Further evidencing Netflix’s desire to diversify the Christmas romance blueprint, 2018’s The Holiday Calendar brings another original high concept to hang our stockings on. Lonely Abby (Kat Graham)’s magical, toy-filled antique advent calendar gives her a new trinket each day that predicts her future and her love life. Sadly, this original idea leads to another aggressively bland romcom, albeit a supernatural, magic-tinged one.
I’m starting to understand why Netflix romantic holiday movies have become such a big hit these last few years - they play things really safe, making films that act as a warm assuring blanket during the coldest season but are also just edgy enough to distinguish them from the identikit Hallmark crowd. Judging by social media reactions to a lot of these films, people seem to be enjoying them ironically. I recall a friend posting about this on Facebook explaining “It’s so awful - but I love it!”
Something about this chilliest of seasons makes a lot of people seek comfort in vanilla, humdrum naffness. I’m sure that watching one or two of these things each December is fine. However, in my experience, I would not recommend binge-watching all of them. I find myself shouting “oh, bugger off!” quite a few times during this, as there’s only so much formulaic lovey-dovey mushiness a guy can take.
Anyway, Abby is a struggling photographer who is the only person who doesn’t notice that co-worker Josh (Quincy Brown) is clearly her soulmate. With the help of the mysterious, mystic advent calendar, she will piss about for ninety minutes before realising that true love was under her nose all along. It’s all about the journey, you see. So, every day in December a door on the calendar opens and reveals clues about where she’ll find true love. A little Christmas tree signposts a red herring meet-cute with hunky doctor Ty (Ethan Peck) after a fir-tree related auto-accident. That sort of thing.
Abby, of course, reads the signs all wrong, convincing herself that decent-seeming Ty must be ‘The One’, though we, as movie-goers, know he is too good to be true and there will inevitably turn out to be a dick.
It’s a cool film in that it’s really racially diverse - Abby is mixed race and her buddies are all of various ethnic backgrounds. I shouldn’t need to say it but it’s really nice to see a film that doesn’t make too big a deal about romantic couples being of different races either. I would say well done Netflix if it didn’t faintly smell of a cynical attempt to tick as many audience-pleasing boxes as possible.
If you’re the sort of person who enjoys these sorts of films ironically and can do so without shouting at the telly, then you’ll probably go gaga for this. Me? I’ve already forgotten most of what happened, aside from the fact that Dr Ty had a James Earl Jones-type voice that seemed about three octaves too low for his skinny white body. Weird, but very cool.
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