La scatola dei desideri

I honestly don't know how to take this movie. The premise is on the less common side. There's a wish box and Faith wishes for True Love. Then things go a little crazy. Faith starts having random encounters with guys. Many of them are the bump-into variety and several include having drinks spilled on her. Later in the movie she gets mad about all the guys "ogling" and touching her. This seems to me to be perilously close to not being PC to have that result from a "wish" which is apparently being fulfilled somehow magically. Faith certainly buys into that theory. Is that really OK to have a wish fulfilled in that way by some mysterious force, or the wish box, or by Pam Grier all dressed in red like Mrs. Clause? If you can avoid being insulted by it, it is kind of funny. I honestly don't know. I am insulted for Faith's sake and the sake of innocent women, but I also see the humor. Does that make me insensitive to see the humor, as the writers obviously intended, in having Faith "handled" that way ?

The Wish is so much a factor in the story that it is almost as if it were a character of its own.

The premise is slightly unusual, but many of the usual tropes jump in quickly. Faith has a very attentive male BFF. The audience quickly picks up on where this is going because it has been done so many times. There's a community program to save. There's a big community get together on Christmas Eve.

Meanwhile there is another sub-plot that is much more altruistic. Stella's mom gets one of the wishes to fulfill (kind of like Make a Wish) and it turns out to be a lot more complicated than it originally sounds.

Hilarie Burton does a nice job as the lead who manages to take all the attention with a combination of frustration, hope, and sometimes humor. Faith goes along with it, but at times she resists blaming her sister for talking her into it.

I rate this 7 stars mostly because I'm not really sure how I feel and 7 is my default for OK, not great, but not bad.

I enjoyed this one. Hilarie Burton is a delight and the movie has some fun moments. Not sure why everyone is complaining about the music... I didn't notice anything like that. It's no award winner, but if you like the mindless Christmas movies, this is one of the more enjoyable ones I've seen lately.

Shame on you Lifetime. A fabulous story, acted out by the wonderful Hilarie Burton and you ruin it with the loud music. This is the second Lifetime movie I have watched this season that the music was so loud you could not hear the dialogue. Why would they do that? Very disappointed.

So most Christmas movies seem to have annoying music tracks. But this one takes it to a new level. Turn on subtitles or you will not be able to tell what the heck anyone is saying. Terrible.

We had to use captioning because the soundtrack drowned out the dialogue, especially when the characters were speaking softly. This is the second movie today where we had to pause, reverse, posy, and pause Judy to read the text on a smartphone-white letters on a pale blue background doesn't work, even with wide screen HD. Other than that, the story and performances were, . . . cute.