Hallmark Christmas Miscellanea Watch: A Grand Ole Opry Christmas (2025) and Christmas at the Catnip Cafe (2025)

Watched:  11/30 and 12/1/2025

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  First for both

Director:  AGOOC - Clare Niederpruem / CatCC - Lucie Guest

Sunday we decided to lean into the Hallmark Season with their big dollar movie, A Grand Ole Opry Christmas (2025) and Monday I was doing other things and we let play Christmas at the Catnip Cafe (2025).  And it was a study in where Hallmark is going in 2025 with a more ambitious, less-boilerplate film versus classic Hallmark formula.

A Grand Ole Opry Christmas was a sincere time-travel movie about a woman (Nikki Deloach) whose father was a 90's country star in a Brooks and Dunn model, but he threw in the towel and quit making music.  A few years later he died, and she doesn't know why he quit making music.  She, and her best friend (Kristoffer Polaha), are transported to the mid-90's via Christmas/ Grand Ole Opry magic to learn what happened.  

Mean, Christmas at the Catnip Cafe is about a big city marketing exec (Erin Cahill) who inherits half of a cat cafe in small town upstate New York.  The other half is owned by an overworked veterinarian (Paul Campbell).  She wants to sell to buy a condo in LA.  He wants to keep his cafe open.  But they mutually wish to get to business time.

RomCom Watch: Happiness for Beginners (2023)

Watched:  11/30/2205

Format:  Netflix

Viewing:  First

Director:  Vicky Wight

We watched Happiness for Beginners (2023) because Jamie had read the book and wanted to check out how it was turned it into a film.  And because Jamie watches so much nonsense of my choosing, I wished to be flexible and watch a movie about Eat, Pray, Loving one's way through a long hike.  Plus, Ellie Kemper is fun.

And, yeah, I am very glad Ellie Kemper got a movie as a lead and was able to show some star quality other than making mad bank as Kohl's Mom.  I've mostly seen her play "wacky" and this wasn't really that.  Here, she's a woman in her 30's who just wrapped up a divorce and decides to go on the aforementioned days-long hike on the Appalachian Trail.  

Helen (Kemper) is accidentally joined by her younger brother's best friend, Jake (Luke Grimes) who accidentally also signed up for the same hike, and along the way she learns, laughs and loves, and the two hook up at the film's end.  Shocker.  (You will know this in the first five minutes of the movie.  This is a spoiler only if you have amnesia that makes you forget how every movie, ever, worked.)

Neo-Noirvember Chabert Watch: The Pleasure Drivers (2006)

Watched:  11/29/2025

Format:  DVD

Viewing:  First

Director:  Andrzej Sekula

Editor's note:  we've decided to Thelma and Louise our way through the remaining Chabert filmography.  I've been looking to see if I can find the Chabert films I haven't seen yet via very cheap used copies or online one way or another.  This one set me back about $5.

Truly a product of a particular decade, somehow The Pleasure Drivers (2006) arrived about seven years after that decade.  It's another LA-based low-budget crime movie, with this one peppering itself with vague philosophical aspirations, but what they are saying lacks any insight and is dumb.  And, the movie is entirely populated by characters who take their cues from how human beings behave from other movies, leaving us with weird third-generation xeroxes of motivation instead of anything identifiable as human.  

Everything about the film feels late-90's, part of the post Pulp Fiction indie boom.  It's three stories that loosely intertwine, and, of course, collide at the end.  But none of the three stories is very interesting and none of the characters terribly watchable.  

Noirvember Watch: Saigon (1947)

Watched:  11/27/2025

Format:  BluRay

Viewing:  First

Director:  Leslie Fenton

I was pretty psyched to see a new-to-me movie starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake.  And one that was set in a post-WWII Saigon.  I was very curious how they'd handle the dynamics of the French colonialism, Japanese occupation, rise of Communism, etc...  

Well, the answer is, none of that comes up.  In fact, I don't think there's a single Vietnamese person in this movie.  That's... wild.

I *do* like the basic idea of the plot.  

Three Army Air Corp soldiers in post-War China are getting discharged.  One of them doesn't know he has only 2-3 months to live due to an ailment (cancer?  something else?) but will likely just die suddenly.  So, the other two decide to show him the time of his life, which they can do if they take a lucrative but shady gig flying a businessman from Shanghai to Saigon.  

But when they go to get the plane and fly him out, the cops stop the businessman, while his secretary, Veronica Lake, jumps in the plane and they fly off.  The plane crashes in Vietnam, and they make their way to Saigon.  Along the way, the dying man falls for Lake (reasonable) while she spars with Alan Ladd.

Oh, and she has a briefcase full of cash.

And, as Lake humors the dying guy, she and Ladd start to fall for each other.

Anyway, it's super weird.  They treat it as if everyone in Vietnam is French?  Or vaguely European?  There's only one Asian person in the movie at the very beginning who sounds very Southern Californian.  

The movie is fine.  It'll never be a favorite, but when I was thinking "I don't think this is working", it kind of changed directions a few times and saved itself.  It fits into that "it's fine" category, but closer to "it's good".  But I just wasn't 100% on board.  But I maybe need to give it another shot.

Hallmark Holiday Watch: Holiday Touchdown - a Bills Love Story (2025)

Watched:  11/25/2025

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  First

Director:  Dustin Rikert

So, for reasons beyond my understanding, the NFL has entered into an alliance with Hallmark to produce movies about super-fans of their teams falling in love at Christmas.  

In no way will this get repetitive after 32 movies.

Despite some real star-power (for Hallmark) the first movie was a complete mess.  And I expected more-of-same.

Holiday Touchdown: a Bills Love Story (2025) actually solved some of the issues of the first movie but then blew my mind by trying to create a sort of MCU of NFL-themed movies by showing the characters from the first movie in this one.  And the magical Santa is in this one mucking with people's lives.

The last movie had some star power with Diedrich Bader, Richard Riehle, Ed Begley Jr., Christine Ebersole, et al.  What it didn't really have was much actual representation by the Chiefs players.  

This one had Joey Pantoliano playing a version of himself as a wacky uncle.  Our stars are Woman (Holland Roden) and Man (Matthew Daddario, who I didn't know, but people keep fan-casting his sister as Wonder Woman, and... fair).  They're childhood friends and neighbors, and the running gag is everyone knows he's pining for Woman.

There's lot of Bills-specific humor which I vaguely get, and lots of regional-specific stuff, which did not lose me, but sure felt like them making sure we knew they were in Buffalo and not doing the usual "we filmed in Vancouver, but please believe this is Arizona" thing Hallmark will do.

The pair find out Joey Pants has been receiving gifts every year from an anonymous source, going back to when he was drafted and this same anonymous person also sent his family groceries and money.  The movie is them solving the mystery.  

Along the way, they fall in love, blah blah blah...  but there's also LOTS of Bills players and coaches and owners and whatnot.  And the main character is a project manager on the new stadium, so there's lots of discussion about that.  But none about how expensive tickets are supposed to be in the new stadium.

I dunno, like a lot of the new Hallmark movies, it's actually kind of funny.  Not gut-bustingly, but I had a chuckle or two.  It feels more like a sitcom than a Hallmark movie.  And that is not a complaint.  Anyway, they fixed a lot that didn't work in last year's offering.

Happy Birthday, Tina Turner

 

Today marks the birthday of Tina Turner, one of the greats of R&B and rock.  

Y'all put on her Simply the Best collection and thank me later.

Rockettes at 100

1925 marks the founding of what was then the "Missouri Rockets", in St. Louis, who would swiftly move to New York City and become The Rockettes.  

The Rockets were a Midwestern response to someone seeing a Ziegfeld Follies show and saying "I could maybe do that".  And, indeed, Russell Markert brought his vision to the stage in the Midwest and a sensation was born.

If you've never checked out the remarkable history of the Ziegfeld Follies, it is weird, wild stuff.  There's nothing like it in 2025 (and who can say if we're better or worse for it).  But suffice to say, Florenz Ziegfeld made an impression that echoes through to today in more ways than we can count.  

Circa 1932, the Missouri Rockets moved to New York's Radio City Music Hall, renamed themselves The Rockettes, and by 1933, they put on their first Christmas Spectacular, which dazzles to this day.

Thanksgiving Watch: Squanto - a Warrior's Tale (1994)

Watched:  11/24/2025

Format:  Disney+

Viewing:  First

Director:  Xavier Koller

I don't know that I've ever seen a movie make me decide, while watching an uplifting story that's part of the well-worn self-mythologizing of America, that the hero is 100% wrong.  But that's where I landed with Squanto: a Warrior's Tale (1994).   

And maybe that's what director Xavier Koller truly felt we should think.  He's Swiss, not American, and based on the script Disney gave him, it really isn't a compelling argument that Squanto was right that what his fellow locals needed to do was put down their weapons.

Before we get rolling, I have not thought about the narrative of Squanto since I was probably eight years old and we had a children's book about his life, which I can safely say:  I do not remember anything from that book, just that Squanto helped keep the Native Americans and the Pilgrims from murdering each other which led to the first Thanksgiving.  I also vaguely remembered he was not part of any tribe.

As the movie starts, Squanto is having a good week.  He just married Irene Bedard, which is a check in the win column.  But no sooner do they go for a lovers' leisurely stroll than he sees an early 17th Century British ship pulling up to his beach.  He's promptly kidnapped by the Brits who take him back to England, along with a warrior from the neighboring tribe.   

Doc Watch: Selena y Los Dinos (2025)

Watched:  11/24/2025

Format:  Netflix

Viewing:  First

Director:  Isabel Castro

Living in Texas in the early 90's, if you had your head up at all, you heard about Selena.  While I didn't listen to Tejano or Cumbia, she'd become so big that a dumb Anglo kid like myself heard Bidi Bidi Bom Bom somewhere along the way, and I admit that I probably paid more attention to Selena because she was very pretty with a Colgate smile.

I could tell you pretty much exactly when I figured out who Selena was from the cover of her album Entre A Mi Mundo.  The cover art was everywhere.  

Candidly, in the 1990's and now, the names of most Tejano acts were just not known by Anglos and English speakers.  But Selena was rapidly breaking down that particular divide through sheer force of scale - she was selling out the Astrodome, something reserved for the biggest acts on the planet - and wildly popular local acts like ZZ Top.  

As a Texan whose first language was English, it seemed like Selena was about to cross-over to a larger audience the second she put out a record in English (see: Shakira).

But then, in 1995, at the age of 23, Selena was killed.  

As popular as she was at the time of her death, it's very hard to quantify the scope and duration of the public mourning that spilled out.

Chabert Holiday Micro-Watch: Maybe This Christmas (2025)

Chabert may have signed an exclusive deal with Hallmark for making movies and selling some lovely products in Hallmark stores, but after last year's slam dunk ad with Philosophy, she's now got a gig with Maybelline.  And while we don't believe she could possibly have a blemish, this year she's re-teaming with Dustin Milligan to sell concealer.

Over a handful of 30-second episodes, we get more story than most Hallmark movies.

All 5 episodes in one convenient video: