By Kelly
I’ve started watching the slew of newish Christmas movies available on Netflix Instant and I’m happy to report that my first pick seems to be a winner.
First, I was lucky enough to catch the brand new Kristin’s Christmas Past on Lifetime this past week and was pleasantly surprised to see a reasonably-done movie involving time travel, Christmas and one of my favorite Roswell co-stars (Shiri Appleby). (Think Back to the Future with Christmas.) And I tend to enjoy the time-travel-themed movies Shiri picks, especially the recent Dating Rules from my Future Self.
So I decided to see what else the old Roswell” cast has been up to and saw that Brendan Fehr is in a 2011 movie called Christmas Kiss. It’s a fairly simple premise: guy and girl make-out in an elevator because it starts to fall (right, because that would be my first priority), the girl is so covered in glitter she’s unrecognizable (I know, but somehow they apply enough glitter to somewhat pull this off) and turns out elevator-kiss-guy is the boyfriend of her evil boss, played by Elisabeth Röhm, the werewolf on Angel. The conflict is actually believable. Elevator-girl loves elevator-guy, but doesn’t want to lose her job, so she stays quiet in a way that’s somewhat understandable and not completely frustrating.
Not that this movie isn’t without flaws, cheese-ball moments and happenstances of high disbelief. For instance, if mean-boss-lady is really as cruel as she clearly displays every minute of this movie, she’d fire elevator-girl for just looking at her funny once, yet she lets it slide that she gruffly voices her opinion often. And is a non-opaque glitter-mask really that effective as a disguise? I guess it beats glasses vs. no glasses, though now that I think about it, they employ this trick in the movie, too. But overall, fun and Christmas-y, which is all I really expect from Christmas movies.
Though I guess that’s not totally true since Desperately Seeking Santa does not make my list of decent Instant Christmas movies, even with the Magic-Mike-like dance scene in the beginning. I won’t even go into what it’s about because I have no idea. Something about needing a “sexy Santa” for a mall? I don’t know. Somehow I only have 32 minutes left already and I have no clue what’s going on, and I don’t really care. Needless to say, it hasn’t held my attention, and all the parts that I have noticed have been corny/unoriginal/dumb/snooze fest. So not a winner in my opinion, but okay if you want to see sexy Santas dance like Magic Mike.