Noël est au rendez-vous

There's huge potential in Jeremy Piven, anyone can see that after watching Entourage. The story and the directing was OK, the acting was excellent, but the atmosphere was totally ruined by the poor selection of soundtrack. The songs should have supported the acting but they simply didn't match the scenes and the feelings, at all.

It started off ok. Accurate father-daughter bickering etc. Decent character development. But then it slowly crumbled into a snooze fest that then turned into harsh daddy-daughter clashes and finally, sort of quickly, to a jerk fest with the dad being a jerk to his daughter and a particular jerk to a woman he knew from his past, for no good reason. He lost his wife two years before which does allow for some poor behavior but this movie seemed to be a weird place to flesh it out. Not a Christmas movie at all. It's a movie that takes place around Christmas.

This movie has some really funny parts, Jeremy Piven is funny and has good chemistry with his daughter played by Olivia-Mai Barrett, it's both strained and loving at the same time (which couldn't be more real). If however, due to the title, you begin watching it expecting a Christmas movie or Rom-Com (as I did), you're very likely to be disappointed. This is a Drama/Comedy, so if you're in the Christmas movie mood this isn't the one, perhaps that's why it's rating has dropped lower than what is deserves, for what it is. It's worth watching when you''re in the mood for a funny Drama.

The movie itself is bang average. But Jeremy Piven is really good in it!

Going into this viewing I sort of expected a Hallmark type of story, light and breezy where single man and single woman meet. But it is far from that, it is an examination of the difficulty overcoming a sudden loss.

Jeremy Piven is dad, David, an American working in York, England as an attorney. His daughter is high school student Olivia-Mai Barrett as Jules. They have a good father-daughter relationship but since losing mom two years earlier in an auto accident each of them has difficulty adjusting to life without her.

Jules is not doing so well in school, there is some tension in the household, but she still has a soft spot for dad's loneliness and in a misguided attempt to fix him up for Christmas establishes several "dating" accounts for him. Then she picks a boyfriend who she later finds cheats on everyone.

Some of the scenes are difficult because of the friction between dad and daughter but overall it is a good story of how they work to come to grips with life after mom. A worthwhile 90-minute movie.

My wife and I watched it at home on DVD from our public library. We visited York, the walled city, some years back and it brought back good memories to see scenes there.