Chabert Watch: Christmas in Rome (2019)

Watched:  06/09/2025

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  1.5

Director:  Ernie Barbarash 

Job: Tour Guide

Location of story:  Hallmark Rome

new skill:  Not going off the rails

Man:  Sam Page

Job of Man:  Business Man

Goes to/ Returns to:  Man goes to Rome

Event:  Business Deal

Food:  a bunch of Italian stuff I can't spell and/ or remember

So.  (deep breath)  I believe this is both the last Lacey Chabert Hallmark movie and last Chabert Christmas movie I have to watch during ChabertQuest 2025.  

Please clap.

If you haven't been around, we're nearing the end of watching every live-action movie in which Lacey Chabert appears that we could get legitimate access to.  And we're almost done.  It started in November by accident, became intentional in January, and it has been a journey.  

One of my self-imposed rules was that if I had already seen a movie and written it up, I was allowed to skip said movie.  Which is how I skipped The Tree That Saved Christmas.  But if I had seen it and failed to write it up, I had to re-watch it and post on it.  And, I know I watched a good chunk/ all of Christmas in Rome (2019) just this last Christmas while doing other things.  And then just didn't mention it.  I forgot or something.  

So I put this one off til last and was in no rush to prioritize the movie.

Anyway, this movie stars Chabert and Sam Page, who you may remember as Joan's would-be-doctor husband on Mad Men, a role that I am sure he has mixed feelings about at this juncture.  Page plays a Businessman from New York who is sent to Rome, just before the holidays, to look into acquiring a famed Italian company that handmakes high-end plates and bowls or something.  And because it's Rome, it is also *art*.

Chabert X-Mas Watch: Family For Christmas (2015)

Mirrorverse Man watches Lacey, while she stares you down

Watched:  06/08/2025

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  First

Director:  Amanda Tapping

Job: News reporter/ Housewife

Location of story:  San Francisco and Bay Area 'burbs

new skill:  being a mother

Man:  Tyron Leitso

Job of Man:  Advertising creative

Goes to/ Returns to:  Goes to alternate timeline

Event:  School Christmas Pageant (very overdecorated)

Food:  Mushrooms and what I think was Captain Crunch

In 2015, Lacey Chabert made four movies, three for Hallmark.  Two of those Hallmark movies were Christmas films.  In 2015, she is on her way to building her own legend.

The first Christmas movie selection for 2015 was A Christmas Melody, the Mariah Carey movie, which we previously covered.  

Our selection today was Family for Christmas (2015),  one of the movies in which Santa is not just a jolly old elf making toys - he's a chaos agent who uses his reality-warping powers to wreak havoc with an unsuspecting person, hoping he can make people hook up.  Santa in Hallmark-Land does not care about toys or children, he cares about making strangers decide to make it.  

Santa is a freak.

Previously, Santa gave Chabert "courage"/ "the inability to stop herself from escalating an already bad situation" in A Wish For Christmas.  This time, Santa finds a perfectly happy career gal/ news reporter (Chabert) who gets a friend request from her college sweetheart she dumped to become a successful reporter.  Meanwhile, she's being offered jobs in NYC, getting the most understanding breakup in Hallmark history, and stealing her assistant's ideas for stories.

Apparently Chabert ponders that Friend Request and what could have been with this ex-boyfriend SO HARD, her pondering becomes a Christmas Wish.  One she did not explicitly make, but Santa still says "yeah, but you really wanted to know".  

Chabert Not-Hallmark X-Mas Watch: A Holiday Heist (2011)

Watched:  06/06/2025

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Christie Will Wolf

So, I thought A Holiday Heist (2011) was going to be a Hallmark movie, but it was not.  It was, instead, one of the weird, trash movies that get made every year in a filmmaking economy I do not understand.  It wasn't A Talking Cat!?! levels of not-giving-a-@#$%, but it was closer to that than it was theater-ready.  It made your typical Hallmark movie look like It's a Wonderful Life by comparison.  I do not know who this was for, where it was shown, who paid for it...  Usually when something is this trash it's called something like "The Dog Who Saved Christmas", but there's no dog in this movie.  They can't afford it.

The filming had to have occurred over, like, two weeks.  There's maybe five locations, and all of the money went to getting hired gun actors with some name recognition to show up, do some schtick, and mostly not be there longer than two or three days.

In this case, it's Vivica A. Fox as the mean Dean of the college and Chris Kattan as a wacky uncle who has nothing to do with anything.  

And... Lacey Chabert as the focal character.  As she does in so many movies, she plays the anchor of the plot.  She is the general-female-protagonist-with-an-artistic-bent, this time a college student skipping Christmas to work in an art gallery (Chabert herself would have been about 28 or 29 when this was filmed).  

Chabert X-Mas Watch: A Christmas Melody (2015)

Watched: 06/04/2025

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  Second?

Director:  Mariah Carey

Job: Unemployed/ diner waitress/ Would-be-Fashion Designer

Location of story:  Silver Falls, Ohio

new skill:  Giving up

Man:  Brennan Elliot

Job of Man:  Elementary School music teacher

Goes to/ Returns to:  Returns to

Event:  Christmas concert/ Snowflake Pageant

Food:  I don't know that they had a food they harped on

The two Queens of Christmas in one forgotten movie!

Chabert stars!  Carey directs?

I'd seen this one during COVID lockdown, but, honestly, I was pretty drunk.  Plus, I blocked out a lot of what I watched during lockdown, so it was kind of like seeing it for the first time.

I re-read my original post on this movie, and I agree with most of it.  It is very fixated on high school and a girl leaving and everyone rubbing it in her face that she had to come home after (checks notes) her husband died and her business failed.  

So, yeah, being a jerk about that seems right.  As we've learned in the last decade, people are the worst.

I also still think the movie is very thin, and that's a screenplay issue, but also I'm surprised I was so surprised by this the first time.  It's kinda par for the course for a Hallmark movie to basically provide a set-up and then people shoot the shit for forty-five minutes, there's a small bit of tension about the two would-be-lovers maybe not getting it on, and then they throw caution and financial security to the wind and go for it.  I'd argue that when there's more to it, that's the outlier. 

But, yeah, it's about Chabert giving up LA to come home where she has what seems like a 2700 sq foot Queen Anne waiting for her in perfect condition.  Her daughter has a gift for singing and poetry, but is sad they've left LA.  

Chabert enrolls her daughter in her old school only to find that her high school nemesis, Mariah Carey, is there and the Queen Bee of the PTA, etc... and a real piece of work.  But Santa works there as the janitor?

Chabert Holiday Watch: A Royal Christmas (2014)

Watched:  06/02/2025

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing: Unknown

Director:  Alex Zamm

Job: Tailor/ Would-be-Fashion Deisgner

Location of story:  vague Europe

new skill: passing for someone allowed in public

Man:  Steven Hagen

Job of Man: Prince

Goes to/ Returns to:  Goes to

Event:  The Royal Christmas Ball  

Food:  pancakes

I have two more non-Christmas movies to watch as part of ChabertQuest 2025, but just wasn't in the mood for either after a weird couple of weeks around Signal Watch HQ.  So, instead, I went down the list of the Christmas movies I have to get through, and we picked this one.  

While I had not previously written this one up, I am positive I've seen it in parts or in whole as I certainly remembered bits of it, so I am not calling it a First Viewing.  

Wrongly, I believed that A Royal Christmas (2014) was Chabert's first Christmas movie for Hallmark.  It's not.  We'll get to that one.  Nor is it even close to the first basic cable Christmas movie about an unlikely American regular-ol'-girl who sweeps a prince off his feet.  But it does appear to have been the moment Hallmark fully invested in Chabert for Christmas, and ten years later, she basically signed a contract to be the Queen of Hallmark Christmas.

The movie was filmed in Romania, but with American and English talent.  Jane Seymour co-stars, which can't have been inexpensive.  And they have a whole castle, block off city streets, etc...  Maybe it's a huge budget!  Maybe the dollar goes super far in Romania!  I have no idea.

Our basic story is that Chabert is a normal girl with a dream to be a fashion designer.  She works at her dad's tailor shop in Philadelphia and has been dating an MBA student, Leo, for a year.  Leo is to spend Christmas with Chabert and her dad, but Leo is  suddenly summoned home.  Before he departs, she learns Leo is actually Leopold, a legit prince of a small, independent country in the South of France.  A sort of San Marino, I guess.  But it is what SNL would call The Kingdom of Caucasia.  And, so the movie can happen, she goes along.

Chabert Watch: Elevator Girl (2010)

Watched:  05/26/2025

Format:  UP free trial on Amazon 

Viewing:  First

Director:  Bradford May

Job:  Massage therapy receptionist, Would-Be Chef, DJ for children and old people, I lost track

new skill:  Landing a dude to fund her boho lifestyle

Man: Ryan Merriman

Job of Man:  Attorney - Mergers and Acquisitions

Goes to/ Returns to:  Stays in place

Event:  a six-year old's birthday, and others

Food:  No special food, but they do make hummus

So, this is somewhat technically Lacey Chabert's first Hallmark movie.  If you're looking for ground zero for how she eventually became a big deal at Hallmark, she signed up for this movie, which was picked up for distribution through Hallmark (a lot of "Hallmark" movies are not made by Hallmark, but made independently to be purchased by Hallmark.  I don't know all the details.).  

It's now available on UP!, which I learned is still going when I looked for this movie, but I hadn't seen the network in years.

Around this same time, Chabert's career was obviously in an odd patch.  She's having work released, but this is her first release of 2010.  In 2009, she was in the big studio romcom Ghosts of Girlfriends Past starring McConaughey, Jennifer Garner and Michael Douglas, but also The Lost, which we've already covered.  And she's doing a bunch of cartoon voice work - she voiced Gwen Stacy on The Spectacular Spider-Man for 25 episodes.

The description for Elevator Girl (2010) made it sound like it would be about people from two different classes making it work, but it's more like...  two people with nothing in common dating. 

Chabert Watch: Off-Season - The Lex Morrison Story (2013)

Watched:  05/22/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  Steven K. Tsuchida

I did not have NBA-player Vanity Project down on my Chabert bingo card, but here we are.

Look, I didn't like Rick Fox when he played for the Celtics and rolled my eyes when he went to LA.  I liked him less when he married America's precious angel, Vanessa Williams.  He became dead to me when he divorced Williams.

How dare you, Rick.

So, yeah, I was immediately not excited about this when I realized this movie was about Rick Fox wanting to be in a comedy and throwing money at it until it was a reality.

I have no idea what this movie is.  It looks like a TV movie, but I can't figure out who it's for.  It feels very much like people goofing in front of a camera more than a TV show or movie.  

late edit:  I forgot the casual racism toward Asian people.  It was incredibly yikes and all out of Fox's mouth.

The story is that Our Hero is part of the PR team for an NBA team.  He's assigned to keep an eye on Lex Morrison (Fox) over the summer and get him in shape for the next season.  If he doesn't, he'll be fired.  Lex is, of course, wacky and out of control and not living up to his potential.  We are continually told Lex is in bad shape, but he is Rick Fox.  

Our lead guy, Zack Lively, is probably fine.  But weirdly and wildly bland.  He has a sort of partner-in-crime who is asked to play doofy/zany very, very broadly, and feels like a high school kid doing improv.  

I guess Fox was dating Eliza Dushku when the movie was made, so she's in it as a brief supporting role, and she's honestly the funniest part of the movie.  

There's a subplot about Lacey Chabert as a sports reporter who our lead wants to date.  Chabert does not embarrass herself.  Which I can't say for pretty much everyone else.

The movie was not for me.  But it was short at 75 minutes.  

But it is entertaining seeing them try to frame Rick Fox and Lacey Chabert in the same shot.

Also, this movie seems to be about how much Rick Fox didn't like living in Boston.  It's very weird.

My suspicion is that Rick Fox just thought this idea was good and wanted to have his own Hollywood project (he does appear in TV and movies) and decided he could be in a comedy, so he spent some of his Lakers money and made it.  He has the Executive Producer credit, and it's budgeted at $650K, so he could have easily financed it, especially using his own house as the set for half of the movie, if that is his place.  Write-offs, ahoy.

Chabert Watch: Sanitarium (2013)

Watched:  05/18/2025

Format:  Tubi

Viewing:  First

Directors:  Bryan Ramirez, Bryan Ortiz, Kerry Valderrama

So, this one turned into a bit more of a rabbit hole than I was expecting.  

Sanitarium (2013) is a movie independently produced in San Antonio, Texas - just down the road from my own Austin, TX.  It's a great town, and I recommend it.

The film is an anthology, three stories centering around how a trio of inmates landed in a sanitarium run by Malcolm McDowell, who sort of book-ends the film and shows up here and there.  But the movie is a testament to people figuring out they can afford the day rates for some actors and living out the dream of making a movie with actors they like.

Chabert Watch: Thirst (2010)

I need two tubes of Burt's Bees, STAT!

Watched:  05/12/2025

Format:  Fawesome

Viewing:  First

Director:  Jeffrey Scott Lando

ChabertQuest2025 is becoming a study in types of low-budget independent movies.  

This film is the "what can we shoot that's dramatic with a really small cast and give everyone stuff for their reel?" feature that's essentially a horror movie as people are trapped in a remote location and will be killed by nature.  Sometimes that is sharks, sometimes that is getting wedged between rocks.  Thirst (2010) is the desert.

I find these movies mostly deeply unappealing in a "your whole movie could have been an email" sort of way.  Watching a large group of people get picked off by alligators or sharks?  Sign me up!  90 minutes of a small group go through therapy and only one lives at the end?  I'll take a pass.  It's a predictable slog.

Usually the movies move slowly, are often melodramas at their heart (otherwise, why care about these victims?), and you spend the whole movie wondering why they made this and that bad decision.

Barely Chabert Watch! Anything Is Possible (2013)

Watched:  05/07/2025

Format:   Peacock

Viewing:  First

Director:  Demetrius Navarro

This journey through the career of Lacey Chabert (just live action work, and only movie-length material - we have to contain this somehow) has become a study of the work of someone who is truly a working actor.  

Sure, Chabert is a star.  Even if she'd never been in anything after Lost in Space, I'd remember her as a young actor.  If Mean Girls had been her last role, we'd all definitely still know her.  But Chabert started in movies as a child (and we'll get to that), and her current role as the face of Hallmark and Christmas movies was not a foregone conclusion.  She had a lot of work that was clearly putting food on the table, and that's kind of what we've been watching for a bit.

And so we find a movie here from 2013 in which she barely appears. It's one of six films she had released in 2013, and one of ten projects - as she voiced cartoons and video games (she's the default voice for Zatanna at DC Entertainment).  But I'm betting she was in and out of Detroit - where this movie seems to have been filmed - in about three days.

This movie is very independent, very well intentioned, and very much not my thing.  It is also less about Chabert's character, who book-ends the film, and a vehicle for real world child prodigy of the piano, Ethan Bortnick.*  Based on the age of the child star and editing timelines, I am guessing it was filmed in 2011, and finally found distribution in 2013.  

Chabert Horror Watch! The Ghost of Goodnight Lane (2014)

Watched:  04/27/2025

Format:  Tubi

Viewing:  First

Director:  Alin Bijan

Goodnight Lane is a very real street in northwest Dallas, where the Ghost of Goodnight Lane (2014) takes place, and was filmed, at least in part.  And if there's one spooky thing in this world, it is Dallas sprawl and suburbs.

The best thing about this movie is that Billy Zane is having a good time.  He knows what this movie is, and he's just happy to be there and dick around.  And, really, this movie is just an excuse for the filmmakers to have a good time and make a low-stakes horror-comedy.  It is silly.  It knows it's silly.  It is critic and taste proof.  If you don't like it, that's kind of on you, audience.  And the fact this exists in this form is proof I don't know how movie-making works.

The Ghost of Goodnight Lane is weirdly full of B to Z list working actors out of LA.  I say this, because this movie has the vibe that it doesn't feel like it should have anyone in it but local talent from the DFW area.  But it has Billy Zane and Lacey Chabert.  And still manages to look like a movie shot by people playing with equipment more than a movie that came out in 2014.  Like, it's weird to see real actors in set-ups and with lighting I associate with movies made by folks usually casting their pals, just something fun to enter into horror film festivals.  

It's maybe not Ouija Shark bad, but... 

So I wonder about the proposition for getting the financing - provided our writer/ director didn't finance himself. Did they blow it all on getting who they got?  The FX?  Which are brief but pretty okay for what this is?

Chabert Watch: In My Sleep (2010)

"genuinely suspenseful"

Watched:  04/25/2025

Format:  Tubi

Viewing:  First

Writer/ Director:  Allen Wolf

Oh my.  Spoilers.

This is an entire movie about a guy who should have done very obvious things when confronted with monumental problems.  But then we would not have a movie.

I get it.  This is a movie that started as someone's desire to create a "Hitchockian" mystery thriller, found a premise, and worked backward from there.  The premise no doubt started as "how do you tell a story about a guy who needs to solve a murder, but he may have committed said murder himself?"  Ah ha!  I saw cartoons. Sleepwalking.  Sleep driving.   Sleep sexing!  This guy does it all!

The first obvious thing - He kinda/ sorta begins to seek treatment for this condition with medication at the beginning of the film - but only after he somehow sleep-sexes his best friend's wife.  Btw, she's far from the first woman he's apparently had luck with whilst sleepwalking, we're told.*  Also: He's been driving.  He's been wandering around in his undies.  He is a mess.  He keeps waking up in odd places.  With 0% bodyfat.

After a birthday party, attended entirely by his married pal and women he has slept with (I mean... honestly... why?) Our Hero learns the best friend's wife was murdered and found by his father's grave.  Kinda sus.

Chabert Watch! Christian Mingle The Movie (2014)

Watched:  04/19/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First (and Last)

Director:  Corbin Bernsen

Job:  Ad company exec

new skill:  being brainwashed

Man: Jonathan Patrick Moore

Job of Man:  I don't know if I ever figured that out

Goes to/ Returns to:  Eventually goes to the Yucatan

Event:  several

Food:  Sushi

This is a movie about a mentally ill person who falls prey to a cult through a recruitment scheme posing as a dating site for Christians.  

Designed to be mistaken for a Hallmark movie, this infomercial for ChristianMingle.com (a very real dating site), our film - Christian Mingle The Movie (2014) - follows Lacey Chabert as a VP of Brand Management for a small advertising company.  She's unlucky in love, and is absolutely freaking out that, at age 30, she's still unmarried.  

The movie is written and directed by Corbin Bernsen, and so I have to lay a lot of blame at his feet, but also know he was having to make a movie for people who are maybe not really aware of how some of the things they wanted in their movie would play.  The film does have appearances by the eternally lovely Morgan Fairchild, Brian Keith, Stephen Tobolowsky, Bernsen, John O'Hurley and one actress I remember who was really pushed on us in sitcoms like 15 years ago.

On the surface level, it's a romantic comedy/ drama about a woman finding God while also finding a Good Man.  

On a meta level, this movie is essentially a warning shot to accomplished women who are being told they're a failure without a man.  Beware: you will have your entire life destroyed by people pretending good will but who will throw you away without batting an eye.

Chabert Horror Watch! Scarecrow (2013)

Chabert completes negotiations for her Hallmark contract

Watched:  04/19/2025

Format:  Tubi

Viewing:  First

Director:  Sheldon Wilson

A movie with a pretty good idea behind it, this movie has an okay first half hour or so and then throws away all of that goodwill in the bin by becoming a movie where things keep happening, but nothing really resolves itself.  And I can't tell if that's intentional - like a joke on the part of the writers - or laziness or sheer incompetence.

It's not even clear, based on what we saw before, that ten seconds after the credits role, that our Final Girl isn't going to get killed.

What's most weird is that the description of the film on IMDB - from the producers, I'd guess - is not what actually happens in the movie.  There's elements of that, but that's not really what happens.  I almost feel like this was a description of the script at some point but then they made a different movie through rewrites.  

A group of high schoolers is going to spend their day of Saturday Detention (ala The Breakfast Club) on a farm "disassembling" the famed scarecrow from the old Miller farm that's part of the town's annual Scarecrow Festival.  But the movie opens on two horny teens sneaking onto the farm first, planning to spook their pals when they arrive, and getting killed by our monster.  

The town has an annual Scarecrow Festival during which they have some game where they ritualistically "bury" the Scarecrow.  But it's essentially a small-town fall fest, I guess.  We never see it.

Chabert Watch! The Lost Tree (2016)

Watched:  04/13/2025

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Brian A. Metcalf

Woof.

The Lost Tree (2016)?  More like "lost me 30 seconds in".  Amirite?  Where are my Lost Tree bros?

To me, the thing that is most interesting about this very not-good movie is less the movie than digging in a bit to how Hollywood works/ worked.  It's famously a town of hustlers, and for a brief while in the late 90's and through the 00's, thanks to the power of indie film, some of that got celebrated as we had breakout films like Swingers.  But since Ed Wood got his hands on a fog machine, genre has also been a part of indie film made for no money, but hoping an idea and a performance will carry the day.

That does not happen here.

This movie is a mess from the start.  The camera-work is maybe not the best, and shot on consumer video as near as I can tell.  The audio in mostly fine, I guess, but the soundtrack/ score is doing some Olympic-class lifting, desperately trying to convince the viewer something is happening, and we're not just watching a dude wander around by himself in an empty cabin or an open field for insanely long stretches.

I will be honest and say:  I watched this movie and I can describe what happens in it, but if there's a story here with a point or an ironic twist, I am at a loss.  

Chabert Watch! The Color of Rain (2014)

Watched:  04/05/2025

Viewing:  First

Format:  Hallmark

Director:  Anne Wheeler

Job:  Church school admin

new skill:  widow

Man: Warren Christie

Job of Man:  I don't know if I ever figured that out

Goes to/ Returns to:  Stays in place

Event:  Christmas pageant

Food:  Italian, also, what other people bring by

So, I'm rapidly running out of Chabert Hallmark movies that are not holiday-themed, and I'm not sure I'll be diving into Christmas movies any time soon.

I don't know what was going on at Hallmark in 2014, or if this was a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie or what.  The Hall of Fame movies tend to be a little closer to regular-ol-movies as they originally aired on network TV, often on Sundays, but this was likely always on the cable channel.  The Color of Rain (2014) is based on the real life of two families who each was dealt a blow by cancer, each side losing a spouse, and then the two remaining spouses meeting and falling for each other.  And the resulting side-eye they get from their support structures.

I guess I'm basically shocked that this movie made its way to Hallmark, because it's sort of the opposite of the usually marshmallow fluff comfort treat that the network is known for.  Instead, it strives to show how people going through a spousal death and in the throes of grieving really are feeling and dealing with day-to-day life - and it's not a rose-colored version.  As both families have kids, they require daily care as well as the emotional support needed when you lose a parent - and that can include the kids just flipping out.  Man in this movie is angry with God, and this is a movie about good, church-going folks with the pastor as a supporting character and the center of their lives seemingly the church and its attached school.

Chabert's character had three years of knowing her husband was sick and had already taken on everything, but Man's character loses his wife abruptly to cancer, and is utterly unprepared.  The connection comes as Chabert is kind of the only one making sense to him in the wake of his wife's passing.

Chabert Watch! Non-Stop (2013)

Watched:  04/03/2025

Format:  Amazon Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Richard Gabai

Is this movie an absurdist comedy?  Or a straight-up Lifetime thriller that had two drafts written and then they shot it?  I honestly, earnestly do not know.

Non-Stop (2013) is a 90 minute movie that starts getting to the action in minute 41 or so, dragging out a both boring and overly elaborate set-up that includes exposition dropped during the credits - because no one thought to include this information in the rest of the film.  This is Lacey Chabert doing her absolute best against a movie that makes no sense and every actor seems to think they're in a different movie.  Meanwhile, Chabert is trying to convey something that the writing doesn't help her with at all.

I am not averse to the locked-room-mystery-aboard-transportation.  Give me a murder on a boat, a lady vanishing from a train, snakes on a plane.  But this is not a murder mystery for Lacey to sleuth out.  This is a movie that doesn't understand how these movies work, provides far too few potential suspects and a single motivation, and muffs the ending.  It realizes it has plot holes at the 2/3rds point and goes back and tries to paper them over with gigantic neon signs along the way, so you know what's up every time a plot point is introduced and where we're headed.

Chabert Watch! Love on Safari (2018)

Watched:  02/18/2025

Format:  DVD

Viewing:  First

Director:  Leif Bristow

Job: Web designer for corporations

new skill:  looking at giraffes, deus ex machina identification

Man: Jon Cor

Job of Man: Safari ranger

Goes to/ Returns to:  goes to South Africa

Event:  Birthday for Lacey

Food:  Cookies

First of all, Brad sucks.  

Brad is Chabert's City Man, and he prides himself on loving spreadsheets.  That's fine.  I love to spend time in Google Sheets, too.  But that and misogyny are his whole personality.  He's a gigantic tool, and we're supposed to dislike him, and, hey... mission accomplished.

Chabert plays a web developer from Chicago.  In the way that only seems to happen in movies, when a great-uncle she hasn't seen in 20 years dies, Chabert inherits a whole frikkin' animal reserve and lodge in South Africa and is now responsible for miles of bushland, the animals upon it, and the people employed by the reserve.  All without a letter or phone call from the uncle forewarning her of his plans.

Chabert Watch! Crossword Mysteries: Abracadaver (2019)

you'd think the prop would indicate this movie is more fun than it is

Watched 02/10/2025
Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  First

Director:  Jonathan Wright

Job: Puzzle maker and Police Investigation Meddler

new skill:  close-up magic

Man: Brennan Elliot

Job of Man: Detective

Goes to/ Returns to: Remains in NYC

Event:  Birthday at Magic Manor

Food:  I don't think there was any food

In a move that makes total sense from a cost-savings perspective, Lacey Chabert and Brennan Elliot (as Detective Man) return for a third installment in the Crossword Mysteries series - a series which was clearly shot all in one big sprint for these three installments.  Chabert has the same hair, and, occasionally, the same jacket.  The sets for the police office and the newspaper are the same, and the cast remains intact-ish.  

This time, the only tie to a crossword puzzle is that - in order to create a single day's crossword puzzle, Chabert has enrolled in weeks of magic classes at an approximation of LA's Magic Castle.  I do not know if New York has one of these.*  

It is a crazy reason for Chabert to be on site, but I guess it's weird Jessica Fletcher was always floating around when someone dropped dead 23x a year.

Chabert Watch! Crossword Mysteries: Proposing Murder (2019)

Watched 02/08/2025
Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  First

Director:  Don McCutcheon

Job: Puzzle maker and Police Investigation Meddler

new skill:  Escaping from enclosed spaces

Man: Brennan Elliot

Job of Man: Detective

Goes to/ Returns to: Remains in NYC

Event:  None, really

Food: you know, I don't think they stop to eat in this movie

If I was concerned this was going to be a series of movies about crimes being hidden in crossword puzzles, I needn't have worried.  Instead, the crossword tie-in here is that the victim is a friend of Chabert who (prior to checking out involuntarily) asks Lacey to hide his marriage proposal in the Sunday puzzle.  A few days later (that very Sunday!), he manages to gets murdered.  

Rather than a crossword housing the mystery, there's a whole thing about cryptography, WWII codes and a hidden treasure.  It's not bad.  The idea here is that Chabert's character is naturally adept at solving puzzles and codes, as well as driven to do so, exploiting her interns along the way - in pursuit of justice!

Detective Man is assigned to the case, and immediately he and Chabert cross paths.  Flirty paths, with meaningful glances.

Our victim, Chabert's platonic college pal, had just received tenure at College University, and was getting engaged to a woman he met a year ago.  She's a chef with access to pointy knives.  In addition to the fiancé, other possible suspects pop up, like a librarian, a faculty member, an antiquarian and an ex who is a surgeon.