The National Tree [2009]

This movie was selected purely on the fact that the premise is so incredibly strange and, honestly, dumb that we decided it had to be watched. Here we have a bona fide Hallmark film about a "seventeen year old" kid who enters a contest to have his tree evaluated to be the new "national tree" after the old one was struck by lighting. What this means is that the tree his parents planted for him when he was born will be uprooted and replanted on the White House lawn. Why does this matter at all? Mostly for dead mom and father-son bonding reasons. 

The son, named Rock because a rock needed to be moved for this tree to be planted, is a vlogger on the most 2002 website possible where he's got a few international friends and an online girlfriend. After winning the contest, his curmudgeon dad decides they should take the tree himself, being really salty about the removal of the tree in general but never actually expressing his feelings to his son. They are traveling with a woman connected to a toy company sponsoring the move, who has an sir-not-appearing-in-this-film fiance and totally isn't going to be set up with the dad by the end of the film. On the cross country travel they encounter tens of people excited about the tree because I guess not much happens in those towns at all, the son maneuvers the tree through a fire, they meet up with grandma, and they meet up with the son's online girlfriend who stows away with the tree and nearly freezes to death. Once they finally make it to DC, they get the bad news: the tree is going to be cut and put in a stand, not planted. The son is ambivalent but the dad is shook by his callousness. The son has a turn around and cuffs himself to the tree, riling up the crowd, and the tree is planted.

This movie is pretty wild. The acting is funny, both from the clearly 25-year-old son trying to act childish and the dad who is just mad about everything. There are some strange camera moments to punctuate this. And again, the premise itself is so weird that it frequently becomes comical how important this tree is. Sarah asked a good question at one point: Who is this movie for? It's light on the romance and even light on the Christmas cheer and nationalism given the premise. It seems like the target audience might just be old people who want clean entertainment and who want to live in a simple time where a guy carting a tree across the US is actually worthwhile news. We wouldn't watch it again, but it was definitely worth the one time.

Spoon Rating: 5

Falling For Christmas [2022]

This post is late due to internet issues, but although this movie has been talked about a lot, there isn't really that much to say. This movie isn't even the one that comes up when you Google Image search Falling for Christmas because apparently another movie was made with that name in 2016. Sarah quickly identified the movie as a remake of Overboard, a movie no one else had seen, and it's also another of those movies that was made by Netflix but is for all intents and purposes a Hallmark movie. The main reason this movie is talked about is because it's being heralded as Lindsay Lohan's return to film.

The film is about a hotel heiress who gets amnesia after falling off a ski slope. She gets taken in by the widowed owner of a failing, rival ski lodge and learns how to do chores and fall in love. She gets her memory back and ends up moving in with the lodge owner and becoming a stepmom to his plucky daughter. That's functionally the whole film. There's a bit of a side story with her "comic relief" fiance who also got lost in the woods, and he seemingly has a happy ending too when he realizes that he's gay or bi but it's presented somewhat subtly because "Hallmark." I guess that's progress.

The film doesn't have many laugh moments. There are a lot of cliches, a random old guy who's the Santa stand-in, and very little reason for these two to fall in love. Mainly it's interesting to watch the uncanny valley of Lohan's face. After a lot of drugs and plastic surgery, she doesn't look quite how she should. She's only 36 and when her face isn't moving, she looks like a normal 36-year-old with some lip filler. The second she has an expression though, there's just something off about her. This isn't meant to be a criticism, clearly she's had a rough time, but the byproduct of this as an actor is really interesting since she has to make faces for her job. 

Overall, you probably shouldn't bother with this film; if you really like this kind of movie, there are funnier ones out there.

Spoon Rating: 2.5

Blood Beat [1983]

This film is very poorly represented by its poster. There was no sex in the movie. The vibe of this movie is some sort of combination of Things and Hereditary but without the humor of the former or the quality of the latter. Frequently something would happen in this film and we would all look at each other in the hope that someone understood what happened but no one ever did. The lore of this movie is kind of nonexistent, and the film kind of feels like an attempt at justifying someone's purpose of samurai armor.

The plot is about a woman's two kids coming home for Christmas with their significant others. She's a painter who refuses to marry her boyfriend, and her son's girlfriend thinks she can read her mind. There's some deer hunting. Sometimes the girlfriend freaks out and has visions of a samurai. People start dying. This samurai seems to have something to do with the mom, but it's not clear. It might give her the ability to paint or just possess her to make its own paintings? The samurai is defeated kind of easily by her two kids who may have magic powers that they got from her. That's the end.

We only really got two brief laughs. Mostly we were confused.

Spoon Rating: 2