CHRISTMAS AT CARTWRIGHT'S (2014)

"Christmas is about profit and numbers."

Alicia Witt is unemployed as fuck, broke as fuck and fucked as fuck cuz she cannot pay her rent, she has a super annoying kid she has to provide for and it's Christmas. But wait a minute cause undercover angel Wallace Shawn performs some olde tyme Christmas angel witchcraft and gets Alicia a job as a store Santa at the prestigious Cartwright’s department store. Oooooooooooh! Fancy. Now you might be asking yourself: how does the payroll and tax stuff work with a woman secretly acting as a dude at a job where literally nobody knows her secret…and you might even be curious how she was able to pay her overdue back-rent after only being on the job for like three days, but, you see, you’re thinking too much! This is a Hallmark movie, motherfucker! Relax. Take your big, ol’ overheated noodle and put it on a shelf and quit thinking. If you do insist on thinking while you watch this upbeat motherfucker, think about how easy (and fun) it would be to re-edit this into a horror movie. Example: Wallace Shawn isn't an actual angel...he's just fucking crazy.

As much as I would like to be a Hallmark movie expert, I’m not (since I don’t come across the DVD’s that much), but I have thoroughly enjoyed the ones that I have seen. CHRISTMAS AT CARTWRIGHT'S is no different. It’s awesome. The story is predictable as fuck, the acting is all over the place (especially by the background actors), the annoying child character is easily the most emotionally mature character in the entire film (despite the fact that she cannot spell the words “blue” or “night”), the production design and sets looks interchangeable with other Hallmark films and the positivity! Oh my god. The shit is off the scales! I think I talked back to the television for the entire movie. At one point towards the end, I remember standing straight up and yelling “This fucking movie!!!” with my left arm out. Haha. I was seriously getting upset with the two main characters not hooking up.

Overall, I really enjoyed CHRISTMAS AT CARTWRIGHT'S and was surprised at how much I enjoyed Alicia Witt’s overacting. Especially all the funny faces she made. It was awesome. Even if her hair was too short. I also really liked Gabriel Hogan. He had a playful demeanor that I thought was cute. His hair was okay.

Now that I think about it, I don't remember seeing any horrible jackets in this movie. That seemed to be a running theme in the couple of films that I saw in the MYSTERY 101 and CHRISTMAS IN EVERGREEN series. I thought that might be a Hallmark, uhhh, hallmark.

[Not part of the review: Cerealously though, if anybody has some Hallmark discs, send them my way.]

Oh fuck...I was just going back and watching it again and I remember in the scene were the kid cannot spell "blue" in class, right when she got it wrong, I said "Stupid!" and at the exact same moment the kid sitting behind her said "Dummy." hahahaha, oh shit I was dying.

H (2002)

There’s a new copycat killer in town. Meow! So instead of assigning a team of professional homicide detectives to the case, the local police put together a team of highly emotional chain smokers. At the same time, the original murderer sits on death row acting like a smug douche.

I’m always interested in finding new films and artistic visions, but honestly, I would have probably been better off watching two old episodes of Dexter than wasting my time on H. Although I did get a chuckle out of the one cop who encounters two other cars on the road so he drives his whip straight into a pole. That was funny. As far as serious entertainment goes, H is a total bust. The entire story is lifted from numerous other serial killer cop thrillers and the big payoff at the end is dumb as hell.

Okay acting, shit script, meddling pace, damn near worthless detective investigation, lots of smoking, emotional outbursts left and right, zero thrillers, a little bit of blood, zero time travel, zero likable characters, zero cheerleaders, one detective who falls down at least three different times. I somehow managed to stay awake for the entire film, but afterward I wished I had taken a nap instead.

Skip it with a vengeance.

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Oh shit. I was going through my stuff after I wrote the review above and discovered I reviewed this movie elsewhere back in 2005. Here is the full review, totally unedited. (I did add in the links to older reviews.) It's okay:

Along came a stinker.

Anybody who falls for the cover blurb "SEVEN meets SILENCE OF THE LAMBS" is gonna be disappointed...kinda like me.

Nicely filmed and that's about it H is the clunky, unexciting tale of a copycat serial killer who's reenacting the grisly murders of another killer who was arrested 10 months earlier. Very interesting idea.

Now enter the world's most inept cops. First you got Kang who in every single scene freaks out in some way and either kicks something, breathes heavy, screams, wrecks his car or all of the above. His partner, Kim, has a haircut like Mia Farrow in ROSEMARY'S BABY and the personality of the wooden Indian in CREEPSHOW 2. She also likes to disrupt crime scenes, stare blankly and punch or shoot Kang.

I wanted to like the film. I was all excited and happy for about the first minute and forty seconds then Kang showed up and it all went downhill from there. On the bright side I did learn that if I ever want to head up a surprise raid on a serial killer's house to NOT land a helicopter in his front yard first.

OCEAN'S ELEVEN (2001)

A professional criminal, Danny Ocean (George Clooney), comes up with an idea to simultaneously rob three large casinos in Las Vegas of around 150 million dollars in cold hard cash money duckets cheddar. Naturally, in order to do this, he will need ten of his trendiest and dorkiest friends. You got the one guy with the computers and the other guy who’s good at the thing and the one guy with perhaps the most distractingly bad British accent in movie history. You catch what me drippin', guvna? Oh yeah, the casinos are all owned by the guy (Andy Garcia) who is now long-dicking Ocean’s ex-wife, Julia Roberts. Imagine that.

Every time I sit down to watch OCEAN’S ELEVEN I end up watching part 2 and 3 also. I think my handsome brain just sees all three of them as one singular six-hour movie. The entire series really is super enjoyable junk food for the brain. Solid acting by the entire cast, a goofy story that’s about as believable as the Book of Genesis, not as many location shots of Las Vegas as I wanted, zero nudity, zero cheerleaders, two bumbling Oceaners who bicker back and forth so much that you wanna bash their skulls together like in HELLRAISER: BLOODLINES, a two-hour runtime that flies by and leaves you wanting more, lots of goofy dialogue that super fun to laugh at, confident direction.

As far as dude-centric, early 2000's American heist films go, OCEAN'S ELEVEN is one of the better ones. It's a good comfort movie to have playing in the background. I wish the people behind the movie would edit together a six-hour supercut of all three films. That way when you're playing it you don't have to flip over to the next film.

Original - Ocean's 11 (1960)
Part 2 - Ocean's Twelve (2004)
Part 3 - Ocean's Thirteen (2007)
Spin-off - Ocean's Eight (2018)