A Gingerbread Christmas (2022) -
The actor playing leading man James had very pretty eyes and also looked superb without his top on, so that was a reason to keep watching.
However, Tiya Sircar as the other lead, Hazel was a bit abrupt, just like her Mandalorian character from 'Star Wars: Rebels' (2014-8).
His character though, was quite sweet and charming to counteract her brassy ways and actually I thought that he deserved someone better and nicer.
Their relationship developed as they came up with and created a gingerbread house to win money in order to save her Dad's failing business and I have to say that after years of watching these made for TV specials, I have started to think that some of these down on their luck businesses probably should give up and close, especially if they had to rely on winning an obscenely outrageous amount of money from a scandalously popular local competition, which they clearly weren't actually capable of doing, to make it happen.
They made a big fuss about how to actually put the gingerbread build together. I've only done it once, but it really wasn't that hard to do and it certainly shouldn't have taken them a week to make what they did. It wasn't even that good really when compared to the other competition entries.
This wasn't the worst film that I've seen this season by a long shot, but it still had some weird moments in it.
- They've definitely gone out of the way to make it politically correct, with lesbians, Muslims and a variety of people of all colours (No disabled ones though!) and it was all a bit obvious that this was the case to tick boxes.
- The competition manager asked people if they wanted to say anything before they were judged, quite out of nowhere, purely so she could say something, because no one else did. Probably because it would be a weird thing to do at any competition.
- And I will never understand why, in order to show how popular these bakeries and other places were, they showed huge queues outside the shops, while, most of the time, the shops were half empty. I'm British so I know how to queue and you don't stand outside in the winter just for cake, you just make the people in front squash up so you can all fit inside.
- I also found James' change of heart at the end a bit quick and as I said before, I'm not sure I would have wanted to put up with her moods.
I watched it to the end, because he was cute, but I'm not sure that I was that enamoured with the film in general.
4.25/10.
