Val’s Movie Roundup #27: Hallmark Edition

Posted on September 22, 2015 by Valerie Troutman

Lead With Your Heart (2015) – At this point, I have seen 98 Hallmark movies. I think this is the best one I have ever seen. Honestly, there isn’t a whole lot to say either. The movie is about a couple played by Billy Baldwin and Kari Matchett. Their children are leaving for college and she gets a temporary job out of town. As a result, the two spend more time apart then they probably have in close to 20 years or more. What follows is just a nice little story about how they adapt to their situation. It doesn’t go the easy way and have one of them cheat, or almost cheat, then reconcile. That’s what you would expect. That’s not to say that some people don’t show interest in them, but instead of being a true temptation, it acts as a signal to them about how they need to change to keep their relationship together into this new territory. I especially liked the ending because it involved real compromise and not some fairy tale giving up success for something humble.

You have no idea how refreshing this was to see. Especially considering Hallmark then aired a movie called Just The Way You Are, which I will talk about, that is basically the same, except terrible.

For a Hallmark movie, I can’t recommend it enough.

Family Plan (2005) – This is more of the standard middle of the road Hallmark movie based off of a plot device that would have made for a screwball comedy in the 1940’s. In this case, Tori Spelling’s company is taken over and for no other purpose then to give this movie a reason to exist, she is advised to pretend she is married. Seriously, this other lady gives her a ring, she puts it on, then she can’t get it off. So, she has to pretend to her boss that she’s married. She hires an actor to play her husband. She also picks up a daughter from her friend. You know how the rest goes.

This kind of movie sinks or swims on the charm of the actors involved. They are no Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, or Katharine Hepburn, but they work well enough. Spelling has never been a great actress, but she does a certain kind of part well and this is one of them. The other actors are in the same boat.

It does get a little boring because it’s so by the book, but that just means it’s a little below average. Like I’ve said before, it won’t kill ya.

One funny goof. In the credits, they forgot to capitalize this guy’s last name.

Just The Way You Are (2015) – This movie on the other hand can kill you. It will make you beg for another Aurora Teagarden mystery movie where you can just watch Candace Cameron Bure run around like she’s high on cocaine. Also, you won’t be able to listen to Billy Joel’s Just The Way You Are for awhile. At least there’s still She’s Got A Way!

It’s basically the same thing as Lead With Your Heart. It even used a licensed song like Lead With Your Heart did. In this case, it’s the original. In Lead With Your Heart, it was a cover of Love Lifts Us Up Where We Belong. A couple a ways into their marriage are getting stale in their relationship. Unfortunately, Candace Cameron Bure’s character works for a matchmaking company that uses stupid rules for making relationships work. Yep, it’s one of those movies.

Bure’s idea is for her and her husband to start blind dating while following the rules. It’s all a bunch of boring and stupid nonsense. I remember when that book The Rules came out in the 90’s. Why are we still doing this stuff 20 years later? It’s always the same thing. Yes, statistically certain things show up as significant, but of course following them blindly won’t work. Human beings are far more complex than any set of rules you can attempt to derive through study of them. This isn’t news, and we don’t need yet another movie to remind us of this fact.

Don’t watch this one.

Perfect On Paper (2014) – I usually save the computer screen goofs for the end of the review, but I think this time they belong at the beginning.

Near the start of the movie, they do a decent job of faking a site called SomebodyDateMe.com.

But later in the movie, they show a horribly faked website for a fictional school called The Horrock’s School.

Look at that thing! First, no school would have a webpage that looks like that in 2014. Second, notice the URL is a local file. Third, notice the specific HTML document they are looking at is called “donovan2.html”. Finally, notice that the URL clearly shows they did, or tried, to setup an XAMPP LAMP stack, then either couldn’t figure it out, or just didn’t run it for some reason.

The whole movie is kind of like that. It feels slapped together. It’s about a book editor who is offered a glamorous position in Los Angeles. The whole thing is about her friends trying to reshape her into an LA power girl stereotype to keep their major client played by Morgan Fairchild. Of course, it’s Hallmark, so there’s also a guy.

See that little bit of grey peeking out from behind that bush? That’s the guy. She throws the coffee over her shoulder and hits him. If you don’t pay close attention, then you won’t see what looks like shears drop from his hand and it’s not mentioned. In other words, you’ll likely think this guy was just behind that bush for no reason except to have coffee land on him and meet her.

He’s the opposite of the “Perfect On Paper” guy that her friends want her to be with for her job. Of course, she was never the glamorous type to begin with. Here, I have to give them some credit because they went with a girl who honestly isn’t glamorous. She’s not especially attractive. That was really nice to see and it fit her character.

You know how it all works out. The only thing to mention is that since they want you to clearly see the difference between the main character and the other girls, questionable trendy clothes show up. I hope they burned this thing after they shot the movie.

This one is definitely below average. Like I said, it feels slapped together, people kind of stumble through it, and you just want it over with.

Lead With Your Heart is the one to go with here.

What Lisa Marie Watched Last Night: Mother, May I Sleep With Danger? (dir. by Jorge Montesi)

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Last night, I watched on old movie on the Lifetime Movie Network. The name of that movie? Mother, May I Sleep With Danger?

Why Was I Watching It?

Mother, May I Sleep With Danger? pops up on the Lifetime Movie Network like constantly and it’s always advertised as “the cult classic: Mother, May I Sleep With Danger?” Now, to be honest, the entire Lifetime Movie Network is something of a cult classic but Mother, May I Sleep With Danger is the only film shown on that network that is actually advertised as being “a cult classic.” I mean, even something like Confessions of a Go Go Girl is usually advertised as if it’s a perfectly normal, totally serious movie. Therefore, I figured, if even Lifetime realizes that Mother, May I Sleep With Danger? is a cult film then it must be the most culty cult film ever made.

Plus, just from the title, I think I was justified in assuming that at some point, someone would be heard to utter the line, “Mother, may I sleep with danger?” In fact, beyond the whole cult film thing, that was actually my main reason for watching the movie. I wanted to hear that line so I could clap my hands and yell, “We have a title!”

Seriously, I was really looking forward to that.

What’s It About?

Laurel (played by Tori Spelling, who looks like a Modigliani painting in this film) is a college student who has an overprotective mother (Lisa Banes, who has a great first name) and who is recovering from an eating disorder. Anyway, Laurel is also a competitive runner and she’s got a chance to go study abroad in China. However, she also has a really possessive boyfriend named Kevin (played by an actor named Ivan Sergei) and soon Kevin is running her life. Obviously, he’s dangerous and Laurel’s mother soon starts to dislike him. Laurel gets mad at her mom before even asking if she can sleep with danger. Anyway, Kevin eventually ends up locking Laurel up in a cabin that has 8 cross-shaped windows but ony one door.

What Worked?

The genius of this film was that nothing worked. Absolutely nothing. Here’s just a few of the more memorable lines from the film:

“Sex, mother! The word is sex! Sex!”

“You will protect me from everyone and anything now, right? (giggle) Bye!”

“When I don’t see you, I bleed to death.”

“You don’t want me to climb a tower with a gun, do you?”

“I just never learned to trust love.”

“It’s gonna to take the type of time that breaks down mountains.”

And my personal favorite:

“If you’re lying to me, I’ll know by the way you make love to me.” (And let me just say, boys — nothing gets my panties on the floor quicker than hearing something like that. Seriously, the idea of using fucking as a lie detector is one that needs to be explored. It would certainly make daytime television more interesting.)

As the psycho boyfriend, Ivan Sergei gives a performance that would seem to indicate that somebody held a gun to his head and yelled, “ACT! NOW!” I mean, seriously, I’ve dated a few guys who, in retrospect, I shouldn’t have, but even silly, little naive me knows that if a guy can’t stop twitching and stammers nervously whenever you ask him about his past, chances are that the guy has some issues. Watching Sergei’s performance here, you ask yourself, “What type of stupid moron would actually go out with this loser?”

Then you remember that this film stars Tori Spelling. As I mentioned earlier, Tori does not look her best in this film but oh my God, I don’t even know where to begin. I mean, I don’t want to be all catty here but seriously — when your head is that much bigger than the rest of your body, you’ve got some issues.

When we first see Tori, she’s debating Daisy Miller with a college professor and, amazingly enough, her comments about Daisy Miller’s fate manages to neatly parallel what happens in the movie. It’s amazing how that happens. Anyway, once English class is finished, Tori goes running across campus in the most horrid combination of black running capris and purple sports bra ever. Now, I have to admit that I started running a few months ago. It helps with my asthma and it’s something that I’ve grown to really enjoy but I always feel a little insecure while running because I’m also something of a klutz. However, seeing Tori Spelling — with her gigantic head and her stick-like body — running around in that tacky purple outfit with her chicken-like arms and spindly legs flying all over the place, it filled me with all sorts of confidence. From now on, if I feel insecure, I’ll be able to say, “At least I don’t look like Tori Spelling in Mother, May I Sleep With Danger.”

The mother of the title is played by Lisa Banes. Her best moment comes when she finds out that Tori is planning on spending the summer in Guatemala with Ivan Sergei instead of studying abroad in China. She bulges her eyes and literally spits out the line, “GUATEMALA!? WHAT ABOUT CHINA!?”

What Didn’t Work?

Not once did Tori Spelling or Ivan Sergei say, “Mother, may I sleep with Danger?” Not once! Seriously, I sat there for 2 hours waiting to hear that said so that I could clap and cheer and be all cute about it.

“Oh my God!” Just Like Me Moment

There’s a scene where Tori is running across campus and she almost knocks over a few extras with her flying arms. Back when I was dancing, I did the same thing a few times. Though in my defense, if those other people hadn’t been in my way, they wouldn’t have gotten kicked.

Lessons Learned

There were several lessons learned. One of them was that if you’re boyfriend twitches constantly, lies about his identity, and responds to questions about his day by breaking plates, don’t agree to go to an isolated cabin with him. If you do, however, make sure that isolated cabin has a random canoe sitting nearby. Seriously, that canoe is important.

The main lesson, I learned, however is not to ever allow myself to be filmed while running because, 20 years later, some snotty little bitch might see the footage and write a blog post making fun of me.