A Nanny for Christmas

The movie was ok...it's a romance Christmas movie so I didn't expect much . The one thing that bothered me throughout the film was the main character's eyebrows! They were horrible and over tweezed! Her whole look was so horrible....no makeup and shabby dried straw like hair... she just didn't look the part she was portraying. Very distracting. The acting was average and Dean Cain was overacting for sure.

Suffice it to say that I had, of course, never heard about the 2010 movie "A Nanny for Christmas" prior to sitting down to watch it here in 2024. I stumbled upon the movie as I was gathering Christmas movies for my December Christmas movie marathon.

Writers Michael Ciminera, Richard Gnolfo, Jeffrey Schenck and Peter Sullivan put together a rather generic script. I just didn't get that particular warm and sappy Christmassy feel as I sat through the 87 minutes that the movie ran for. Sure, it was a watchable movie, but it just didn't really stand out in the vast selection of sappy Christmas movies that are out there.

The movie does have a couple of familiar faces on the cast list, with the likes of Emmanuelle Vaugier, Dean Cain, Richard Ruccolo, Cynthia Gibb and Clyde Kusatsu. The acting performances in the movie were certainly fair.

While I did manage to sit through the entire movie, I was not particularly entertained. And since the movie failed to capture that sappy Christmas spirit, then the movie just didn't cut it for me.

This is definitely not a movie that I will be returning to watch a second time. Nor is it bound to become a Christmas classic. But I am sure that there is a fan base out there for a movie such as this.

My rating of director Michael Feifer's 2010 movie "A Nanny for Christmas" lands on a four out of ten stars.

A movie where the protagonist creates an unnecessary problem for herself.

Emmanuelle Vaugier plays a suma cum laud college graduate trying to break into the world of advertising. She interviews with one of the hottest agencies in the field, where she thinks she's interviewing for an account executive position but is instead hired as the nanny for the CEO's two children. Along the way she begins to fall in love with one of the agency's male executives who is struggling to come up with a pitch for a major client. Thinking that the executive will think less of her for being a nanny, she lies and tells him that she's a "special consultant" to the agency, hoping to impress him. As the nanny, she teaches the children that Shakespeare can be fun... if you set up your own play. Regimented in their behavior by their over-bearing mother and absentee father, the children embrace their new nanny's ideas of how to do things (hence the references to the "Sound of Music").

Already we know how the movie will end, but what makes you want to stick around and watch is (a) Ms. Vaugier, who does a great job of being the playful nanny as well as the business-first executive, and (b) a simple, straight-forward plot that you can watch over hot cocoa and spongecake.

You probably won't cry at the end, but at least you'll laugh at the more humorous moments.

Dean Cain plays VERY against type in this movie, as a bombastic company owner. When Ally Leeds, an advertising exec, pitches a campaign including an element certain to anger him, he storms out of the room and fires her ad agency, leading to her dismissal.

Later, thinking she's interviewing for a job at another agency as an ad exec, the owner of that agency thinks she's applying as a nanny and gives her that job. A bit desperate for ANY income, she accepts.

He unorthodox nanny techniques are fun, but complication arise when she falls for an ad exec at that company and pretends to also work there as an ad exec.

This is a fun movie, not at the top of our list, but one we're just fine with seeing again from time to time. It helps that we love Dean Cain, even though his role here is minor and, as I wrote, against type.