absnow54

Hallmark has made a few decent Hanukkah movies between Double Holiday and Eight Gifts of Hanukkah. I'm looking forward to Round and Round because it has Bryan Greenberg in it.

I think the other movie was A Timeless Christmas with Ryan Paevey and Erin Cahill. Another good time travel one is The Spirit of Christmas.

I doubt Kailyn could get IVF less than a year post partum. Or that she would implant a male embryo if she were doing gender selection.

I was hoping to like Letters to Santa, but cut out about 3/4 of the way through to go to bed. I did like the scene where the kids were hanging out with "Santa" and their parents came to claim them, and the kids were like, "We've never seen these people before," much to their father's exasperation.

That's the other movie I was thinking about! Back to Catch Me if You Claus, I laughed out loud at Luke MacFarlane's delivery of, "I'll be so ffffff-ar behind schedule!" It was so campy and fun!

The car scene may have been the sexiest scene I’ve seen in a Hallmark movie! Catch Me if You Clause was a definite highlight for the season. The two leads had fantastic chemistry, straight out of a screwball romantic comedy. When Hallmark gets the pairings right, they really knock it out of the park.

She came in 9th at US Nationals last year, and doesn't have much international experience, so it isn't shocking. Hopefully she stays consistent enough through the rest of the season to send her to Four Continents if she doesn't qualify for one of the World's slots.

Finally got to watch Holiday Road last night, and I really liked it. It's based on a true story of a road trip going viral, so the social media aspect was pivotal to the story (kind of like in #XMAS last year.) I thought all of the characters had great chemistry. Although, I've definitely seen the coffee spiel done way too many times before with the over complicated drink order.

Lifetime Holiday movies are generally rough, but since they scored Jake Epstein's Laughing All the Way this year, they won my viewership last night. I thought it was pretty decent, although the romance seemed like a shoehorned afterthought. I didn't love his Adam Sandler-esque bits, but the song about fake Christmas Trees was pretty funny!

Should we start the countdown clock for Days snatching him up?

I didn’t mind Navigating Christmas. I thought the actors had decent chemistry and the progression of the story was reasonable (save for her buying a lighthouse with her boyfriend of 2 days.) Or maybe it was just a good snark movie. My husband and I had fun doing MST commentary throughout.

Apparently they scraped the Six of Crows spinoff too. I hope they reconsider and at least do a movie. I think the cast and characters are strong enough they they could do a standalone film that doesn't require watching Shadow and Bone. Granted, a lot of the book has already been adapted, but the beauty of heists, as seen is Netflix's other show, Kaleidoscope, is that the order of events don't matter much, when done right.

I still hope they find a way to do Six of Crow. The casting is just so perfect to throw away the opportunity.

Speaking of infinite rewatches, are they not playing Love at the Thanksgiving Day Parade this year? I haven't seen it on the schedule for either channels.

My favorite was their heart to heart at the end of the movie where he spoke in German while she spoke in English. Like this is where you break out the subtitles?

I thought Christmas Island has been the most consistent and formulaic movie so far this year. It was fine, and had a decent story arc, but still, kind of dull. I only watched the last 20 minutes of A Heidelberg Christmas. I've actually spent time in that area, so I wanted to be excited for it, but it seemed really melodramatic. Navigating Christmas looks like it might be fun *fingers crossed.* I'm still waiting for one decent movie this year that's rewatchable. So far The Santa Summit is the only one that's come close to making the cut.

Yes, when so many showrunners are priding themselves for plot twists that are subversive and unexpected, I enjoy the predictability of Hallmark Christmas movies. Completely low stakes, albeit contrived cotton candy for the brain. (And yes, snarking on them is a lot of fun too, because nobody on this planet has that many winter coats.)

We're Scrooged on Up!TV was kind of decent. Former high school sweethearts get trapped in a retelling of A Christmas Carol while attending their class reunion. It drags a bit near the end, but I thought it was more engaging than most of what Hallmark has offered so far this season.

I like them, but I think my enjoyment of Hallmark movies has more to do with basic tropes (Fake dating! Second chance romance! Enemies to lovers!) found in summer beach reads.

I agree with others, Santa Summit was quirky in a good way. The three friends seemed like actual friends, and it felt like there was a lot of ad-libbing, which made the dialogue feel less cookie cutter. The actual love story was pretty weak, and I found the scenes where the love interest met Hunter King's friends to be really forced, and kind of weird. Like with friend number two he immediately offered to buy her a drink (yes, it was funny when he said he'd expense it!) and was asking her all of these personal questions. If I'd encountered him in real life, I'd be enforcing the buddy system for the rest of the night to avoid him.

In the comments, The Ashley is standing by their reporting that it was a boy and a girl. Kail's Instagram announcement says it's three parts, and she's only released the first two so far, so there's speculation that the third part will reveal the twist that one of the twins was a girl.

These are separate issues, though. Streamers are generating as much content as possible hoping that something will stick, and to do that, they are running on bare bone budgets. The amount an actor makes upfront was included in these negotiations, and I believe they got raises, but that's not where all the money is at. It was critical to define how residuals would be calculated off subscription fees, especially since many shows which existed before the advent of streaming are featured on these platforms. Actors aren't expecting to take one job and live off those royalties forever, but they do depend on the small income stream to help keep their benefits active during slower working periods. Regardless, it seems like the residual issues have been resolved in negotiations. It's AI that's holding things up. Residuals just seem to stick out more to the general public because few earn their income that way. I wouldn't be surprised if that's a strategy from the AMPTP, because AI is what should be scaring the general public too. It's not only actors who are threatened by the emerging technology.

I thought those two actresses were the ones with the most chemistry. Never Been Kris'd was fine, but it's not one I'll bother watching again. My DVR is already packed to the gills with holiday movies, and it's only the first week of November! I hadn't realized they started airing new movies in mid-October this year, so I'm playing major catchup. I agree with others that Mystic Christmas was enjoyable, but there was zero chemistry between the two leads. I think Chandler Massey is a fantastic actor, but he has a hard time generating romantic chemistry with his love interests. I think his best pairing has been with Lyndsey Fonseca in Next Stop, Christmas. The script for Checkin' It Twice was really bad. I cringed through most of it. But Kim Matula is just so charming, she made it watchable. I thought Kevin McGarry was good in this too, and their romance was believable.

For a guy who is so anti-streaming, why would he want to make sure the theater going experience is as miserable as possible? This also ensures people dart out of the theater the second the credits start to roll.

Poor Josh Hutcherson having a relatively successful comeback film (Five Nights at Freddie's) on the cusp of the Hunger Games prequel coming out, and he can't capitalize on it due to the strike.