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!

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.

Maps and Mistletoe | 2021 Christmas Movies

Movies like Maps and Mistletoe make me think that there is no way real people have jobs like this. I know that cartographers exist. I mean, that is how we have actual maps. But they make the job feel very fake.

Cartographer Emilia (Humberly González) is tasked with making an interactive map of the North Pole for her company’s website. In order to make it more educational, her boss teams her up with world explorer, Drew (Ronnie Rowe). With her strict scheduling and his laid-back approach, will the two of them be able to get the map finished before Christmas?

I think I know why Maps and Mistletoes makes me think Emilia’s job is fake. When she’s making a map of New Zealand for her nephew, she is doing everything. The amazing artwork, the actual latitude and longitude of the map, the facts about each location. I don’t believe that one person could do all of that. At least not at the scale that she made the map. This whole project makes her seem a little too perfect. Well, except for the fact that she seems to know nothing about the North Pole.

As for Drew…I know that they are trying to make him seem like a fearless explorer. However, he’s doing dumb things for a small town. He’s laying in the middle of the street (I’m assuming without a spotter since people were calling the cops on him) and climbing buildings. I’m all for getting into weird positions in order to get the best photography shot but maybe you should figure out what you should and shouldn’t do in a small town. Or at least get yourself a spotter that can alert you when danger is nearby or if the police are coming. You know, basic safety stuff.

I don’t know that I would say Maps and Mistletoe is worth watching. Like most movies this year, there isn’t a lot of substance there. No one gets a big epiphany and the romantic leads have terrible chemistry. It is yet another “turn on for background noise” movie. I’m getting very tired of those.