Ugh, Christmas puns. It’s the worst part of the Christmas movies. See, it’s A Picture Perfect Holiday because they are photographers! Get it? Groan.
Gaby (Tatyana Ali) is a fashion photographer looking to nab a permanent position at a fashion magazine. For some reason, Leila (Dina Meyer), her former teacher and a current editor at the magazine, sends Gaby on a Christmas Photography Retreat to try to make her photography more emotional. When Gaby arrives, she finds that the cabin she booked has been double booked. She will have to share the house with wildlife photographer, Sean (Henderson Wade). The two photographers teach each other new things about their art and fall in love along the way.
Well, I will give this movie one thing - it has photography. And we actually get to see some of the photographic results! But that is probably the best thing about the movie. Gaby and Sean are very boring people. She likes black coffee, he likes hot chocolate. She doesn’t like Christmas, he lives for it. She doesn’t eat breakfast, he likes cooking large elaborate breakfasts. We have seen this so many times.
This movie should have been about Dani (Paula Andrea Placido) and Amelia (Rivkah Reyes). They are a lesbian couple waiting for the perfect moment to propose to each other. It would have been awesome to see all of the almost-proposals since neither of them know the other is planning on proposing. To see the look on Amelia’s face when Dani starts to propose but gets interrupted by something or to see each of them trying to find the perfect spot without letting the other one know what they are doing. That would have been much more interesting! But, no, we’re stuck with Dull and Boring.
Is A Picture Perfect Holiday worth watching? Not really. This is yet another ‘turn it on and do something else’ type of movie. I do want a sequel about Dani and Amelia’s wedding though. Maybe they can make it a sort of anthology of them telling stories and showing pictures of their life story. That would be cool.