Under The Autumn Moon [That’s A Christmas- Cole Reviews Festive Hallmark Movies]

One of my favourite Hallmark tropes is ‘big city businesswoman goes into the country and falls in love with both nature and some sort of country boy’. This is absolutely a film with that trope as its main plot.

A lot of the effectiveness- or lack thereof- of these films comes from the charm of the main characters (because, if we’re honest, there’s very little plot in one of these bad boys). Alex is our main character here, a pleasant businesswoman struggling to fit in at her job as part of a sportswear retail company. She’s fine, I guess. Good hair. Josh Ketchum is the romantic interest, and he is automatically more interesting than Alex because his name makes me think of Pokémon. He doesn’t want to sell the ranch he loves and runs with his sister, but they’re out of money, and Alex’s company wants to buy it. They have some nice chemistry in the bland, inoffensive way of these films.

The most interesting character by far is Alex’s utterly bizarre boss, a sort of fleece-wearing Steve Jobs type who insists on having meetings halfway up a climbing wall and rides a bicycle around the office. There’s also a fairly cute side romance between two other visitors at the ranch.

The mild drama in the film is in the form of Josh’s ex-girlfriend, a woman with excellent boss bitch sunglasses who also wants to buy the ranch. There is also a guy who works with Alex who she’s up against for a promotion. Both of these people want the ranch for nefarious purposes that I guess we’re meant to believe are less morally good than Alex’s reasons.

This Hallmark film is a bit on the weaker end of the scale, I think. It was fine, but didn’t hold up to some of their better (slash more cheesy) entries.

Pumpkin Pie Wars [That’s A Christmas- Cole Reviews Festive Hallmark Movies]

This series of posts is named after MBMBAM‘s segement That’s A Christmas To Me, which is a delight if you love dreadful festive movies.

I am a strong believer that ‘guilty pleasures’ is a dreadful phrase, and that you shouldn’t be ashamed of liking cheesy things. I write romance novels, so maybe I’m biased about this, I don’t know.

Hallmark festive movies are weirdly compelling to me. They’re not without their flaws- god knows they’re pretty much all white, cisgender, heteronormative nonsense. They all have basically the same plot and possess possibly the lowest stakes possible for a film to still claim it has a plot. That said, they’re like catnip to me, especially as we enter this cooler, Christmassy time of the year. I inevitably watch about a dozen each year, so I have decided to review them, because I can.

Pumpkin Pie Wars is a new one for me this year. The ‘plot’ basically involves the adult children of rival bakeries entering the pumpkin pie competition that their mothers first forged their intense hatred of each other in a decade ago. The issue is that Casey cannot cook, as she is a business graduate (top of her class, apparently, although for some reason works at her mum’s bakery) and Sam wants to be a proper chef, not a mere baker. They forge a plan to help each other in secret, and, well, it’s a Hallmark film, so there’s some PG-rated smooching and they fall in love.

This is a very short film, coming in at fewer than 90 minutes, and I am sort of loath to say this about a Hallmark movie, but it could have done with being longer. The ‘misunderstanding’ that one expects in a romance film came 15 minutes from the end, and then there was another key plot point thrown into the mix about five minutes later. Carnage, obviously, for the last ten minutes.

The main characters were about as bland and politely charming as you’d expect in this, but their mothers were amazing and vicious to each other. The whole thing plays like Romeo & Juliet but without all the stabbing.

It’s trash, and the pacing is off, but the delicious animosity between their mothers is delightful, so I’d say this is a good medium-bad Hallmark movie.

Book Review: The Handmaid’s Tale

Firstly, I can’t believe I’ve managed to get to the age of thirty without reading this book. I’ve always had a sort of grumpy avoidance of things other people really recommend; it isn’t snobbishness, it’s more the feeling that when something is built up that much, it can’t possibly live up to it. It’s that awkward moment where your friend is showing you their favourite film and you’re just not feeling it. So I have been aware of The Handmaid’s Tale forever, been told to read it hundreds of times, but just not done so. What a mistake.

This is one of the best books I have ever read. I read Vox a few months ago, and I also read The Power last year, both of which draw heavily on the ideas in The Handmaid’s Tale. (Incidentally, I read all three of these books for the same reason- the Newcastle Girl book club.) This female-focused, dystopian, morally heavy style of story really does it for me.

The thing about The Handmaid’s Tale is that it isn’t overly difficult to imagine a world in which the horrifying reality presented is true; we already know, don’t we, that there are people who live in liberal, western countries who oppose women’s rights to do what they want with their bodies? There are people who oppose feminism. There are people who use religion to push their own beliefs onto the masses. That’s the real power of this book- it’s not a completely alien world that is presented, but one which could fairly easily be reality.

The story itself is very loose; the narrative style is erratic and conversational, flicking back and forward in time, and it works so well. Our protagonist, who we know only by her enforced name of Offred, is a Handmaid, a fertile woman in a world where that is rare. She is forced into a life of horrifying servitude in which she must attempt to conceive the child of a powerful man, a child who will be raised by the man’s wife.

I was absolutely gripped by this book. I can’t imagine many people are reading this who haven’t read this yet, but if you are one of them, you absolutely have to read it. I was furious, heartbroken and horrified by it, and it absolutely deserves the praise it receives.

Review: The Mandalorian

This review could basically read it’s amazing and you need to watch it and honestly that would be sufficient.

If you’ve been living under a rock (because let’s face it, I am late to this party) The Mandalorian is a series on Disney+. Set in between trilogies, it follows the adventures of, well, the Mandalorian- a masked bounty hunter with the voice of Pedro Pascal and not much of his face.

Of course, nobody really cares about that (although it must be said that he does an incredible acting job given that his face is covered for the vast, vast majority of this show). People are obsessed with the Child- aka, Baby Yoda.

Look at this lad though

Although he’s not Yoda, he’s a tiny green Force-sensitive cutie and is by far the best thing about this show. I have never felt such intense anxiety about the fate of something so physically similar to a snot before.

This show is heavy on the Western vibes, even down to the music choices, and it works really well. It’s aesthetically gorgeous and well-paced.

Other reasons why it kicks ass: Taika Waititi is a robot, Werner Herzog is a bad guy, and Gina Carano is amazing.

Board Game Review: Unlock 3! Secret Adventures

I keep meaning to play more board games. Although I love them, I feel like there are many big, popular games I have not played. This is not one of those games; in fact, this is a game I have never heard of before.

The game basically takes the popular ‘escape room’ format and applies it to a card game- with surprisingly successful results.

There are three games in the box, plus a tutorial level. It’s worth saying first, I think, that there is absolutely no replay value here at all. Absolutely zero. Once you have solved these puzzles, I can’t possibly imagine why you’d go back and do it again while knowing all the answers. With that in mind, I’d recommend borrowing this game (from a library, perhaps) rather than buying it. It seems to be going for just over £20, and I think I’d resent paying that much for it. That said, it is fairly excellent fun, so perhaps worth the splurge.

The stories are Noside Story, Tombstone Express and Adventurers of Oz. All three are quite different in terms of tone and narrative; Noside Story is a fairly wacky mad scientist story, Tombstone Express is a western locomotive mystery and Adventurers of Oz is a puzzling retelling of the Wizard of Oz story.

All three follow the same core mechanics; you use the cards and have to find clues and solve puzzles. The cards themselves are beautiful and very well-designed. Tombstone Express also had a bizarre shooting mini game where you threw bullets at cards, which did not quite work. Adventurers of Oz was by far the most puzzle-heavy, and also the most satisfying.

This was a fun, collaborative game. I played with one other person, but I imagine it would be delightful with a bigger group. You can also play alone, and I think that would be fine, although I feel talking it through and sharing in the satisfaction of solving the puzzles is probably better.

Overall, I really enjoyed this and will be keeping an eye out for the other games in the series.

Rating: 4/5