MichaelByTheSea

I'd probably rate this lower without Amy Groening but she just lights up the screen. I have wanted this for years. Amy Groening has long deserved to be a lead in her own Hallmark movie and here she gets to play Jesse, who runs some sort of "global fiber optics marketing team" (consisting of 4 people with whom she has a virtual Christmas party on her laptop). For reasons that aren't clear, her family is planning to cancel a holiday tradition of family competitions unless she brings a boyfriend home for the holidays.

After a series of laughably bad dates, Jesse gets on a dating app and specifically tries to find a date for Christmas Eve. She matches with Bryan, the new heir to a development company, nicely played by Robert Buckley. He has no family and thinks spending Christmas Eve with a pretty stranger's family would be an interesting alternative to spending the day alone. They end up having plenty of chemistry but there's a somewhat tiresome big bad developer coincidence that's been played out way too many times.

I love small town charms as much as the next Hallmark fan, but a stand alone candle store? In 2024? With Amazon, supermarkets, and gift stores that sell a lot more than candles? It just seems like a very challenging business model. And yet they didn't seem to be in financial distress. But somehow the big cloud hanging over the movie is how Bryan's company plans to send the owner "an eviction letter" on Christmas Eve by email that requires them to vacate by January 1st. I'm a lawyer. That's not how commercial leases work.

But Amy Groening is adorable and her easy going interactions with everyone, especially Bryan, make this worth watching.

I hope Hallmark makes more movies with her as the lead. She is simply wonderful.

On the Hallmark scale, this is a solid 10. Rachel Skarsten has been in two of my favorite Hallmark movies. I loved "Royal Nanny" and "Timeless Love" and "Christmas Island" was also pretty good (mostly because of Skarsten and Walker).

Rachel Skarsten is an interesting actress. She's beautiful, but not in a way that you can't picture her walking around in everyday life. She's very expressive, and it's fun to watch her face react to a scene. As Whitney, a librarian jolted out of an ordinary life and saved from what was likely to be a less than inspiring date, Skarsten is a perfect blend of strength, uncertainty, courage, and vulnerability.

I wasn't a fan of Corey Sevier at first, but over the course of several very good movies he has won me over. He's perfect as Josh, an undercover FBI agent with no life. He has no family and apparently no friends and Sevier really captures the sadness of this man's life. There's a poignant moment during a beautifully filmed charades game when Josh really sees what he's been missing and it gutted me. In that moment, he embodied so many lonely people in the world who, sadly, know all too well what they are missing.

It's worth noting that this very entertaining movie was directed by Corey Sevier and he nailed it. It was written by Kate Pragnell who also wrote last year's very enjoyable "Take Me Back For Christmas."

There's lots of fun moments, including a shout out to "Die Hard" (the air vent scene) and a brave recognition that "Die Hard" really is the best "Christmas" movie (no doubt reigniting that debate in many households). I also loved the hot tango scene. There's also a lively scene with the wonderful Jayne Eastwood who plays a jeweler who can apparently make anything in just a few hours.

Unfortunately, the security for the Heart of Christmas necklace seems to have been provided by a hungry crew from Keystone Klowns Security. Don't come looking for realism here (there are some rope rappelling sequences that also defy reality). But, let's face it, nobody demands realism from Tom Cruise's "Mission Impossible" movies so why expect that in a Hallmark adventure movie? The light FBI procedural structure here worked well enough for a Hallmark romance.

The plot has a few twists and it's all a fun and refreshing change of pace for a Hallmark Christmas romance.

And these days, anything with Rachel Skarsten is automatically worth watching.

Jocelyn Hudon is a very beguiling, bright and beautiful actress who shines as Luna, a former dancer trying to replace an aerial gymnast who dropped out of The Small Town Festival just 6 weeks away. The role of a former dancer wasn't a stretch for her given that she actually trained and performed at the National Ballet School of Canada starting when she was eleven.

Luna is paired with Bennett, an Olympic gymnast and professional aerialist who has been performing around the world with Cirque du Reve (a fictional Cirque du Soleil). Bennett is played by Oliver Renaud who actually did perform with the real Cirque du Soleil. He's lost his partner and the script would have us believe that a former dancer, who's spent the last few years working in her family's construction business, could learn to be a world class aerial gymnast in just 6 weeks. Maybe. The real Cirque du Soleil has an intensive training program that lasts at least 3-4 months.

As is often the case with these kinds of movies, the Big Festival is presented as having some sort of monumental significance when, in fact, it's just a small town festival. When it finally happened, it didn't look like more than a few dozen people showed up to watch. But Luna and Bennett's festival performance was actually pretty good.

Along the way, a small town reporter for a small town paper (Hazleton Weekly) inexplicably turns a puff piece about the up coming local festival into a bitter critique based on a preview she should never have seen. That would never happen and it bothered me. It was the kind of unrealistic plot development just added to create conflict and tension.

I had to look up the actress who played Luna's mom (Tonya Clarke) because she seemed too young and pretty to be Luna's mom. But she's 52 and has some nice scenes being very supportive of her daughter's dreams. I liked her even though I was a bit confused by the family's construction business. It seemed to consist of no one other than Luna, her brother and her mother and father. They're very excited and very busy about getting the contract for the festival but I never saw anything that they did in connection with that contract. And what would the festival need constructed? The Big Performance took place inside an existing theater.

This movie had one of my least favorite Hallmark tropes (the interrupted kiss) but Luna and Bennett's actual first kiss was pretty memorable.

Overall, the movie was just OK. I would probably rate this a 5 or 6 in most cases but I bumped it to 7 stars because I like Jocelyn Hudon.