A New Year's Resolution

Regular Christmas Hallmark movies are so cliche, like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. This movie is more of a quiche - some work put into it, a variety of ingredients and leaves you satisfied at the end.

I love that both the female and male lead have relatively successful careers and neither one of them has to give it up in order to be with the other. They also don't have to go to some quaint small town to find their purpose or love of their life. The seriousness of the bank fraud was a little glossed over, but then again we're watching a romance not the Panama Papers.

It seems so cool and fresh/ refreshing, inspired, romantic and just seductive than becomes, scene by scene, more than the expected Hallmark. A beautiful chemistry between Aimee Teegarden and. Michael Rady, nice dialogues, charming resolutions, honest hopeful. Just admirable work.

Rady was a little too much of a happy puppy, Aimee was good (Note: It's Gung, or Kung, Hay Fa Choy - phonetically.) The tale was sweet and I liked the bank issue, a more realistic hard hitting story issue than is normally covered in these movies.

Kelly is a producer at a morning show, Tom works in marketing in a National Bank. She believes in New Year's Resolutions, he doesn't. Her resolution is "to say yes to social invitations"

Unbelievable. We get a different movie than the usual Hallmark gives us and people start complaining. I liked it. We have two people who meet each other, like each other, flirt, go on dates until we have a problem threatening to split them up, which, in my opinion was quite realistic.

There are reviewers saying that the leads didn't have chemistry: i'm sorry, were we watching the same movie? The chemistry was amazing. Both leads were great, but Michael was probably my favorite. His character was quite charming and he definitely knows how to keep me watching.

The script was quite original. We had fun activities and we had a group of friends (we usually get one or a sibling). The characters just talked to each other like the mature adults they are, they never kept anything to each other (even at the ending, and I will defend Tom, he tried his best to tell her). And the romance was ON POINT. The final scene was delightful. Not gonna lie though, I was expecting a flash-forward (since they kind of share a dream) and I was disappointed there wasn't one.

So, I liked it, and this movie gets extra stars for originality.

Michael Rady and Aimee Teagarden have wonderful chemistry. I loved watching every scene with them (prior to the conflict). I wish there had been more. The acting is mostly good all around. Important characters seemed natural to me.

I've said several times that in Hallmark type rom/coms it is necessary to suspend a demand for realism to some extent or another. This movie has two huge plot holes. The first is when a pretty young woman appearing on TV saying she won't turn down any invitations. I'm glad the movie didn't go into the gutter on that one, but in reality that would have been a disaster. The second is the obvious conflict of interest which would have torpedoed their story in the real world. Here's a case of the writers "hanging a lantern on it" when Kelly brings that up and they almost immediately dismiss it. So we'll give this movie two Mulligan's instead of just one and move on.

Disregard those problems, or find a better way around them, and this is a good story. I can't remember a story quite like it (at least recently). There is some real conflict and some angst. There are some great situations. There's also some good dialogue. Some is funny. Some is a little highbrow. Some gets a little philosophical. This movie goes a little more sophisticated than a lot of what we see on Hallmark, even given the two plot holes I pointed out.

Looking at actors' pages on this web site, this movie shows up as both 2019 and 2021. I can't believe I missed it in 2019. Wonder what happened.