Hello, and welcome back to Stereo Geeks.
We've got a new episode, and this is the second part of our Holiday Special.
I'm Mon.
And I'm Ron.
We watch so many holiday films this year, we have a lot of thoughts.
We've broken it down per platform, which hopefully makes it easier for you to find.
Anyway, let's start with the first movie that we watched this year, holiday movie that is, Dashing Through the Snow.
You and I had very different reactions to this movie.
I thought it was kind of sweet.
And I have to admit, it's nice to see a movie where an adult finds the magic of Christmas.
This was a truly terrible film.
Okay, wow.
There was no redeeming it.
It was so unfunny.
The graphics were terrible.
The performances, honestly, I don't know what happened.
The actors deserve better, but also they could have put in better.
Yeah, I just, I think the issue was that the first scene that we have set in the present, it set up this very real emotional problem that so many people are facing, especially during the holiday season.
It's such a core story.
And I just thought, oh wow, this, you know, it really got me.
And then we went into Christmas magic in Santa Claus.
So one of the things that we've realized this year while we've been watching holiday films is that you don't like Santa Claus being in the movies.
I do not.
This whole Christmas magic solving all our problems situation is ridiculous.
Who are they making these movies for?
There is no Christmas magic solving all our problems.
Such a cynic.
I am undoubtedly the wrong person to be watching Christmas movies, that's for sure.
But let's move on to another platform, Amazon.
I know that you started off with Genie.
So my streak of watching Christmas movies that I disliked intensely continued with Genie.
This was terrible.
I couldn't get into it.
It stars Melissa McCarthy as the titular Genie.
Listen, she's great, but she's doing what she usually does.
You're watching Melissa McCarthy be the best Melissa McCarthy.
It's nothing new.
And the story was, I don't know if I missed something.
I feel like there were some rules that may have been explained that either I missed, fell asleep, I don't know.
But yeah, this was just very underwhelming.
It also felt like it was trying to be Aladdin, the Disney movie.
I just don't know what happened here.
All I can say is, yeah, no.
Well, we then moved to Merry Little Batman, which is an animated film for younger audiences.
And unfortunately, it was cringy and annoying.
I really, really struggled with this one.
Who was this film for?
If you look at the artistic style, which is very specific in particular, it's not appealing to younger audiences.
It's not appealing to any audiences.
It's true.
And the story itself, who is it talking to?
I've always struggled with Damian Wayne.
I don't like him.
I don't like him in the comics.
I don't like him when I met him in other TV shows.
I just don't like him.
And in this movie, he is extremely unlikable, very frustrating to watch, and he destroys everything.
And the film tries to address the fact that he's basically being a bad guy at Christmas, but then it just kind of brushes it off.
This movie was very obviously made so that they could sucker in Batman fans.
And in the end, we realized that we were the suckers.
Because there are a lot of references to Batman properties that have come before, but some of those references just seem like plain old plagiarism.
It's true.
So shall we move on to some more interesting films?
Let's talk about Candy Cane Lane.
I'm in two minds about this film.
The first act is very real.
They deal with these real problems that the essential family is facing.
Kids are growing up.
They have their own minds.
They're making their own decisions, which don't really align with what their parents want for them or think they want for them.
The parents themselves are dealing with workplace pressures, workplace problems.
Honestly, I was just quite thrilled by what I was seeing.
And then they have this very beautiful parade of lights.
There's a scene where they're basically going down Candy Cane Lane to view all the lights in the houses.
Oh, I love that scene.
It's magical.
And then it gets weird, because this movie is about Christmas magic.
And yeah, it was weird.
It was really weird.
It lost me after that.
Maybe other people will enjoy it, but it was not for me.
Maybe I'll take a look, and we can discuss it later.
But here's a film we really did enjoy, and that was called Xmas.
I didn't think we'd like it, but oh my God, it was really funny.
This was surprisingly funny, but I have to say, a lot of the laughs came from Robbie Amell's character.
I don't know if it was because he was given the better dialogues or if it was his dialogue delivery.
We were hooting with laughter.
It was really, really funny.
I mean, the film is a rom-com.
It's set around Christmas.
Of course, it has some tropes and silliness and in general, contrivances that are completely unbelievable.
But yeah, I just enjoyed laughing so hard with this film.
It does take a surprisingly dark turn near the end.
And one of the things that we kind of keep bumping into with some of these films is that they're so white.
And this movie was very much like that.
They have one token black character, but it's really weirdly funny.
We were literally laughing out loud.
Yeah, they kind of seem to be setting up a sequel, which is weird.
I don't know how I feel about it, but maybe I'm into it.
Who knows?
Let's move on to Netflix.
So you watched The Bad Guys, A Very Bad Holiday.
I was never going to watch this.
Please tell me.
Yeah, so this is an animated spin-off of The Bad Guys film.
It's a bunch of animals who are villains, criminals.
It's a short film, and another one that seems to suggest that it'll be an annual affair.
You know what?
It wasn't bad.
It was fun.
It's a really quick 25 minutes.
I was initially worried that the sensual gimmick wouldn't work.
We are talking about villains in an animated film for kids.
How are they going to either commit crimes and make it look good, or not commit crimes and not be preachy?
But they make it work.
Kind of fun.
I'm surprised to hear that because I forgot this movie even existed.
But we did watch one of the most stressful films of the holiday season, Christmas as Usual.
Now, the funny thing about this movie is it's based on real people.
It's a real story, which actually makes me worry about them a little bit.
This was overly fraught and chaotic and hectic.
I actually didn't like this film at all.
I did like the locale.
We go to this place in Norway, you know, these beautiful landscapes, et cetera.
But I didn't like this movie.
I thought the characters were very annoying, especially with regards to food.
I actually really liked this movie.
I think maybe because it was just so different from all the other Christmas movies that you've seen.
It's about an Indian gentleman who goes to his fiance's home in Norway, except she's very resistant to telling her family that she is marrying him.
And it's very much about culture clashes.
So he makes this Indian food and they're choking and dying on it.
And he despises their pork belly.
He thinks it's bland.
So yeah, very weird stuff about food.
But I really like the specificity of the experiences in that film.
And it makes sense once you realize that it's actually based on a real couple.
But that family was hella racist.
Even that dog was racist.
As much as you want to couch it in the fact that it's based on real life, which is, you know, complicated, to say the least, I just couldn't get into this.
They were so annoying, all these people.
And when I realized that they were real, yes, you have to heighten things for story purposes.
I get it.
I'm sure people want that dramatic in real life, but I don't know.
I just didn't like these characters.
Let's move on then.
So you watched a movie called Best Christmas Ever, to segue into another film where I didn't like some of the characters.
It's not intentional.
Listen, this film, Best Christmas Ever, it's kind of sweet.
And it does deal with very human emotions and dynamics, like success, the feeling of success, lack of success, judging people, wishing to be like other people, you know?
All very real emotions.
It really fell away in the third act because Christmas magic.
It was so real before that, you know?
It just feels like they ran out of ideas and they wanted to tie it up with a nice little neat bow.
I was really disappointed in how it ended.
That being said, the movie stars Heather Graham, who I haven't seen in a long time, so that was nice.
And it also stars Brandy, who has a few songs in there.
So it's really nice because I've forgotten how beautiful her voice is.
Honestly, the magical part is listening to her voice.
I don't know why they didn't just stick to that.
Oh, fascinating.
I might actually check it out.
So I got a movie called Holiday in the Vineyards.
It was kind of amusing at first.
The main actor, his name is Josh Swickard.
I've never seen him before, but he was really funny initially.
It's basically about this rich guy who's trying to buy up this vineyard for his mother.
He goes undercover and ends up falling in love with the widow he's staying with.
And she's played by Sol Rodriguez, who was Teresa on Picard season 2.
It's very weird how similar her character is to Teresa.
Did they just make the story about Teresa?
For the most part, it was okay, but I hate to say this, but once the romance started, it just became kind of dull.
In all honesty, the romance is based on a lie.
I don't see how that's going to pan out well in the future.
Well, that's how every Disney movie turns out, so it's okay.
I'm being sarcastic in case anybody's wondering.
The one and only holiday film that we caught on own was The Christmas Detective.
I thought this film was delightful.
I agree with you, it was delightful.
I think that it has a lot to do with the fact that the detective story was the central focus and not the romance.
I also think it helps that Javicia Leslie is the protagonist of this film.
She is so charming, so normal and real.
She has this easygoing persona that really worked with this film.
Because the film is not really very high stakes, a little bit, but not too much.
Most of the pressure that the characters are feeling is really like internal, personal pressure that they're putting on themselves.
I really like that.
She works so well, has this sort of quirky, interesting, nosy sort of character.
It was really good fun.
Yeah, you've got these Christmas aesthetics, but it's basically a mystery.
So what's not to love?
But the majority of our holiday watching was, of course, on Hallmark.
Now, I started off with a film called Christmas in Notting Hill.
Very, very low stakes.
It's about this footballer and this teacher who meet in England, and he's apparently an English footballer, but she's a teacher from America.
She doesn't know anything about football, so she doesn't know that he's this, you know, famous guy.
And it's funny because it kind of reminded me of the story of how Glenn McGrath met his wife, and they were in some other country, and people just kept coming up and saying hi to him, and she was like, oh, he's like a really popular guy here. And later on, she found out that he's actually an Australian cricketer.
So I like that.
But the meet-cute in this film is that he bumps into her and breaks a sentimental ornament.
I'm sorry, but I don't care what the person looks like.
That's a complete no-no.
But because he looks like William Moseley, the lady completely loses her mind and decides that she's in love with him.
Anyway, it was okay to have on in the background a good starting point for the Christmas season of 2023.
But there was one bit in the film that was a little bit different.
There was this part where the two main characters are trying to do a Secret Santa, and it's like it was completely from a different film.
It was directed so well, and it was so exciting.
I wish the rest of the film had been like that.
The rest of it was just a Hallmark movie.
I've never seen a Secret Santa in a film.
I'd love to watch that.
So another film that we kind of just ended up watching was Christmas with a Kiss.
This is a very traditional love triangle story.
I find those very difficult to watch.
Yeah, this was a bit cringey.
I like that this is a very hallmark film with all the hallmarks of a Hallmark film.
But the central characters are mostly a Black family and their community.
But I don't know, it was just so tropey and so quintessentially Hallmark.
I was like, please, at least we are away from something.
So the protagonist is this influencer based in the big city.
And of course, her story needs to be that she's not happy there and she's lonely.
So she needs to come back to her hometown and take over the family business because that's the only way that she'll find love and happiness.
I don't know why Hallmark movies insist on doing this because it's so unrealistic.
Not all big cities are bad and they're not all bad for all the people.
It's just so trying to keep watching it.
I guess it was a novelty when it first started, but now we've only watched these hallmark movies for like three years running, and I'm already tired of this trope.
I think one of the reasons why we ended up watching Christmas with a Kiss was because of Ronnie Rowe, who we used to watch in Star Trek Discovery.
He was very good in it, but his character is kind of weird.
It was hot and cold with that guy.
One minute he's like the sweetest person ever, and then he makes some judgmental comment, and you're like, go away.
I don't think that helped, because you have to have consistency of characterization, not saying people aren't complicated, etc.
Are they doing something which is completely irredeemable?
Is that a character trait, or is that something that just was, you know, something out of character?
You have to think about that.
Maybe we're thinking too much.
It is a Hallmark film.
We're thinking too much into it.
It's not that deep.
The next film did have Santa Claus in it.
Catch Me If You Claus.
What did you think?
That was a no from me.
I'm sorry.
Santa is hot and he's part of the romance.
This movie was somehow overly convoluted and boring.
That was my problem with this movie.
Why was it so dull?
It had a good premise.
Santa Claus' son is now taking over and he's doing a very bad job.
He's also played by Luke McFarlane, who is basically a staple of Christmas movies.
We know that now.
And they have this big mystery of how they're supposed to stop these bad guys and deliver all these Christmas presents.
And somehow it is so slow, so dull, so badly paced.
I couldn't wait for this movie to finish.
Which is a shame because I felt like it was better acted than the usual Hallmark film.
But unfortunately, I just could not, with the second act dragging as long as it did, with all these random things thrown in.
And also, we kind of figured out the reveal a long time before the characters did.
So when it happens in film, you're like, okay.
And Italia Ritchie and Luke McFarlane have so much chemistry, but it seems like they had a very small budget because there were like three sets perhaps, seven for the most part, and they didn't have anything to play with.
I don't know why they made this film like that.
Fun fact, Italia Ritchie, who is the star of Catch Me If You Claus, is the wife of Robbie Amell, who was the star of Ex-Mas.
And their movies premiered on the same day.
Oh, that's funny.
So here's a movie that was slightly different.
It's called Round and Round.
Not a Christmas film, but a Hanukkah film.
I thought that was a really good idea because I have not been able to catch a Hanukkah film before.
So this movie uses the time loop as a central gimmick.
I love time travel.
Obviously, I was going to watch this movie.
The bits that I liked in this film were all the traditions that are observed during Hanukkah.
Those are very interesting.
I really liked being able to see those.
I feel like I would have liked a bit more.
But there's this weird throughline about women not being into geeky stuff, which felt so 90s.
In 2023, it does not make sense.
I'm pretty sure half the audience for Marvel movies and video games are women and queer people.
And let's not forget, women are the reason why Star Trek still exists.
If you look through our entire episode list, you'll see that Ron and Mon definitely like their geeky stuff.
So I just couldn't get past that bit.
It just bothered me a lot.
And also, this is something that I just struggle with = time loop stories which have romances in them.
There's something so unbalanced.
One person knows everything about their love interest.
The love interest doesn't even know this person exists.
How can that be a love story?
It's what bothered me about Groundhog Day.
It's what bothered me when I was watching About Time.
And Round and Round does the same thing.
It does try and question that, but it's literally the last scene and it's just brushed off.
Oh, that's disappointing.
Now, this year, I tried something different.
I watched two horror movies set during Christmas time.
The first one I watched, It's a Wonderful Knife.
Now, from the title, you can tell that it's somewhat related to It's a Wonderful Life.
In this film, a young woman manages to stop a serial killer, but she's not particularly happy after the whole thing goes down.
She's lost her best friend.
She's the only one who seems to be pining for everything that went down.
Everybody else has moved on, and she's like, there was a serial killer.
How is everybody okay with just living life?
Also, she's kind of obviously not the favorite child in her household.
So she wishes to the stars about not being born, and that's exactly what happens.
So she ends up in this alternate universe, where, because she wasn't there, the slasher continued slashing.
So many people are dead, including her beloved brother.
It's up to her to save the town and stop the killer, which is not very easy because she doesn't exist.
I love this movie.
I am so surprised because I don't really like horror movies and slasher films especially, but this was an amazing concept.
It was really sweet at times because there was this slow burn queer romance.
It was just thoroughly enjoyable.
I'm highly recommending it.
Well, that's different.
I would love to watch it, but slashers and horrors, they keep me up at night, but I'm so tempted now.
I will say that there isn't as much gore in this film.
There are a few moments, obviously, where there's some blood, but it's not as bad as you would expect.
Maybe give it a watch?
Close your eyes.
But another horror movie that I just couldn't get through was called The Sacrifice Game.
I watched this because Mena Massoud was in it.
He was excellent.
He was really, really terrifying.
But it was just too gory for me.
There are certain kinds of gore that after a while I just can't, and then it kind of goes into this satanic ritual thing, which, I'm sorry, I just found it so cringe.
They were trying so hard.
The actors are doing such an amazing job, and I was just like, I can't, it's so cringe.
So, I'm sorry, actors involved in this movie.
Y'all did a good job, but I just couldn't.
Okay, well, now we can come back to something normal.
We watched two other Hallmark movies, and these are two queer movies, which, as we said, Hallmark only started doing these recently.
So, the first one that we watched was Christmas on Cherry Lane.
It's three different stories centering different families, and we find out along the way how these three families are connected.
I think this was my favorite Christmas film of this year.
I loved the concept, I loved the families in it.
I felt like the stakes weren't very high, but they were so personal, and I really liked how they kept dropping these little Easter eggs, and then you'd see the connection later on.
It was really surprisingly complex for a Hallmark movie, and I think that's how it worked, because we went in there with pretty low expectations, and it turned out to be extremely good.
Yeah, it was really sweet and charming, I will say.
I think it's time for Jonathan Bennett's Christmas characters to move away from the whole adoption storyline.
He's had three in a row now.
We can do something different.
But in general, it was really charming, quite emotional from time to time.
But what I liked most about this film was that it had a lot of singing interludes, and they were singing these Christmas songs that we know and love.
It really brought that Christmas feeling.
A lot of these films, they just...
I don't know if they don't have the rights or what.
They don't actually use Christmas songs, Christmas carols, etc. even in the background.
So this one, which really hopped on about this is Christmas, the importance of Christmas, this is the feeling of Christmas.
I just really, really loved that.
Honestly, this was a surprise, but I just enjoyed it so much.
Highly recommend this film.
And one of the reasons why I think we enjoyed it was because this film had relationships that were already established.
One of the things that we struggled with Hallmark films is that there's a lot of messiness involved in the whole falling in love for the first time with somebody aspect.
And this movie just does away with that because these are all relationships that have existed for a while.
And we're coming into the middle of the story.
I think Hallmark needs to do more of that.
Yeah, and the last film that we watched was Friends and Family Christmas.
This is a little bit more regular Hallmark.
Two people brought together, find a connection, something gets in the way of that connection, and then how does it all end?
Very sweet, very charming.
I kind of believe these two people coming together and kind of rooting for their romance, because even though they didn't have the greatest chemistry, I think it really worked as a story.
Yeah, this was a lot of fun, actually.
I thought this was a really, really cute queer film.
It's not super white, thank goodness.
There was some amount of chemistry between the actors, and in all honesty, the whole fake dating trope, people love it.
It's a huge thing in fan fiction, and in a queer romance, oh my God, I'm surprised more people aren't talking about this film.
And you know what, I think the other reason why this film kind of worked was because you got to see a little bit about their lives beyond the romance, and their families, and their work.
There's a lot of that in it.
It's kind of like a sticking point for the queer couple, but it just ended up being really cute and very warm and fuzzy.
And that's a nice way for us to end this episode.
Thank you for joining us for our two-part Christmas special.
See you next time.
You can find us on Twitter at Stereo-geeks, or send us an email at stereogeekspodcast.gmail.com.
We hope you enjoyed this episode, and see you next week.
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