Christmas Next Door

Like all Christmas movies they are no different then one's at Valentines day. Except for the obvious exception in holidays. I'm not a fan of holiday movies but I've been watching quite a few during this pandemic. This wasn't too bad but definitely not my favorite. I couldn't focus on it very long. I did notice the House looked very familiar that Eric lives in. It's the same house as the movie Chloe with Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore.

Here we get an antithetical romance between Jesse Metcalfe--who we first saw and came to like in the Dallas sequel-- and Fiona Gubelmann.

Jesse plays a successful author of lifestyle books for single men, and he lives his lifestyles, adding authenticity to his work. He's also not a big "holiday guy".

He gets saddled with his niece and nephew leading up to Christmas, and is a real fish out of water in handling kids. His neighbor (Fiona) helps out even though she and Jesse don't get along that well.

A funny bit throughout the movie is someone continually placing Christmas decorations in his yard, and his frustration when he gets rid of them and they reappear.

It's well worth a watch, and we've seen it more than once.

The minor details in the film make a huge difference in how one perceives it, between being a low budget waste of time and a decent film where they put at least some effort into the production.

Anyone else notice how they were skating on plastic tiles rather than ice? This, as well as the obvious violin playing.

Overall, it was a decent film for what it was, and I ended up watching it through completely. That's how I judge a film, if I can actually get through it. I just wish that they would focus on the minor details a bit more than they did. It would have made a huge difference in how it's seen.

My wife and I settled in for some festive TV watching a couple of weeks ago, and we landed on Christmas Next Door from the Hallmark Channel. However, we also had things to do, so we only watched parts of this movie over the course of two hours. By the time the movie was over, I estimate that I had watched about 18 minutes of this actual movie, and my wife probably watched about 12 minutes. There was some overlap in our watching, but there were also some parts one of us watched while the other person was doing something in another room. Together, we pretty much got the gist of the story.

It seems that the guy in the story, who early on had his black hair completely slicked back, did not have the Christmas spirit, and did not like decorating for Christmas. There was some annoying man who lived on Slicked-Back's block who wanted to decorate the front of his house for him, but Slicked-Back was having none of it. After not watching for a little while, my wife and I tuned in to find a blonde woman, who also lived on that block, talking to her sister about how Slicked-Back doesn't like to decorate. This part was troubling to me, and I honestly feared for Slicked-Back's life at that point. It seemed that the whole neighborhood was obsessed with him. I was afraid that the neighbors were going to drug him, kidnap him, and perform medical experiments on him where they tried to make him part reindeer. I imagine that they probably would have attached the antlers to his head, kept his face in tact, given him a reindeer torso, kept his human arms and legs, and then attached hooves. Sleep with one eye open, Slicked-Back!

I guess my fear wasn't so great that I had to keep watching because we stopped paying attention to the movie for a while. When we started watching again, Slicked-Back was still alive, BUT he was hanging out with the blonde woman enjoying Christmas carols AND his hair went from being slicked back to an even side part. This encapsulated the main character's transition from being a bad boy who was too cool for xmas to the side-parted teddy bear who wanted nothing more than to buy the prized goose for Bob Cratchit's family. My wife noticed this too, and we both instantly knew that Side-Part had found the true meaning of Christmas. I was so moved that immediately hugged my daughter, but she was busy tearing napkins to shreds and therefore did not seem to care about my hug.

This was a pretty good Christmas movie, even in spite of a few minor details that bugged me. The chemistry between the leads was believable, and the script was actually decent. Fiona, the actress who played April, was adorable and charming. I had a harder time with Jesse Metcalfe, as I thought he was still a child before I looked him up and discovered he is only a few days younger than me. He played his bachelor role perfectly.

As for the negatives, I just wish they would have dubbed in a better violinist, and that the actress would have at least attempted to make it look like she was actually playing it. Also, what are these houses made of that he can be sitting in his study two houses away and hear her playing the violin loud enough that he's distracted? Or that when he turns his music up, it's loud enough to disrupt a music lesson with her student? Yet she couldn't hear a conversation between him and his ex-girlfriend in a super quiet evening from feet away? Okay.

All in all, I recommend watching it. It contains everything you expect from a Hallmark movie.