Christmas Class Reunion | 2022 Christmas Movies

Finally! We have a different premise for a movie! The big town girl isn’t just coming home for Christmas. She’s also coming home to plan the 15-year class reunion! I bet you didn’t expect that with a title like Christmas Class Reunion.

Elle (Aimee Teegarden) was the valedictorian and class president in high school. Fifteen years later, she is home for Christmas and to plan her class reunion. Despite a few catastrophic setbacks, Elle and class vice-president, Devin (Tanner Novlan) manage to put on the best class reunion ever.

I have to admit that it was nice to watch a movie that wasn’t completely about romance. Sure, Elle still kinda had a crush on the guy she liked back in high school and there’s a whole subplot about the troubles that the high school sweethearts are having now that they are in their 30s. But romance wasn’t the point of the movie. It was all about their interpersonal relationships, which was cool.

Is this the best movie ever? No. I’m not even sure it will crack the top 10 this year. However, it wasn’t nearly as boring as some of the other things I’ve watched this year. So, yeah, go ahead and watch Christmas Class Reunion. Maybe it will bring up a little high school nostalgia for you.

The Art Of Christmas | 2022 Christmas Movies

I have watched a lot of Christmas movies this year. I’m pretty sure that some of these movies weren’t originally written to be Christmas movies. They were written as romance movies (or terrible romcoms) and they stuffed some random Christmas references in to make it fit into the season. Yeah, The Art Of Christmas has little to do with Christmas.

Liv (Brigitte Kingsley) is about to have her first art exhibit. Unfortunately, a fire in the museum’s kitchen has ruined most of her works. In order to make enough money to pay her bills, she takes a job teaching art at a local elementary school. With the help of history teacher, Jake (Joe Towne), Liv finds the inspiration she needs to create more art for her next show.

So this movie was basically “what if two of the most awkward people in the world were shoved together for a relationship?” Jake frequently acts like he’s some sort of alien that doesn’t know how human relationships…even just friendships…work. And Liv hates herself so much that she keeps trying to be someone else. That’s definitely how to get inspired to make artwork that people want to buy.

Don’t watch The Art Of Christmas. It’s annoying. I’m actually getting very close to throwing out the whole Great American channel.

A Royal Christmas Match | 2022 Christmas Movies

As I think most people know, there are a lot of royal Christmas movies. There are so many tiny kingdoms with princes and princesses looking for love. Well, UPtv gave us another one in A Royal Christmas Match.

Princess Camille (Jordana Largy) of Morgana is traveling to the United States to try to set up an exchange program with her country’s university. If she fails, Morgana University will be forced to close. Rhett (Matthew MacCaull), a professor at PSU, is assigned to escort her around the American college. When Camille finds out that her father hired Ben to babysit her, she wonders what his true motive is.

I have to admit that the plot for A Royal Christmas Match is more interesting than most royal Christmas movies. Camille is set on saving Morgana University and she isn’t letting anything get in her way. When Rhett distracts her with Christmas events, she continually tells him that she wants to talk to the other professors at the college and that she really wants to set up the exchange program. She is one determined princess!

It’s also interesting that both Camille and her friend, Duchess Teodora (Ashley Alexander), have PhDs. They are in different subjects but it takes a lot of work to get a PhD. How in the world did a princess and a duchess have enough time away from their royal duties to attend college for that long? Morgana really is set up differently from every other country with a royal family.

Amazingly, A Royal Christmas Match was rather watchable. I don’t think UPtv gave us a lot of good content this year but this was one of them. Go forth and watch, good people.

A Recipe For Joy | 2022 Christmas Movies

I love when we get these mash-up movies where they want the romantic couple to be more…different. A Recipe For Joy is not just about cooking. Oh no, it’s also about producing a television show. But it does neither well.

Carly (Erin Agostino) is a food correspondent. When she is offered her own television show, she is sent to her hometown of Angel Heights to cover the reopening of the town’s diner, now run by Chicago chef Grant (Dillon Casey). The two butt heads about how the diner should operate. He wants things to be new and fancy, she wants to celebrate the history of the diner.

This movie was so boring. It didn’t get interesting until that big third act conflict when Grant saw a cut of Carly’s episode but it wasn’t her cut. And even that is such a typical conflict for a movie about a television show production. “My bosses wanted this to go in a different direction!” Everything else about A Recipe For Joy was just bland.

No, don’t watch this one. Unless you need something to help you fall asleep. It might be good for that.

Christmas Bloody Christmas | 2022 Christmas Movies

It is time for another horror Christmas movie. This time it’s the slasher fest Christmas Bloody Christmas from Shudder.

A life-sized robotic Santa has been released to malls and toy stores this Christmas season. Unfortunately, it was based on a military robot and there is a malfunction that reverts the Santas back to their original programming. Tori (Riley Dandy), a record store owner, is spending Christmas Eve out on the town with her employee, Robbie (Sam Delich). Their first stop is to visit some friends who own the toy shop next door. Of course, they have one of the robotic Santas, which goes berserk. It follows Tori and Robbie around town, murdering everyone it sees along the way.

I’m not a huge fan of slasher films but I can appreciate that some people enjoy them. My husband is one of those people. Personally, I didn’t like Christmas Bloody Christmas that much. My first turn-off was the change to a first person point of view during Santa’s first two kills. It was very difficult to see what was going on as he was swinging his axe around. If they want me to know he killed someone, let me see the kill!

The next thing I didn’t like was the pacing. I believe the movie was supposed to be some sort of homage to Terminator , where it’s difficult to kill the robot. However, the beginning of the movie was very slow. There was a long section where nothing happened. We have the first two kills, which no one knows about and is never addressed, then the Santa has to take the long walk to Tori’s house for the next set of kills. When we finally get into the bulk of the kills, they all happen very quickly with little build-up. I may not know a lot about horror movies but I’m pretty sure there’s supposed to be some suspense to heighten our fear before the big event. That didn’t happen here.

Maybe if you are a fan of slasher movies, you might find some sort of enjoyment out of Christmas Bloody Christmas. Personally, I’d go watch Violent Night instead. It’s a much better movie.

The Most Colorful Time Of The Year | 2022 Christmas Movies

Do you remember those EnChroma glasses that went viral like five years ago? The ones that allowed color blind people to see color? Well, Hallmark made an entire movie about them. And, yes, they called it The Most Colorful Time Of The Year.

Michelle (Katrina Bowden) is an optometrist. Ryan (Christopher Russell) is an elementary school science teacher, who happens to teach Michelle’s daughter, Bailey (Ava Weiss). When Michelle finds out that Ryan is color blind, she enrolls him in a study to test glasses that will fix color blindness.

This movie is so ridiculous. When they show Ryan in his color blind state, he literally sees zero color. Everything is in black, white, and grey. That can happen but it is very rare. From Color Blind Awareness: “Achromatopsia is extremely rare, occuring only in approximately 1 person in 33,000 and its symptoms can make life very difficult. Usually someone with achromatopsia will need to wear dark glasses inside in normal light conditions.” So even if he did have this, he probably would be wearing sunglasses a lot. And I don’t think the EnChroma glasses would help him a whole lot.

I also hated that Michelle keeps getting harassed by her ex-boyfriend, Mark (R Austin Ball), throughout the entire movie. When he finally convinces her to talk to him, he asks to go to her kid’s elementary school chorus concert? I’m sorry but that is creepy. For some reason, Michelle relents and let him attend instead of throwing him out of her house. At the concert, Mark asks Ryan how much money he makes? What the hell is wrong with this guy? He really didn’t need to be a part of this movie. There could have been a better misunderstanding than forcing a woman to try to rekindle a terrible relationship.

Despite having a silly plot, The Most Colorful Time Of The Year wasn’t a bad movie. The acting wasn’t terrible, though Russell was a bit of a wet blanket. I know his character is supposed to be a bit Grinchy in the beginning but he never gets any better. Overall, it’s fine to watch if you are interested to see how they handle Ryan’s color blindness. Just be ready to shake your head a lot.

Your Christmas Or Mine? | 2022 Christmas Movies

To be honest, I didn’t even have Your Christmas Or Mine? on my list of movies this year. I do have some other Amazon original movies on the list. I’m not sure how I missed this one.

James (Asa Butterfield) and Hayley (Cora Kirk) have just recently started dating. As they get on their respective trains to go to their respective houses for Christmas, they both make the rash decision to switch trains to surprise the other. Unfortunately, that means that James ends up at Hayley’s family house without Hayley and Hayley ends up at James’s family house without James. They learn way more about each other than they had planned.

Your Christmas Or Mine? was a nice little twist on The Gift Of The Magi story. They both wanted to surprise each other but it wasn’t the surprise they were expecting. And while both families are complete opposites, both James and Hayley had a lasting effect on each of them. My husband didn’t like the movie as much as I did but sometimes he gets nitpicky with Christmas movies.

This one is a nice Christmas movie to watch. It has a little more Christmas and a little less romance as the Hallmark/Lifetime movies but I appreciated the differences. If you are looking for something a little bit different and a little bit British, this would do nicely.

It's A Wonderful Binge | 2022 Christmas Movies

It’s around this time of year that I get burned out on the Hallmark/Lifetime type movies. They all seem the same and they all bore me to death. So I try to filter in some movies from other streaming networks, like Hulu, to break up the monotony and keep me going. I chose the extremely weird It’s A Wonderful Binge.

In the year 2027, all drugs and alcohol have been outlawed in the United States. But once a year, the population can binge all the want with no repercussions. This year, it’s happening on Christmas.

OK. Stoner comedy is a love it or hate it thing. Thankfully, while this is stoner comedy at it’s core, they layered a few things on top of it to try to open it up to people that aren’t into it.

There’s a guy, Andrew (Eduardo Franco), who has an It’s A Wonderful Life adventure with Angel (Danny Trejo). Then there’s Hags (Dexter Darden) who wants to propose to his girlfriend, Sarah (Zainne Saleh), but the ring he was going to use (given to him by Sarah’s grandmother) was accidentally donated to an orphanage and now he has to try to get it back. In attempt to attract tourism to their town, Mayor Spengler (Kaitlin Olson) got a Christmas Owl then promptly lost it so she sends her daughter, Kimmi (Marta Piekarz), to retrieve it. And all the while, the entire town is high as a kite.

All of this definitely gave Binge a little more oomph than a regular stoner comedy. I found myself laughing more than once. Sure, it was a dumb comedy but sometimes you need to sit back and laugh at an owl flying around town attacking anything it finds. So, if you are looking for something light-hearted that doesn’t require a lot of brain power to watch, this is perfect. And you just mind find yourself getting closer to your family somehow.

Scentsational Christmas | 2022 Christmas Movies

Lifetime’s Scentsational Christmas sounded stupid when I wrote it on the calendar months ago. Little did I know what I was in for.

Ellie (Nazneen Contractor) develops scents for perfumes. This year she decides to go home for Christmas to help her father with the family’s candle-making business. When she arrives home, she finds that her father has rented the cottage to Logan (Mykee Selkin), a writer who is looking for inspiration. Together, they try to find the secret to the famous Christmas scent of the holiday candle.

Not only was this a staggeringly boring movie, this was also just dumb. The big conflict comes when Ellie submits a “Christmas scent” to her boss for a famous client. Then the famous client finds out that Ellie’s family uses this “Christmas scent” in their holiday candles because Logan wrote about it on social media. While I can understand not wanting to steal a scent from another company, it’s still Ellie’s scent! They could have easily marketed this as some sort of collab between the client and the candle company. Or just use the scent for the perfume anyway. There was no reason to throw a fit over it. Guess what…there are only so many scents out there and it’s not like the client was making candles. They are completely different products.

No, don’t watch this one. The plot is dumb, the main couple has zero chemistry, and there really isn’t anything redeeming here. Throw this one out with grandma’s perfume.

Merry Textmas | 2022 Christmas Movies

Merry Textmas may be the weirdest Christmas movie I have watched this season. I’ll try to explain…

Gaby (Ariana Ron Pedrique) lives in Austin, TX and develops apps for a living. As she helps her family plan for their Christmas trip to Mexico to visit her grandmother, she accidentally adds the phone number for Alex (Rodrigo Massa) to their text chain. Since Alex was planning on spending the holiday alone, Gaby’s family invites him to go to Mexico with them.

The biggest thing I hated about this movie is the ADR. For those that don’t know, ADR (or Automated Dialogue Replacement) is when actors re-record their lines in a studio while watching their film footage. That is why you’ll get normal sounding lines then all of a sudden all of the background noise has dropped out and you can hear the actor crystal clear. They did a lot of ADR in Merry Textmas but it wasn’t done well. I don’t know if there was a lot of background noise in the scenes or someone thought the actors’ accents were too thick or what but it was very distracting.

I honestly think this movie would have been better if it was entirely in Spanish. The big conflict happens because Alex doesn’t speak Spanish but they could have easily fixed that by having him speak a different dialect of Spanish or something. Or that he speaks Spanish badly. I appreciate that, since this aired on Lifetime, they felt that it had to be mostly English but I think the movie suffered for it.

While I really want to recommend Merry Textmas, I don’t think I can. I love that it highlighted Mexican Christmas traditions but it didn’t spend nearly enough time on the traditions and the ADR was so bad. I’m sure there are better movies that show off Mexican traditions.