Christmas Plus One | 2023 Christmas Movies

Lifetime has finally joined the Christmas movie fray with Christmas Plus One. And, of course, it’s another Corey Sevier movie. I just can’t get rid of him, can I?

Sisters Cara (Emily Alatalo) and Amy (Vanessa Smythe) make a Christmas wish every year. This year they both wished to meet their soulmates. One year later, Cara is on her way back to New York City to get ready for Cara’s Christmas wedding. She catches a ride with Chase (Andrew Bushell), who she clicks with immediately. However, the two can’t seem to reconnect when they reach the city. As she searches for Chase, Cara helps writer Michael (Corey Sevier) with his Christmas article.

Usually, I get annoyed at the major plotline of these movies. Instead, it’s the wedding B plot that annoys me. Amy has met her soulmate, dated, got engaged, and planned a wedding all within one year. She barely knows the man! Either the movie should have had the engagement happen at Christmas or just meeting the family. I know these movies are unrealistic but it is extremely unrealistic to have a full relationship and wedding within one year. I hate it.

As for the actual plot, it’s fine. It’s the usual conflict of main characters not having an actual conversation and Cara not doing anything besides wandering around New York City to find Chase. When she finally does something (leaving a random picture of her and Michael on a Christmas tree at a sales lot), it is stupid. She doesn’t ever ask anyone if they have seen Chase and she keeps following random men wearing red scarves even though she knows that Chase no longer has his red scarf. I think I might hate this whole movie.

Rating: Hide and Seek Loser

Under The Christmas Sky | 2023 Christmas Movies

I wish Hallmark kept Under The Christmas Sky a little more secret. All of the commercials featured a child in a wheelchair squealing “You’re an ASTRONAUT?!” So we know it’s astronaut-related somehow, right?

Kat (Jessica Parker Kennedy) is an astrophysicist who specializes in the sun. After a terrible car accident leaves her with a blind spot in her vision, Kat is unsure where her life is headed. Her boss gets her a consulting job helping David (Ryan Paevey) with a Christmas exhibit at the local planetarium. Will Kat figure out where her future lies?

I’m not a big science person. However, some of this movie felt really wrong. They frequently refer to David’s place of work as “the planetarium.” But it’s more like a museum with a planetarium inside. Maybe I’m being too nitpicky about that but like a museum and a planetarium are two different things. Right?

I also feel like they are super confused about Kat’s eyesight. Her eye doctor seemed to blow it off with a “Well, if it hasn’t fixed itself by now, it never will.” But Kat said that the blind spot was caused by hitting her head in the car accident. So is it a problem with her eye or a problem with her brain? Everyone keeps having her do these eye exercises but maybe the actual eye isn’t the problem! The issue felt like a tacked on reason that the writers needed in order to dash her dreams of going to the space station.

At the same time, they made too big of a deal about the blind spot. We are given shots that are supposed to be from Kat’s point of view and it looks like a big smudge in her vision. Yet the writers are literally trying to equate her slightly impaired vision with people in wheelchairs. ‘We can’t go to space but we can still work in the space industry!’

It’s another movie that isn’t terrible but it wasn’t particularly good either. My favorite parts were with Kat’s brother Andy (Andrew Bushell) and Celeste (Sydney Sabiston) who also works at the museum. They were a much more interesting couple.

Rating: Failure to launch

Record Breaking Christmas | 2022 Christmas Movies

When I saw the title for Record Breaking Christmas, I assumed we were going to have another movie about a singer. Nope. This one is about world records, like The Guinness Book Of World Records.

Leah (Michelle Argyris) is an adjudicator for the World Records Bureau who specializes in judging Christmas record attempts. A nearby small town is attempting to break six world records. Leah and her trainee, Jin (Danny Vo), travel Saint Drexel to validate whether not the records have been broken.

Record Breaking Christmas was a cute movie. Argyris may be one of my favorite Christmas movie leading ladies, even if she isn’t always in the best movies. She has a way of making her characters relatable without making them annoying. I think the leading man, Andrew Bushell, usually gets pushed to the friend category in Christmas movies but he held his own as the lead here.

While I’m going to file this one under “Watch,” I would have liked to see a little more of the record breaking attempts. We see a lot of them when they are already done and we don’t even see the results of others. (They just reference them in a throwaway line.) Since the records are the main plot of the movie, I would have liked to have seen the town working together more on the actual record attempts. The Hula Hoop one would have been a blast to see!

Secretly Santa | 2021 Christmas Movies

At first, I thought Secretly Santa was going to be a Cinderella-themed Christmas movie. But they dropped that plotline for a stupid one about an app. Ugh.

Miranda (Alicia Dea Josipovic) and Paul (Travis Nelson) each run an app that helps people choose appropriate Christmas presents for the people in their life. Unbeknownst to them, they meet up at a costumed Santa-themed bar crawl and begin to fall in love. Before they can exchange information, they get separated but Paul has a glove that Miranda left behind to help him find her. Professionally, Paul’s company is planning on buying Miranda’s app and merging the two together. The two of them get tasked with figuring out how to make the app better by learning more about how people choose the perfect gift.

This movie would have been a million times better if they ditched the stupid app story and kept with the Cinderella plot. First off, if you need an app to tell you what the perfect gift is, you need to pay more attention to the people around you. Second, how could an app possibly know the perfect gift without some Facebook-level stalking of your target’s online life? It’s stupid.

On top of the dumb story, Josipovic and Nelson have terrible chemistry. The writers try to give them this flirting by fighting vibe but they don’t come off as flirting. They just come off as mean to each other. They are a terrible couple.

I don’t want to talk about this movie any more. It’s awful. Don’t watch it. I wish I had those 90 minutes back in my life. I wish I didn’t fast forward through the commercials so that maybe one of those would have been worth my time.