea finally starts to figure out how to make the system work for her. For instance Andrea can't make pancakes without burning the house down, so she learns how not to burn the down. Her son didn't make the basketball team so she and some neighborhood kids decide help the kid work on his game. If you saw the hoop they were playing on, which looked to be seven ft. high and angled down sharply from some dumb kid hanging on it, it's no wonder the kid sucks at basketball. And her daughter is a big fan of the influencer that is screwing up this commercial shoot, so she takes her to work with her to meet this woman and also help with the shoot. And she actually buys gifts that the family all loves. All is well!
At least I thought so, until her husband husband asked for a divorce at the end of this day. Huh? where did that come from? I mean he didn't ask for a divorce at the end of all the other days, but on the day when she finally gets everything right, he wants out? If I can offer some advice to my man... big fella, slow your roll and let's step back and a look at the big picture here. As far as I can tell, homeboy has no job, and if he does it's not a good one, and it's been made perfectly clear that Andrea is bringing in the majority of the cash in this family. He's clearly not thinking this through.
Well, Christmas is over and December 26th comes and Andrea beelines it over to chat with Sinister Santa who explains to her she got what she wanted. I'm sorry Santa, I don't think this is what she wanted. She wanted just the opposite of this. So Andrea heads back home, packs a bag and is leaving the house because it looks like this husband of hers has just kicked her out of a house that I'm 100% sure she's paying for. While driving away sad, Andrea says 'Screw this Noise' and makes a U-turn and heads back home where she makes an impassioned, albeit completely unnecessary plea that her family allows her back home. Touched by her words, they all hug with joy, mainly because the breadwinner has come back home and they can continue eating regular food and not Alpo, Andrea tells off her boss and winks at Satanic Santa who has possessed a Christmas ornament against its will. And all is great! At Christmas! I mean the day after Christmas!
Well... that was different. I guess. I mean we've watched the tale of the hard working, driven career person who forgets what's important in life, but that doesn't necessarily seem to be this character. Yes, she is probably overworking herself but as they told us in the movie, it's been just a year since she got this new promotion, which is 365 days, which is not a long time, and all of this hard work does seem like it is being done out of necessity. She's trying to pay the house off, she's saving for the kid's college fund and other family needs that all seems fairly reasonable to me. Maybe if they made the character of Andrea less of a sweetheart and more of an Scroogkins, or maybe if this unemployed husband of hers asked for a divorce at the end of every day, thus giving Andrea the goal of trying to stop that from happening, this narrative might have worked better. But as it stands it didn't work all that well for me, but it might be different for you though.
The vomit worthiness was also a bit on the low side. We did have a solid Christmassy theme, plenty of decorations adorned our limited sets, and we also had a creepy Santa floating about, but we didn't get any cookie baking, no caroling, no Christmas tree buying, no Christmas tree trimming, I can't recall any cocoa drinking, no ugly Christmas sweaters, the kids were too old to be cute and the old people, this being Santa and the mom-in-law weren't shelling out any old people wisdom at all. And there weren't any near miss kisses though we did get a near miss date in Divorce Court which certainly does not count. They did make a snowman though. Gotta give them some credit for that, and building that snowman couldn't have been easy because I'm pretty sure they shot this Christmas movie in July.
I guess the best word I can use to describe 'Christmas on Repeat' is uneven. Different, but not different in a way that made it better.
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