You Light Up My Chrismtas
A wise woman once told me as a child, 'you take the good, you take the bad, you add them up and there you have the facts of life MF'. It was the old lady who ran the sweat shop that made shoes for Nike I worked at when I was a kid. Imagine my surprise when a couple years later these same lines would be the theme song of a sitcom, minus the 'MF' part, but still with the same theme of an old lady working children in a sweat shop making shoes. Or something. It was an awful long time ago and I don't remember much about that sitcom other than it was called 'The Facts of Life' and starred and old lady four girls. Charlotte Rae is no longer with us, may she rest in eternal peace, but those kids who worked in that sweat shop are, and they have reunited to be in this Hallmarky Romantic Holiday movie. Sort of reunited. More or less. Less.
Emma (Kim Fields) is big city real estate maven making moves and knocking down dollars, but she gets a call from the real estate agent attempting to sell her late father's home that the property simply isn't moving. No problem, Emma hops in her BMW and heads up the freeway to snowy Small Town.
When Emma arrives in Small Town she does not like what she sees. The town is dying, it's lost the Christmas Spirit and her high school bestie Lily (Christina Sicoli) informs her that it's largely because her father's light factory, which is like the only major business in Small Town, is hitting a rough patch. To see what's going on at the factory, Emma hikes it over there and this is where she sees Ben (Adrian Holmes), her one true love from twenty years ago, who is now running her fathers business. Into the ground. It seems there's a company down the road making inferior cheaper lights that has taken all the sales and employees away from the factory, even attempting to lure Ben to their evil enterprise of profit making.
Emma has work to do. First thing is to stage her father's house to sell by Christmassing it out, which the current real estate agent Heather (Parveen Dosanjh) didn't think to do, then she's got to get the city back in the spirit by dressing it up for Christmas, pretty much all by herself, and she has to save the light factory. In her father's study she found the incomplete schematics for a revolutionary new light that shines brighter than other lights! This will save the factory and save the town! If Ben can get it to work.
All the while Emma and Ben are spending time together, reminiscing about stuff like their first kiss and other nonsense, but Ben does kind of have a girlfriend, that being the Heather the kindly but clearly incompetent real estate agent. Or we could say Ben had a girlfriend because Heather ain't gonna have no man at the end of this movie. It looks like the fire has been burning for these two middle aged singles for years, but they allowed life to get in the way. True, they both be on third marriages now, but whatever. Emma, saves Christmas, saves the factory, saves the town, and seals it all with love's true kiss with Ben, at Christmas.
No, I didn't mention Lisa Welchel, Mindy Cohn or Nancy McKeon in this synopsis because they weren't really in this movie all that much. At least Blair and Natalie physically showed up for their cameos, but Jo only appeared in a fifteen second cell phone video. I mean for a while there back in the day Nancy McKeon along Melissa Gilbert was the face of Lifetime movies so I'm hurt she couldn't make a physical appearance as well.
The movie, well, you know... it was what it was. Big city girl goes back to her small town to save the factory at Christmas. A little on the basic side and it doesn't do much to get out of that. Emma even gave us an impassioned story about how she thought lights were magic, but the magic lights didn't save her dying mom, which is why she never loved the lights because she lost the belief in the lights. She wants to believe in lights again. Tears were even flowing from eyes as she told this story, where I was thinking 'they're just lights'. And when they saved the town by putting the town saving lights on the town Christmas tree, they might've wanted to CGI those lights up to bit to brighten them up, because they were just regular ol' lights. I think the town is still doomed.
But at least the movie was very Christmassy. We had Christmas Tree shopping and decorating, caroling, cookie baking, cocoa drinking, lots of canned Christmas music in the background, a near miss kiss even though I'm pretty sure these two have had sex before, two dead parents, a Christmas food drive for orphans that Jo was apparently in charge of via her cell phone, and the worst snowball fight you're ever gonna want to see. Problem was they probably filmed this movie in the summer and could only generate enough snow for the cute kid to pack on lousy snowball, with everyone reacting to the snowball throwing action which was occurring off screen.
While it was good to see the kids from 'The Facts of Life' back together again, this probably isn't the reunion we were all hoping for. And while the movie was certainly mediocre at best, I have to say that Kim Fields and Parveen Dosanjh were sporting fashion boots that were freaking amazing, and I'm not even into women's footwear. Honest.
Comments
Post a Comment