His and Her Christmas
Today my Excel algorithm, also known as The Universe, went back in time a bit and randomly chose this nonsense from seventeen years ago. I'm not happy with The Universe right now. We're going to have to have some words later on.
Act One:
Liz (Dina Meyer) is a recent divorcee' who writes an advice column for her small town newspaper outside of San Francisco. I know, Newspapers. Hey, this movie is almost two decades old and newspapers were still semi relevant back then. Liz's life is a mess as we can plainly see as see she lives alone and has a cat. That's a sure sign of a miserable person in movie land. Her bestie Sarah (April Telek) knows the solution for her woes, and that's getting a man. Or just getting tightened up by a man to loosen up those gears. Just telling you what she said. But Liz says she don't need no man! HAHAHAHAHA!!!!
Across town in SanFran proper we meet Tom (David Sutcliffe), a big time reporter for the biggest Newspaper in town. Tom also lives alone with his fish, fish that he constantly taps the glass of their tanks. Folks, don't do that. Every tap is like an earthquake for those poor fish. Tom isn't miserable though for he is about to launch his own television talk show and he has a laundry list of ladies to keep him entertained, though his bestie Nick (Alistair Abell) would like him to settle down. Tom thinks Nick is dumb.
Act one has ended which means we are thirty minutes into this Romantic Christmas movie and our two leads are completely unaware of each others existence and Christmas has hardly been mentioned.
Act Two:
Finally our two mains are at least aware that they both exist. Tom's big Newspaper has bought out Liz's small paper with the intent of folding it into the big paper and shutting it down. Liz rallies the troops to start writing good articles, I guess for a change, to increase sales so they won't get shut down. Liz, for her part, is writing a bunch of articles about how great Christmas is.
Apparently this works and circulation for the tiny paper picks up. This is bad for Tom because it seems that if they can't shut down this tiny paper, he can't launch his TV show. It was never made clear to me why these two completely different things can't exist concurrently, but they cant. So Tom uses his column to write counterpoint articles belittling Christmas, which drives Liz crazy.
Act two has ended and our two leads in this romance have not met, nor even spoken to each other. They have a lot of ground to cover in not a lot of time to make these two fall in love with each other.
Act Three:
Finally, they meet. It doesn't go well. It's on a street corner at a newsstand and they end up getting in a big argument. No love connection there, at least I didn't think there was, but the people around Tom and Liz are telling them 'Oooh, I can really tell you like really him' and 'Oh yeah, you got it bad for her bro'. Where are they seeing this? What are they deriving this information from? There's absolutely nothing there.
Their next meeting was at a Christmas party where they get into another big argument with Liz physically attacking Tom and the both of them falling into the punch table. But where I saw an assault, this pretty much seals it for everybody else within their spheres that these two were made for each other.
So there's like fifteen minutes left in this movie and Liz and Tom have only met twice and both times it's gone terribly. But independent of each other, because they have spent absolutely no time together, they have come to the conclusion, somehow, that they really like each other. Unfortunately though, the tiny newspaper has gotten word it's going to be shut down while Tom is preparing to shoot the pilot for his TV show, but he just can't go through with it. Liz is too important to him. Why Tom! Why is she important to you? I get it, she's really pretty, perfect facial bone structure on this lady... but is that it? Liz, for her part, feels she's been unfair to Tom. No Liz, you haven't! Tom is a shallow, self absorbed asshole! Those are your words baby, not mine. Nothing's changed. I mean he does look good in a suit, but is that it?
Anyway, Tom shows up at Liz's place of business, they go for a walk, say some words to each other and then start making out in the park. I don't know why they are doing this. A little bit later the guy who bought the small town newspaper decides not to close it down and Liz and Tom start making out again. The next time we see Liz it's at Christmas dinner and she is wearing an engagement ring. There are whirlwind romances, and then there's whatever the hell this was. At Christmas.
It was 2005 so maybe the recognized Hallmarky formula hadn't taken root yet. Even though I can't think of any romance movie that could be successful when the boy and the girl have virtually no contact with each other. In You've got Mail, Meg and Tom might not have know who was on the other end of those emails, but they still had that email correspondence as well as plenty of personal interactions. Let's just say I didn't buy into this. Maybe Dina Meyer and David Sutcliffe, both of whom are charming and magnetic actors, just didn't like each other and demanded to spend as little time together, on set, as humanly possible. It also didn't help that the movie was on the slow side with a lot of the action being Dina Meyer and David Sutcliffe drolly reading the articles they just wrote, against a montage of people in the street reading newspapers.
The movie also wasn't very Christmassy. Vancouver was pretending to be San Francisco so no snow, no snowmen, no snowball fights, we had no cookie baking, no hot cocoa or eggnog sipping, no Christmas tree shopping, no caroling, no mistletoe, no orphan kids, no near miss kiss because our two mains were barely around each other to pull that off, nothing! They did trim a tree, so we did get that.
Again, this was made a while ago so maybe this is how these things were supposed to go back in the day? I don't know man. One Vomit!
Special shout out to actor Suzanne Bastien, who is labeled on the IMDB page of this movie as the character of Black Woman. They least they could've done is give this sister a name. Dang.
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