PixlBit

I didn't have very high hopes for A Holiday for Love (1996). I was pretty sure I was getting a Hallmark channel-style movie love story taking place in the backdrop of the holiday. I didn't think it would live up to the standards set by Home Alone and Jingle All the Way, but it wasn't even trying.

It tries to be more than a love story, but falls flat. Big business vs small town values clash when a tractor company CEO decides to send boardroom representatives(?) to covertly check on factories in flyover country to decide how to best downsize jobs and save the company. Jake (Tim Matheson, Animal House) has a heart, and doesn't want to ruin his former hometown, but the Picard-esque CEO tells him that he has to make difficult decisions if he ever wants to be CEO. And it was so.

The movie makes no attempt to transition to different locations. The opening shot pans across miniature Christmas decorations when one of them gets grabbed by an unseen thief(?) and country music plays, so you assume it's in the country; then we see big city buildings and the boardroom conversation plays out (back to some unnamed city?); when Jake is sent out, the opening shot pans away from some corn stalks, so it means he's made it to the small town in the country. City, country, city, country. It's a little bit disorienting, or maybe my attention span is short.

Before leaving on his job-killing mission, Jake is seen at home sulking over his yearbook, where a woman in red pajamas(?) asks “Ever wonder what you would've become if you stayed?” Who is this person? His wife? GF? We never hear from her again, but we're expected to believe that Jake later falls in love with country girl. CUZ IT'S ON THE BOXART.

 

 

I guess it's ok to cheat on your significant other if you fall in truer-love with another person. That's a great Christmas message that more modern movies like Elf or The Santa Clause 3 should have tackled.

So then country girl Emma (Melissa Gilbert, Little House on the Prairie) catches Jake breaking into a nearby house trying to find shelter during the blizzard. She orders him into her home at the butt of a shotgun while she calls the sheriff (her fiancee). Since it's too stormy, he has to stay over. Later they bond over a heartwarming story of how her husband died in a car accident, and they live happily ever after.

Wrong. The movie has barely started. Jake and Emma go on another date(?): he pushes her on a swing in a snowy area (yes, on a swingset), they skate on a 6x6 foot skating "rink" (in slow motion), then the topper: a romantic horse and carriage ride. I was bustin up laughing at this point; how do chicks watch this stuff with a straight face? I thought that the mining of cliches had finally reached rock bottom, but it simply changes drill bits and continues boring all the way to the earth's core. Jake falls off a tractor, injures himself, and has Emma bandage his shirtless chest at home. Woooo. It's gettin' steamy.

Of course the fiancee-sheriff arrives right at this moment to catch them in the act (of bandaging his wound), and it later throws him into a pathetic, impotent state of... disappointment.

I'm sure you were picturing a steely, tough guy sheriff. A man of authority and seriousness that comes with the badge; you could not be further off base.

 

 

Mulleted Sheriff Tom Uhll (Travis Tritt) makes one of the most heinously unromantic actions I think I've ever seen. I almost had to rewind it because it left me in total shock: he grabs her by the hand and whisks her away to...........a prison cell...........unlocks it, sets her down on the bench (ew), gets on one knee and demands that she set a date for their wedding.

Emma: “We have such a good friendship... Let's not mess that up.”

At another point he tells her, “Just cause he's different doesn't make him better!” Self-emasculation at its best. What an abysmal character to put in a movie.

But there is more terribleness to go. The movie jumps from one extreme to another. One minute Jake's the town hero, then everyone knows the truth about him and hates him; the waitress makes a mess of his coffee and the hotel housekeeper tells him to make up his own room. Ooh, that'll show him. Emma's daughter (Michelle Trachtenberg, Inspector Gadget) gives her mother earrings for Christmas, but then she immediately tells her that she will need to take them back so they can have the money to make it through the holidays. What a total downer. When Jake returns at the end to the town dinner, he learns that the thief from the beginning of the movie (one of the old guys in the choir?) is actually his long lost father.

My heartstrings have already been pulled in a dozen directions at this point that they're a tangled web of a mess that can't respond to this sudden revelation with the necessary excitement. I feel like Data wanting to deactivate his emotion chip; I wish my solution were as simple as an android's. I begin to daydream about performing open-heart surgery on myself and cutting these strings out once and for all.

"Chainsaw or hedge trimmmers?" I wonder.

I soon conclude that heavy-duty scissors would be ideal so that I wouldn't need to drag out the extension cord from the garage.

Over the course of 90 minutes I ended up hating corporations and small town inhabitants, romance, old people, police, Christmas, snow, tractors, and mullets. Just stay away the heck away from this movie.