Hello It’s Me | Through the Shattered Lens

Hello, It’s Me stars Kellie Martin as Annie, who loses her husband to a freak accident at the start of the movie. Two years later, Annie is still struggling to accept his death. She’s a baker who sells her baked goods on the beach and she tries to be a good mother to Ella (Erin Pitt) and Milo (Jack Fulton). A chance meeting with James (Kavan Smith) leads to an unexpected friendship, though James wants it to be more. James helps Annie to open her own bakery. (Why do people in Hallmark movies always want to open up a bakery?) Even though she is attracted to him, Annie cannot bring herself to move on from her husband’s death. But then she starts to get messages from her husband, encouraging her to move on. Just as Annie starts to open up to James, Ella gets angry and starts acting out. Will Annie and James’s love survive?

Hello, It’s Me was the last movie that I watched for this Valentine’s Day blogathon and it was also the best. It’s a Hallmark movie but it’s also realistic about the grieving process and Kellie Martin gave a really good performance as Annie. The movie really didn’t even need the supernatural element to be memorable and to work. I was cheering for Annie and James all the way. I could also relate to Ella and understand why she was so upset and worried to see her mother getting close to another man. Losing a loved one is never easy and I appreciated that, even at the end of the movie, Annie was still learning how to keep moving forward in her life. There is one embarrassing scene that takes place at a comic book convention, just due to some of the costumes that the movie has the background extras wearing. But it doesn’t detract from the movie’s effectiveness as a whole.

Some movies really touch your heart. Hello, It’s Me touched mine.

Well, it’s been 100 Hallmark reviews. This being 101. I think from now on I’m going to review each of them separately. It’s easier for me. It will make it easier for people to find a specific movie I’ve reviewed. Plus, it’s more fair to the movies themselves because I will be able to come off of viewing one and immediately write a full review.

So, what do we have here? The title does remind me of the Verizon guy and I think it’s supposed to. The movie opens with Kellie Martin on the beach with her husband and two kids. A boy and a girl. She shoots a short video of them all together. Then Martin and the kids go home while the husband goes off in his boat. He doesn’t make it back alive.

Cut to two years later and you can tell none of them have moved on because they still visit the same beach and watch the video together.

Martin is a baker in this movie and while on her way to deliver some pastries, Kavan Smith backs his car up and nearly kills her. That’s how they initially meet. Then they part ways. Of course by part ways, I mean they go to the same party for different reasons. For her, it’s a delivery. For him, it’s his family having the party. Running into each other again kicks off their relationship.

Now this is where it kind of becomes a Movie A, Movie B type thing. Movie A is Kellie Martin and Kavan Smith just doing their thing much to my delight. They’re good actors. They fall in love while the two of them work to open up a bakery for Martin. This part worked very well for me. The problem is Movie B interjects itself from time to time and then a bunch near the end.

During their time together, Martin is getting messages from beyond from her dead husband through her cellphone. Well, sort of. It basically amounts to a couple of words that summed up mean: move on with your life already. I’m sure this worked better in the book this is based on because there was time to flesh that out and have the relationship part too. But here, when it happens, you just want it to stop so you can see more of this.

And this.

I even like the kids and kids don’t always fare that well in Hallmark movies. I feel for Julie Sherman Wolfe who wrote the screenplay for this movie. She even tweeted me because of a response I had to some of her dialogue. This.

I feel for her because adapting a book into a Hallmark TV Movie must be the equivalent of what Tod Frye faced trying to port Pac-Man to the Atari 2600. Or any arcade port back then. You are taking something from a more powerful medium and have to try and squish it into a much more constrained one.

Oh, Kellie Martin does look a little goofy back there doesn’t she. Well…

there! Now they’re even.

The only real resistance these two meet in the movie comes from Martin’s daughter and Smith’s mom. Smith’s mom tries to set him up with someone of their class, but that doesn’t work. He has his heart set on Martin. Martin’s daughter is worried that he is going to leave if he is allowed to get too close. Both of those things are just minor friction and never really threaten to derail them coming together.

It was a little disappointing for me because I do like these two actors on their own and together, but that dead husband kept poking into my fun. There are also a couple things that seemed to reference a scene that I sure didn’t remember seeing. But I’m fallible. If you don’t let those parts bother you, then this is worth seeing. Definitely better than the usual middle of the road formulaic Hallmark romance.

Now we just need a sequel where Alison Sweeney plays an evil baker with Smith and Martin trying to catch her. This time the husband tries to give them clues from beyond. Make it happen!