The Holiday Exchange

I watched this Christmas movie in the beginning of July and loved every second of it. It's not trying to do or be anything other than what it is. The story is typical RomCom kind of stuff with the Christmas cheer thrown in for good measure. The actors all play their parts well , no exaggeration, no campy or crude jokes. This is genuinely a sweet movie , in the very best way possible. I loved it. It's beautifully filmed and the music is pleasant and unintrusive unlike a lot of it's gay themed predecessors. Anybody who doesn't have a problem with the idea of male couples should enjoy this movie as much as I did. Ten Stars.

Admittedly I only started this movie because it's a gay Christmas movie. In the end I really enjoyed it. The beginning was rough and the cheesiest part, but I got into it after the first act. I liked all the main characters and their diversity (the actors and their storylines). The secondary characters were all somewhat forgettable. I'm surprised Kyle Richards is at the center of the poster as she's barely in it. Overall it was predictable, but pretty good acting and a little more depth than the average Hallmark-type movie. I'm not a big movie person and tend to only watch around the holidays (mostly classics like Home Alone, A Christmas Story, etc) but this was a worthy watch.

I am a firm believer that Gay themed movies are either really good or really bad. There is never a middle ground when it comes to these types of movies. This one happens to be really bad and the lead actor Taylor Frey has to be the absolute worse. He happens to be very stiff and fake. There is also nothing original about this story. Let's travel across the world and meet your love. Maybe this story could have been good if they would have only hired a lead actor that could act. I have seen a few of his painful attempts at acting before and each one only gets worse. The rest of the cast was easier to watch. Save your time and skip this movie.

The dialogue is not great and the acting is average to good, and the characters were all too well-off for my liking. But despite that I sensed gay actors were probably involved in its making and that is a bonus. I did not like their lives as represented here much, but who am I to judge ? Most popular heterosexual mainstream films have the same kind of supposed glamour, and that as they say is Hollywood. The plot is easy to follow. Four guys go away for Christmas, exchanging apartments and they find love. One apartment in Los Angeles and the other in an obscure place that looked like a cute Romanian town. It borders on the unbelievable, but then a lot of films do and we accept the fantasy. Samer Salem as a writer was in my opinion the best actor, and Taylor Frey was fun and at the same time irritating to watch. All four find love and how often does that happen either in life or on film? To sum up it is escapist fantasy and so are most of Vincente Minnelli films and Douglas Sirk. This film is arguably lacking their magic, but it does have a lot of wish fulfilment and to a large extent this is the Hollywood ethos, and most do not complain about that.

This is simply bad, really,really bad! The acting is amateurish and coupled to a nonsensical script, the outcome is nauseating. It's like some kind of fantasy or fairytale that has no connection to reality. The European setting looks suspiciously American, and becomes distracting. The script seems to have been written by a child. The movie goes from one painfully bad scene to another, all with the aim of creating a world of complete fantasy and silliness. While the aim might have been to produce a gay film with a happy feel and ending to it, turning it into some silly childish fantasy is clearly not the answer.