Prime Time: Just In Time For Christmas (2015)

There seems to be an unwritten rule for TV movies nowadays that, if possible, anything with a plot utilising time travel should cast Christopher Lloyd in there somewhere. Main role, cameo, it doesn’t matter. Just have Doc available, letting viewers know that you know the best time travel expert in modern cinema.

Just In Time For Christmas has both an element of time travel and the presence of Christopher Lloyd (here playing a kindly grandfather). The plot revolves around Lindsay Rogers (Eloise Mumford), a psychology professor who may just get everything she ever dreamed of. She is offered a position at Yale, and is also proposed to by her boyfriend, Jason (Michael Stahl-David). But it seems that the two things may be incompatible, providing her with a potentially crucial, and life-changing, dilemma. Thankfully, an angelic type of figure, a coachman in the guise of William Shatner, offers Lindsay a chance to see what her life will look like three years down the line.

Magical and enjoyable, if unspectacular, Just In Time For Christmas works better than some thanks to the cast. Which is something I say a lot at this time of year, because it is usually just the different faces making these films distinguishable from one another. 

Director Sean McNamara has a varied selection of TV and film to his credit, including a number of *shudder* Baby Geniuses sequels (or offshoots, I have not yet been brave enough to explore any of those movies), but he seems to respond fairly well to the script, written by Helen Frost and Don MacLeod. Frost and MacLeod have been a working writing team for only a few years now, still perhaps getting used to writing films with certain expectations to fulfil, but they do a good job here. 

Mumford and Stahl-David are good leads, the former is pleasant company and the latter embodies all of those great qualities that the male leads in these movies need, but without being as bland as so many of them are. Lloyd keeps popping up just often enough to remind you that he's in the movie, which was a tactic I welcomed, and Laura Soltis plays the mother of Mumford's character, and ends up only used for a few scenes mainly bookending the main section. Tess Atkins plays Becca, someone who has grown a LOT closer to Jason over the course of the three years that have happened in the blink of an eye, and she does well for someone with arguably the most thankless role of the lot.

Interesting in the way that it's not JUST another tale of a successful business woman realising that her career and achievements mean nothing without the love of a good man to keep her warm and cosy in the evenings, Just In Time For Christmas walks a fine line throughout. It's easy to view the lead as someone being quite selfish and disruptive, considering the film is allowing her to see the consequences of her actions, but it's also enjoyable to see something like this that doesn't force a main character to deal only in absolutes. There's room for compromise, room for difficulties on the way to real happiness, and that's probably a better lesson than the messages delivered to viewers by hundreds and hundreds of other Christmas TV movies.

6/10

P.S. Here is a huge list of every Christmas movie I have ever reviewed, either here or over at Flickfeast.

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Miss Congeniality (2000)

Once you get beyond the opening act of Miss Congeniality, with numerous scenes built around the fact that Sandra Bullock isn't viewed as a lady because she's strong, smart, doesn't take time to ensure her hair and make-up are flawless every morning, and is generally just "one of the guys", things improve considerably. Instead of just trying to hide Bullock in the wrinkled clothing of "FBI slob", she gets a chance to shine, in terms of her transformed appearance and also, more importantly, in scenes that show her talent for comedy.

The basic plot is nonsense, but nonsense that makes the whole thing easy enough to buy into. Bullock is Gracie Hart, the only agent available at short notice to help infiltrate the Miss United States beauty pageant, which the FBI believes has been targeted by a dangerous criminal who wishes to blow it up. Gracie only has a couple of days to be groomed by Victor Melling (Michael Caine), who initially suspects it's a job that even a man of his skills cannot manage, and she is a pain in the backside of all those involved, be it the hosts (played by Candice Bergen and William Shatner) or her colleagues at the bureau (Benjamin Bratt tries to offer support, Ernie Hudson is the boss none too impressed by the whole escapade).

Director Donald Petrie has a filmography with some solid comedies in there, but few real greats. This is another solid one, almost lifted higher by the performances from a couple of the main players. Although it's all put together competently enough, it suffers from a script that fails to wring as many laughs from each sequence as it could. Marc Lawrence has written a few features that Bullock has starred in, whether by coincidence or by design, but co-writers Katie Ford and Caryn Lucas are names I am less familiar with, and that makes me wonder if there were a number of conflicting voices here that tried to pull the film in too many different directions, tonally, without keeping the comedy at the front and centre of their plans. You have the thriller plotline, often sidelined aside from one or two key sequences, you have the "fish out of water" aspect of Bullock being somewhere she really doesn't want to be, and you get the moments of female bonding. None of these elements spoil the experience, but the shifts in tone are enough to make it feel inconsistent and lacking in cohesion.

The consistency comes from the main performances. Bullock is a lot of fun, making the most of this star vehicle, and Caine works very well alongside her, helped by the fact that he grabs most of the best lines from the script. Bergen and Shatner are both good, with the latter a perfect fit for the role of slick show host, and Heather Burns is very sweet as "Miss Rhode Island", a girl who brings out the protective nature of Bullock's character. Other contestants are played by Melissa De Sousa, Deirdre Quinn, and Wendy Raquel Robinson, although they often have to resign themselves to being scene-setting accessories in most of their scenes. Hudson gets to be angry in a couple of scenes, and that's his whole character (basically), and Bratt gets the thankless role of potential romantic interest, which makes a nice change from a talented actress being stuck in such a role.

There's a good selection of familiar hits in the soundtrack, some amusing lines of dialogue outwith the exchanges between Bullock and Caine (my favourite being the answer to a question about a favourite date), and it just about manages not to outstay its welcome. If you're a massive fan of Bullock then you may want to add an extra point. Everyone else can have more laughs with Drop Dead Gorgeous (a much funnier film with a similar setting, albeit very different thanks to the mock-doc style) first, and then get to this one whenever the opportunity arises.

6/10

You can buy the movie, with the sequel, here.
Americans can buy it here.

Osmosis Jones (2001)

Osmosis Jones is a standard tale of a reckless cop (Chris Rock) paired up with someone who is a stickler for the rules (David Hyde Pierce). There's an evil villain (Laurence Fishburne) with a plan to go down in history. And lives are at stake, although it is mainly just the one life (belonging to an unhealthy Bill Murray). The big difference here is that the cop is Osmosis Jones, paired up with a medicine named Drix, and the villain is a deadly virus with symptoms that may not be fully recognised until it is too late. And all of this is taking place inside the body of Murray, in animated form.

Directed by Bobby and Peter Farrelly, Osmosis Jones is a fun blend of animation and live action (most of the grosser moments involve Murray either helping the virus along or showing some nasty side-effects from the battles raging within him) that is helped by a great voice cast and a lot of wonderful little sight gags, even if they are all fairly obvious puns. It's also quite tame for a film that comes with their names attached, which seems more likely to be down to the script by Marc Hyman. It focuses more on transposing the tropes of a buddy cop action comedy into the setting of a human body than it does on the many potential opportunities for toilet humour.

The animation may be a bit rough around the edges but it does everything it has to do, and that includes some fun scenes that have our main characters depicted in their animated form while the background is the very live Murray (who is also joined onscreen by Molly Shannon, Chris Elliott, and Elena Franklin, who portrays his frustrated daughter).

Rock does very well in the kinda-lead role, his sharp, fast delivery working brilliantly alongside the smooth and deliberate tone of Pierce. Fishburne, voice matched by the character design, oozes threat and menace with his every line, and there are fun supporting turns from William Shatner, Brandy Norwood, and Ron Howard.

The idea of our bodies being regulated and looked after by small humanoid entites isn't a new one (and it's one that can keep delivering great entertainment when done the right way, as it was with Inside Out) and nothing here feels too original, which is probably the biggest problem that the film has. Overlook the sense of the familiar, however, and you will find an absolute little cracker of a film, one that was unjustly neglected when first released, and remains sorely overlooked nowadays. Seek it out, give it your time, and you may well find that you enjoy it almost as much as I do.

8/10

Osmosis Jones can be absorbed in exchange for cash here.
Americans can get it streaming into their homes here (but on disc, not just . . . streaming).

American Psycho II: All American Girl (2002)

American Psycho wasn't ever a movie that I thought needed a sequel. It was a self-contained slice of cinema gold. But such a thought has never occurred to film executives before so why should it occur now?

After an opening sequence that pretty much pisses all over the greatness of the ending of the first movie, this film then moves on to establish its own identity as we follow the latest psycho on the block (played by Mila Kunis), a young woman determined to be the best in her class so that she gets to follow the path she has chosen for herself all the way to the FBI training facility at Quantico. If she can't achieve her goals simply by being the best in her class and working hard then she has no qualms about getting rid of anything (or, more specifically, anyone) in her way.

Directed by Morgan J. Freeman, this is an example in many ways of how to create a bad sequel. It creates a tenuous connection to the first movie that feels quite disrespectful, for want of a better word, and it simply moves from one ridiculous moment to the next after that.

Luckily, the cast help make this rubbish entertaining. Mila Kunis isn't all that believable in the lead role but she's always a welcome presence onscreen and has fun delivering some of the dialogue. William Shatner is also good fun to watch (when is "The Shat" never entertaining?), Lindy Booth and Kim Poirier lift things with their small roles and Geraint Wyn Davies is amusingly perplexed as the psychiatrist who doesn't make much professional headway with the leading lady. Robin Dunne and Keith Lawson also do fine with their roles.

While it's far removed from the sly, dark humour of the first film, American Psycho 2 does bring along a camp, over the top tone that makes things fitfully amusing. The script by Alex Sanger and Karen Craig seems to know from the very beginning that the very idea of a sequel following on from the first movie is a ridiculous notion and so it starts piling on the absurdities one after the other until we get to a grand finale that is as laughable (both intentionally and unintentionally) as it is unbelievable.

You could certainly wring some entertainment from this movie, as I did, but it's not one I'd recommend and it's certainly not one that you're likely to be won over by if you were as big a fan of the first film as I was.

4/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/American-Psycho-II-All-Girl/dp/B00005UWP4