Christmas 2020 Reviews: Day 1 - Holidate (2020)

Hello, and welcome to the first of my Christmas 2020 reviews. This year, I will be reviewing one festive film every day leading up to Christmas. Christmas is a magical, cosy time of year, and one thing that everyone likes to snuggle up to around this time is a festive rom-com. But how many good Christmas chick flicks are actually out there?

For these 25 days, I will be watching a variety of romantic Christmas films. Some are made-for-TV, some were released cinematically. Will that divide the quality of these films though?

Some of these look laughably bad, some appear to be plain bad, and some seem promising. So let's begin, with Netflix's Holidate.

Holidate follows Sloane (Emma Roberts) and Jackson (Luke Bracy), who are two singletons fed up with celebrative holidays like Christmas, New Year's Eve and Valentine's Day. Sloane is heartbroken after she found out her ex-boyfriend was cheating on her, and her family pressure her to meet someone new. Meanwhile, Luke keeps hooking up with women who keep try to trap him in a relationship after only a couple of dates. When the pair meet by chance, Sloane tells Jackson what her aunt (played by Kristin Chenoweth) does at each holiday-based family gathering: she brings along a "holidate" - a man who she isn't romantically committed to, as her date, so that she isn't alone. Inspired by this, the pair agree to be each others holidates, and we see how this plan works for them over the course of one year.

Now, I must say that this one feels a bit like cheating, because Christmas only occurs at the very beginning and very end of the film. However, the poster suggests that this is mostly a Christmas based film, and our two protagonists meet because of a Christmas connection (returning presents they don't like to the same shop), so I will be considering this as a Christmas film.

At least, for the blog. I don't actually think this is a Christmas film, but I watched it solely to review it for this themed month, so let's go with it.

Originally, this film left me with an overwhelming feeling of "meh". It felt like such a nothing film to me. Not good, but not so terrible that I would think you were an imbecile if you told me you liked it. But then the more I thought about it, the more I felt frustrated with it.

I had a few problems with Holidate, mainly the pacing, the writing, and the characters, as well as some of the acting.

I know that sounds like I hated everything, but I didn't. Let me start with the positives. Luke Bracy is charming as Jackson. He's a very appealing man, in appearance and in the charisma he portrays onscreen. He brings genuine warmth to a character that would otherwise been a throwaway male lead. Now, ironically this does work against Bracy somewhat, but I said I would start with the positives, so let me continue with those before I get into that.

Some of the cinematography was nice. There's a scene where Sloane and Jackson go to a supermarket together, and the shot is captured from a camera attached to the end of the trolley, which is a nice visual and allows us to follow the characters as they go about their task.

And now for my gripes.

This film didn't really do anything offensively terrible, it's just that it did a lot of things not very well.

I have to talk about the sense of humour this film has. This film's sense of humour is based in shock value and gross-out comedy, and neither of those work here. Admittedly, neither of these are what I personally lean towards in terms of comedy anyway, but it just felt so out of place in Holidate. Roberts and Bracy are both so good-looking and have a Hollywood cleanness to them, that every time someone swears, or there's a joke with someone mass-consuming laxatives by mistake, it just feels awkward because it feels so inauthentic. I know that Roberts has done shock-comedy before at least, in We're the Millers, but the way these characters look just don't suit this style the comedy at all, and their personalities aren't developed enough for their reactions to be funny either.

I wasn't a fan of the film Bridesmaids, but the comedy in that works a lot better, I believe, because as eccentric as the characters are, they all still look and feel like real people we would find in life, even though they may be exaggerated versions. This is particularly problematic when it comes to Emma Roberts as Sloane, who is considered to be the trainwreck of her immediate family. Sloane smokes in secret at family gatherings, goes out in her pyjamas and is always eating chocolate and sweets to help her cope with the emotions she continually supresses.

With that in mind, please take a moment to scroll back up and look at the film poster. Does this pretty, thin woman with a toned stomach, good makeup and nice clothes look like such a mess to you? I wish they had gone for someone a bit more average, it just would have suited the character a lot better.

If we look at a far superior comedy, the show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, they aren't afraid to differentiate when the main character Rebecca (played by Rachel Bloom, who also created the show) is looking great and when she is looking rough.

This is Rebecca looking rough, with no makeup, bad clothes and her hair tied back in a messy, careless way:

This is Rebecca looking great, with full makeup, styled hair, a well-fitted dress and jewellery:

Quite a contrast, right?

Now let's try that with Holidate. This is Sloane looking rough, according to the film:

And this is Sloane looking great:

Where is the difference between those last two exactly? That she had her hair down and put on red lipstick for the "nice" picture? Her eye makeup on the rough day looks identical to the eye makeup on the good day.

I know Holidate isn't the only chick flick guilty of this, but I found it so particularly noticeable in this film that I just had to talk about it.

There are other reasons the jokes in the film don't work. The direction of this film, and how it's shot, is so bland and ordinary, that it does nothing to aid the comedic elements being presented to us. You can put someone in a silly costume, or in a bizarre location, but if your camerawork and the shots you use don't do anything to highlight these things, then it just looks flat and boring.

Additionally, a lot of the jokes, more so in the dialogue than the action-based comedy, simply aren't funny. In the scene where Jackson and Sloane first meet, she is returning a pair of pyjamas to a clothing shop, explaining that they were a gift from her sister, although the pyjamas are sized for a much bigger lady than her. Jackson sees the pyjamas, hears the story behind them and says "Nailed it." Nailed it? That line alone will age badly, if it hasn't already. Your joke can't be that a line was funny because it's a thing that some people actually say. There's no wit to it.

In the aforementioned laxative scene (which I don't think is much of a spoiler to talk about) Sloane repeatedly screams at Jackson to tear her dress off, so she can go to the toilet faster. Hearing slight variations or repeats of the line "Get it off" over and over isn't funny, it just makes the scene feel really long. Additionally, Roberts delivers those lines in a really whiny way, which is frustrating because I do think she's a likeable actress. She simply didn't have anything good to work with here, whether that's the fault of the screenwriter or the director for not being witty enough to think of how to make this scene more fun.

The premise to Holidate isn't bad: find someone who will pretend to be your romantic partner during every holiday celebration so that you aren't the only singleton, and maybe grow to care about that person along the way. Somewhat cliché, the fake-to-real lovers trope, but watchable and probably enjoyable, if handled right.

This film just doesn't understand the potential it could have had though. For a start, Sloane tells everyone in her life from the beginning that Jackson isn't really her boyfriend, that he's just someone there so that she's not alone at family celebration gatherings.

Well then, what's the point of that? You've just completely killed your own premise. The whole reason Sloane teamed up with Jackson to begin with was so that neither of them would be alone for the holidays, and they wouldn't be pestered by people for being single. The obvious choice with that is to then have them pretend to be a couple, and maybe complicate things with Sloane's family during holiday gatherings by having them actually like Jackson, while he and Sloane know that what they have isn't real. By risking hurting her family when they eventually end their holidate agreement, there are consequences to their actions. But by telling all her relatives that Jackson means nothing to her, everyone in Sloane's family knows that she is still single, so they continue to try and set her up with people, while telling her how sad they are that she doesn't have anyone real, which is exactly the same as when she was alone anyway. The only difference is that Jackson awkwardly sits there and just listens it all.

On the subject of Jackson, while I like Luke Bracy in this role, the character himself is very vague, and is, in my opinion, a Marty Stew (the male equivalent of a Mary Sue - someone so normal and perfect that you can't believe that they would ever be a real person). Jackson is Australian, but we don't know why he moved to America, or why he doesn't really speak to his own family (which is only very briefly and very lightly implied). He's obviously attracted to Sloane from the beginning, but she gives him no reason to be, other than the fact that she looks like Emma Roberts. She's rude, she's dismissive of him, and they are never shown to have anything in common apart from a dislike of being alone for the holidays, and that isn't exactly the best reason to fall for a person.

There's also a really weird, pointless scene where Sloane and Jackson wake up one morning and have this long exchange where they talk about how they don't know if they slept together the previous night. I don't know if this was supposed to be for comedic value, or to illustrate how the two characters don't want to face that they may have complicated their relationship, or both, but the way it was played out was so awkward. I wish they had either cut the scene entirely, or had just cut out any implication that they had slept together at that point, it feels so odd and wrong. It would have been better for them to wake up together, after only sleeping, and for the first time, see them realise that they are beginning to feel attraction towards each other, because they liked waking up together. But the film doesn't do that, so let's move on.

This film also has too many side characters with subplots, some of which would honestly be more interesting than the main plot if given the right platform, as they are less generic and yet realistic enough to capture the audience's interest. I'm particularly talking about the plot of Sloane's younger brother and his fiancé, who realise only after they've married that they know very little about each other because they rushed the relationship due to the whimsy of infatuation. This is a very realistic situation a lot of couples find themselves in, enjoying the feeling of love so much that they say they will commit to a person for the rest of their lives before they dare risk the love fading or going away. In this film, the couple work together to try and make it work. That isn't the take that Hollywood generally goes for, as films like I Give It a Year have shown us. I like that though. It's nice to see two characters realise that they may have made a mistake, and try together to make it work, when it would probably be easier for them both to walk away. I think that premise on its own could work really well and make an interesting, sweet film, but it's just a bit underdeveloped here.

The other subplots are okay at best, though again, the ideas for them alone aren't too bad. One of them regards Sloane's aunt and a young doctor, who have a romance, but the aunt pushes the doctor away because she's afraid of commitment, as her string of holidates suggest. My problem with this was that the doctor was dating Sloane when he and the aunt were first shown as a romantic pair. We know Sloane doesn't really care for the doctor, but I still find it morally dubious that her aunt would go off with her date.

Also, there's a scene where Jackson takes the aunt to a wedding as his date, while Sloane takes the doctor to the same wedding as her date, so that's uncomfortable all around.

Sloane's sister (by the way, Sloane is never shown to have any friends - I understand that her family are very heavily involved in her life and the overall plot, but maybe insinuate she has a friend just from a call or a text or something sometimes - Jackson at least has friends) is bored with her marriage to her perfect husband and does a bad thing, but because the husband is perfect, it gets resolved, so that's about that for that plot. It happens in the final third of the film, and could have been cut without anything being lost.

I feel like this is an aspiring cute, fluffy rom-com that ended up being trapped in the body of a vulgar comedy, and this does the film no favours. Again, look at that poster. It does nothing to imply that this is an outrageous comedy: it's too pure. That poster makes this look like the kind of film you would click on because you think it looks cute for your twelve year old daughter to watch, and then switch off when you don't like the swearing, only for them to watch secretly because they think it's edgy, but it really isn't. It's so incredibly bland.

After watching the film initially, I didn't like it and had problems with it, but thought that some people might think it was fine. However, this is unfortunately one of those films where the more you think about it, the less you like. It simply wasn't funny. I can't think of a single joke that even made me smile, but I can think of several that were just plain bad, that made me want to pause the film and walk away to recover from how it made me feel. Even the romance, while well played, doesn't feel realistic. They meet about eight times across a year and decide that it's love? This is a weaker version of Friends With Benefits, with a bit of Christmas and some other holidays thrown in. Maybe you'll think it's fine at best, but I sincerely doubt you'll remember it or thoroughly enjoy it.

THE SCOREBOARD

Would I recommend this film? No.

Christmas quote of the film: "Well, your aunt Susan brought the mall Santa home, and your nephew just pooped in the manger." - Sloane's mother.

Film rating: 3/10