Sunday, December 17, 2006

Christmas movie review: Chasing Christmas

Rating: A

Chasing Christmas from 2005 stars Tom Arnold (yes, people are still giving Tom Arnold acting roles) in the Scrooge role and also stars Leslie Jordan (probably best known recently as Beverly Leslie, the bain of Karen's existence on Will & Grace) as Christmas Past and Andrea Roth (Rescue Me) as Christmas Present. While this is basically a Scrooge story - man hates Christmas, man gets taken into past to see how things once were, man loves Christmas again - it is unique enough that I really enjoyed it. We start off with a debriefing of the spirits, learning the next case they'll be working on, which, you know, these stories don't usually show things from their perspective. While Christmas Past is doing his thing and taking Tom's character back in time, he knocks him out and does something magical to make them both humans in like 1965 or something. Seems Christmas Past is so desperate for a smoke that he's willing to give up his job of the last 2000 years just to succumb to some nicotine. So the rest of the movie is spent chasing him (hence the title) to get Tom's character back to where he's supposed to be without messing up anything in the future. In the meantime, Tom's character sees how much he used to love Christmas and that the big traumatic moment he blamed for ruining Christmas (his wife cheating on him) actually was inconsequential because she'd been doing that since their honeymoon! So: Christmas themes, check. Happy ending, check. Uniqueness, check. Overall, I liked it!

Incidentally, this movie can be viewed online right now through the ABC Family Full Episode Streamer.

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