Love At The Thanksgiving Day Parade [2012]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

Although Adam mentions it approximately three times a year and has been doing so since 2006, we had to postpone "Face Off" for this week because we have a major holiday coming up. There's definitely a shortage of Thanksgiving movies but we did manage to find a Hallmark movie called "Love At The Thanksgiving Day Parade." Although we have never watched a Hallmark movie before, this movie had almost the exact same vibe as "Christian Mingle" and was just about the same in terms of bad movie quality.

The film is about a woman named Emily who dresses like Jackie O and is part of the planning committee for Chicago's Thanksgiving parade. It's basically her life. She's also super upbeat all the time and is dating a marine biologist who she hasn't seen in months even though she is afraid of boats. We all immediately started predicting what way he was going to screw her over. She meets Henry, an operations management guy brought in to analyze the spending and profitability of the parade, and he's attractive but a rich jerk. They clash but spend ridiculous amounts of time together, basically going on dates that are supposed to be about him learning about the parade. It's one of those enemies-to-lovers stories, and their pettiness is painful to watch. 

Then the boyfriend shows up with a big question which Emily thinks is marriage but is actually a proposal that she travel with him on his next mission. She gets drunk (off ONE glass of champagne) with Henry and sings "Heart Of Glass" at a swanky karaoke bar. Later they get kiss-camed at a high school basketball game and it makes things awkward. At this point they are literally both single and it makes no sense why they are fighting this. The idea that they are somehow opposed because of their jobs is a flimsy excuse at best and as time goes on it gets more and more unreasonable. There's a brief misunderstanding where Emily thinks Henry has a girlfriend already and then her ex proposes to make up for the mistake before and she says yes. At the parade, she realizes she made a mistake when she finds out that Henry is an orphan and runs a charity and oh my god he's an even better guy than I thought! And he dresses up as Santa in the parade after the previous Santa bailed. And they make out. While he's dressed like Santa. It's creepy.

Like "Christian Mingle" there are a lot of odd moments and some strange acting. The boyfriend in particular is like a caricature of a selfish nerd guy and it's delightful to watch. We got a decent amount of laughs and more than a few groans at the plot contrivances, which were pretty fun to predict in advance. The biggest complaint here really is that it has basically nothing to do with Thanksgiving. "Thankskilling", while horrible, at least featured the holiday.

Quote: "I have known you for five years and I have loved you for . . . a lot of that time."

Spoon Rating: 6