The Merry Gentlemen | 2024 Christmas Movies

Netflix is very thirsty this year. First we had Hot Frosty with the muscular snowman coming to life. Now we have The Merry Gentlemen, a movie featuring shirtless male dancers. I’m afraid for the rest of this season.

Ashley (Britt Robertson) just got let go from her job as a dancer with the Jingle Belles. When she comes home to Sycamore Creek, she finds that the club her parents, Lily (Beth Broderick) and Stan (Michael Gross), own is very past due on the rent. If they don’t come up with $30,000 by Christmas, they will lose the space. To raise the money, Ashley decides to put on an all-male revue starring handyman Luke (Chad Michael Murray), bartender Troy (Colt Prattes), taxi driver Ricky (Hector David Jr.), and her brother-in-law Rodger (Marc Anthony Samuel).

As a dancer, this movie annoyed me. The Jingle Belles are supposed to be the Rockettes, complete with kickline. However, it’s painfully obvious that Robertson has zero dance experience and the director does absolutely nothing to try to hide it. Instead, she is put dead center of every dance, making the whole thing look amateurish.

This bleeds over into The Merry Gentlemen. Thankfully, Prattes has dance experience (he’s currently on Broadway in Aladdin) and David has martial arts experience (he was a Power Ranger). Those two are the saviors of the male revue. The other two move like it physically hurts them. I guess it’s a good thing they all work out so they have nice abs?

Sadly, even if you try to ignore the bad dancing, which is difficult since it’s the entire plot, the rest of the movie isn’t much better. The romance feels unearned. Ashley likes Luke because he is pretty and Luke likes Ashley because she taught him choreography? I really wish Netflix went in a different way with this. Hire some more actual dancers. I know this may sound stunning but there are dancers who can act. This would have been so much better if Ashley was a really good dancer and was able to take the “country bumpkins” and turn them into good dancers. But you have to cast people that can dance for that to happen. I am very disappointed.

Rating: The Rockettes would never

Christmas On Windmill Way | 2023 Christmas Movies

A lot of people joke about Hallmark Christmas movie tropes. Great American Family’s Christmas On Windmill Way had to have been written by someone who had a trope checklist and wanted to jam as many as possible into one movie.

The windmill on Windmill Way has been owned by Mia’s (Christa Taylor Brown) family for generations. Due to financial difficulties, her grandmother, Ann (Marcia Bennett), has sold the property to a developer. Mia’s high school boyfriend, Brady (Chad Michael Murray), has been sent by the developer to prepare the property for development.

This is, quite seriously, one of the worst movies I have ever watched. Brown reads her lines like she’s reading greeting cards. Is she capable of putting any emotion behind her words? She’s a new actress on the scene but she really needs to up her game if she plans on being around for very long. Meanwhile, Murray’s job is just to stand there and keep saying the same things over and over again. If we cut out all of the repetitive lines he has, this movie could have probably been a half hour long. It’s movies like this that make me sorry I decided to keep Great American Family on the lineup this year.

Rating: Tear it all down

Toying With The Holidays | 2021 Christmas Movies

Sometimes I don’t understand how writers, or whoever is it that comes up with these titles, comes up with these titles! This one is called Toying With The Holidays but it has nothing to do with toys. It’s about trains! It should have been called On Track For The Holidays or something like that. Well, let’s get into it.

Danielle (Cindy Busby) brings her son, Paul (Callum Shoniker), back to her hometown for the holidays. When she gets there, she finds that the holiday train her recently deceased father kept was taken out of commission because it was too costly to repair. With the help of her high school classmate, Kevin (Chad Michael Murray), Danielle is determined to get the train running again for this holiday season.

Who read this script and thought it was a good idea to make? Absolutely nothing happens for the entire movie. Even in the last 15-30 minutes, when we get the big surprise reveal (is it really a surprise though?), still nothing happens! A bunch of people get on a miniature train then the leads kiss. We don’t get to see them take a grand train ride through a Christmas display or even a montage of anyone having fun. They’re just like “Yep, the train works now. Smoochy Smoochy.”

I seriously hate the boring movies more than the bad ones. At least with the bad ones, they make me feel something. I’ll hate a character or I’ll hate the way an actor reads his lines or I’ll hate the set design or something. The boring ones just make me want to turn my TV off and go do something else. Toying With The Holidays is completely forgettable and not worth a minute of your time.

Too Close For Christmas | 2020 Christmas Movies

THIS MOVIE MAKES NO SENSE. I swear Lifetime has just given up on Christmas movies. They put them out because they “have” to but they don’t want to.

Hayley (Jessica Lowndes) is spending Christmas with her sister, Amy (Vanessa Sears), and Amy’s in-laws. Unfortunately, Haley blames Amy’s brother-in-law, Paul (Chad Michael Murray), for the breakup of her last relationship. When Amy’s mother-in-law, Judy (Seana McKenna), falls ill and Paul’s Christmas trip falls through, it’s up to Amy and Paul to fulfill Judy’s wishes for the perfect Christmas.

I am so annoyed by Too Close For Christmas. I have no idea what Hayley does for a living. It seems like she plans something. Parties? Events? I’m not sure. I just know she constantly calls her boss to bug her about a possible promotion. There’s a running gag about Hayley not getting good phone reception at the Barnett house.

Then there’s this wanna-be-tension between Hayley and Paul. Apparently, at Amy and Tim’s wedding, Paul made a comment about Hayley’s then-boyfriend moving back to London without her AND IT HAPPENED. (Big gasp here?) So now Hayley blames Paul for it? It doesn’t seem like it was his fault. He may have been rude (they don’t actually show the interaction; Hayley just talks about it) but he didn’t make the guy decide to move across the ocean without his girlfriend. The movie tries very hard to make this the conflict between the two characters. IT IS DUMB.

Everything else feels so forced. There’s a charity gala that has to be planned and it ends up being left to Hayley and Paul. For some reason, Hayley decides to have a local barbecue place cater the event. Sure, ribs might be tasty but I’m not sure who wants to eat them at a gala, where they are wearing fancy clothes with perfect hair and makeup. I get that they wanted to come off as ‘down to earth’ and ‘relatable.’ But ribs are a messy food. Not something you eat at a fancy party.

I don’t like this movie at all. It has a 6/10 rating on imdb so I guess someone out there likes it. However, I can’t - in good conscience - recommend it. If you want to watch Too Close For Christmas, do it at your own peril.