Holly & Ivy
So this is what the randomizer chose for me to watch today. Normally I avoid movies featuring kids and pets even though I can tolerate children and I love cute kitten videos. But I am not in control anymore so here we go.
Let's meet Melody (Janel Parish), a cute kid to be sure but one with some suspect life-planning skills. Melody, a recent graduate with an M.S. in Library Science, has just moved to a small town in Wisconsin, purchased a huge house which needs all kinds of work, and figures she'll get a job when she gets there. Melody's job search process consists of walking into various libraries unannounced, giving them resumes and hoping they will give her a job. These aren't Arby's Melody, there were better ways to go about this. As an aside, if this were real life all Melody would really have to do is give me a call. So happens my little sister is the former President of the American Library Association, so a good word from me and I could make some things happen. I got connections. But this isn't real life so on we go.
Melody's job search obviously doesn't work, but she is chippered up when she gets home and meets her neighbors The Larsen's, which consist of hot mom Nina (Marisol Nichols), reserved ten year old Holly (Sadie Coleman), effervescent seven year old Ivy (Piper Rubio) and the cute puppy whatever his name is. Holly loves this family almost immediately. However, we knew there was trouble in this family when Nina stumbled while trying to take down the tree from her car. In reality, a stumble is just a stumble. In movie land, a stumble means you are very sick. Things get worse when after having tea with Melody at her house, Nina collapses. Well that seals it. Nina's gonna die. She's donezo yo. It's over man. But we're jumping ahead a bit.
As we mentioned Nina has a fixer upper so she has to head to the local hardware store to pick up a few things where she caught the eye of Adam the local building contractor (Jeremy Jordan) and he likes what he sees. Adam wastes no time in taking his shot, inviting Melody for hot chocolate where they talk about their dreams. His dream is being a furniture artisan, her dream is to supply books to needy children. I should mention that Melody drives around with a Wagoneer full of books, because you know, she's a librarian and that's something librarians do.
Sadly, Nina has gotten the terrible news that her cancer has returned for the third time, and it's not looking good. Her main concern, of course, are her children since their father is not in the picture and she has no other family. This causes Melody to blurt out that she'll take care of them. Sure, this seems like an awful idea considering she's known this woman less than a week but Melody, being an orphan, knows what it's like get caught up in the system and thinks she can do this. Nina thinks she can too so they set about making this completely ridiculous thing happen. Because why not?
While that's great, unfortunately Melody and Adam, who were getting along fabulously, hit a little bump in the road. It's really kind of silly actually. While hanging out, Melody tells Adam that she's going to have put her librarian plans on hold to get a proper job because of the whole 'need a job to take care of kids I just met thing'. Adam kind of freaks out because she's abandoning her dream. Adam, for his part, is the opposite of an orphan in that he has two living parents who love him TOO much and do everything in their power to support everything he wants to do EXCEPT his furniture making. His dad got him a potential big city building contract and when Melody heard about that she had to ask 'What about YOUR dreams!' And then they stop hanging out. I understand that these movies have a process, believe me I do, but this might've been the one time when our two love birds didn't have to break apart, considering this is best they could come up with.
Anyway, Melody has filed for child ownership, I know there's a proper name for it, I just can't think of it at the moment, and she has to get her house up to code, in a matter of days, to make this happen. She knows a guy that could be of great assistance, but they're not talking right now. Something about deferred dreams drying up like a raisin in the sun or something. But Adam sees the error of his ways and he knows what he wants and doesn't give Melody a choice but to accept his help. You see, when you've been out there in them streets all by yourself, your whole life, like Melody, you learn not to depend on folks, but Melody too has learned the error of her ways and accepts the help of the WHOLE FREAKING TOWN. And they have that house looking great in a matter of hours. All we were missing was a Tanya Memme sighting.
It's a glorious Christmas, Adam's parents come around to his dream, they even help Melody achieve her dream even though they don't know this woman from a hole in the wall, and all is well. To an extent I guess. Because fast forward a year, Nina is totally deadzo, but no worries, Melody has been awarded adoption of Holly and Ivy, Adam is about to propose, everybody does a Christmas dance and Melody and Adam make out. At Christmas. Word of warning Melody, while 7 and 10 is cute, when those girls hit 13 and 16... good luck with that.
What we have here, my friends, with Holly & Ivy is a movie that's darn near bulletproof. We are used to characters having dead moms, but what's better than a dead mom? How about a dying mom? Right? 'Brian's Song' has taught us that's it is hard to hate on a movie when a character spends most of the movie dying. That being said this obviously isn't your typical Hallmarky Romantic Holiday movie, because, you know, imminent death. That's going to be a bit of a downer for some, but the filmmakers handled and framed it about as well as they could considering the time restrictions.
Which would lead us to this movie's main problem, in that there's simply not enough time in the mandated TV movie running time of around 80 minutes to establish much. I'm the last person to want any movie, particularly a movie like this one, to be longer but this one needed more time. More time to justify a woman giving her children to virtually a complete stranger, more time for our lovebirds to establish the fact that they could actually fall in love with each other, more time to develop Melody and her character because truth be told the character seemed interesting enough to warrant more than a couple of lines for us to understand her background. But there simply wasn't the time to do all of that. Again, they did the best they could with the time they had, but what are you gonna do?
The vomit worthiness was fair to middling I guess. We had Christmas Tree shopping, TWO Christmas tree trimmings, hot cocoa sipping, a holiday dance number I guess, and we had some caroling though I was kind of hoping Janel and Jeremy might give us tune since they are both professional singers. No time for that though. We also had lots of orphans, even though it took practically the entire movie for those two girls to become orphans. We were missing cookie baking, no snowman making, no snowball fights, they did threaten to go sledding but never did, no ugly sweaters and no near miss kissing. Fair to middling.
So if you like your Hallmarky Holiday Romance movies a bit on the heavy side, with underdeveloped stories and characters that rely on their natural charm as opposed to storytelling to bring us into their narratives, then this one isn't so bad. Really, it's pretty good all things considered.
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