Aimee Teegarden

An Easter Bloom

/ Rebekahrox / 15 Comments

Flower Power

Aimee Teegarden plays a young lady in her mid twenties who has lost her faith because her Dad, who was very into church and Christianity, died of a heart attack. She has come home to “the farm” to help her still religious mother. The farm is a flower farm that is struggling because of what I like to call “bad business.” This is a condition that most Hallmark businesses that need to be saved suffer from. Basically, it can be defined as owners who, allergic to making a profit, try to run a business based on a very flawed business plan. This includes but is not limited to having a store with little to no merchandise in it, having a store with merchandise that people only buy a  month and a half out of the year, merchandise that no one would ever want and refusing to sell merchandise that they actually might want, a business that gives its products away for free, a business with no workers or volunteer workers, owners who have no idea how to use modern business tools like social media, etc., etc. To add to the financial difficulties, usually the owners live in huge and gorgeous  McMansions as do Aimee and her mother. Their lifestyle is supported by people who come to the flower farm to “pick their own bouquets”. There is no mention of any large clients who buy their flowers wholesale in bulk. No 1-800-FLOWERS inc., in sight. Plus this is one of those farms that don’t have any farm workers.

Because of too cold weather, the flowers of Aimee’s flower farm won’t grow in time for Easter, prime bouquet season. We know this because Aimee keeps stabbing at the concrete-like ground with a farm implement and muttering things about God in a bad way. Also they apparently don’t have a greenhouse. Presumably her farm is all perennials because there is no mention of not being able to plant seeds, which wouldn’t bloom in time for Easter anyway. But the odd thing is that there are flowers all around everywhere you look in this town, including in Aimee’s house. Where are those flowers coming from? Maybe Aimee and her mother’s farm is cursed, because it is apparently the only flower farm in the north east that can’t grow flowers. Maybe they need an exorcist in addition to the mother’s faith and prayer.  Anyway, the mortgage has not been paid in months and they just got a foreclosure letter from the bank. Aimee can’t believe it and doesn’t understand. Plus, the bank has turned down their loan application which is not surprising because they have not paid their mortgage in months and are foreclosing. It’s like trying to pay your credit card bill with your credit card. But Aimee and her mother are very disappointed that their fool-proof plan of borrowing money from the people you owe money to did not work. Possible salvation arrives when their good-guy neighbor offers to buy the farm for a generous amount of money which sounds like more than the farm is worth. He is turned down because that is the way it is with struggling businesses in Hallmarkland. The struggling owners always prefer to have the bank take over leaving them with nothing rather than selling their failing businesses for mucho dinero. In order to stave off disaster, Aimee is going to increase her hours at the coffee shop she works at and her mother will do more baking of Snickerdoodles that the coffee shop owner has generously offered to sell without taking a cut of the profits. Good plan. Solid. People like to give Aimee and her mother stuff throughout this whole movie. Also, the mom is going to increase her hours at the accountants. What? She works for an accountant? Amazing.

Thanks to her new friendship with a nice woman and former florist who has moved back to town from a long absence, Aimee enters a statewide flower arranging contest which she had no idea existed despite selling flowers for a living. The prize money for first prize is $20,000 dollars! Who is sponsoring this contest that can afford to offer a $20,000 purse for first prize? That’s the business I would want to be in. This nice woman is the mother of the new pastor at church who is the love interest. While teaching Aimee the basics of flower arranging she is also one of the several sources of inspirational quotes that inspire Aimee throughout the movie and, along with the handsome new pastor, lead her back to church and God.

Spoiler alert. To make a long story short, Aimee comes in second and doesn’t get the $20,000 needed to save the farm. The pastor and she become a couple after a breach is healed caused by Aimee eavesdropping on a private conversation the pastor was having and her misunderstanding of what was going on.  His mother heals a beef she has had with the town grouch with a heart of gold, who happens to be the winner of the $20,000 prize. Also the pastor tells his parishioners his big secret that he is a fan of extreme sports and because of an accident he had, he was almost paralyzed and one of his former students was left in a wheelchair. Throughout the movie, Aimee has been accepting gifts from enablers kind townspeople. Buying all of Mom’s snickerdoodles, free flowers so she doesn’t have to practice with artificial ones, free flower arranging lessons, free clothes, etc. So it is no surprise when the winner of the contest, for no reason whatsoever, bestows her prize money on Aimee with no strings attached. Aimee is pleased to accept.  So the farm is temporarily saved. Do the flowers ever sprout? We never find out. But it doesn’t matter, because Aimee and Mom are finally going to have another income stream thanks to the bright idea of turning the farm into a wedding venue. There is no evidence that they know any more about weddings than they do about flowers, but let’s have faith that it just might work. Bless them.  I’m giving this 5 stars because I like Ben Hollingsworth who played the pastor. His mother was nice and I liked the actress who played her too. It was a sweet movie that was very appropriate for Easter, being about miraculous happenings and such.

Rating: 5 out of 10.

Christmas Class Reunion

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**Spoilers**

A Class Act

The movie starts with the Winter Prom of 2007 featuring 6 stereotypical teen “types.” The smart and popular achiever, both male and female versions, the class clown, the in-love inseparable couple, the popular jock, and the class nerd. The mean girl is missing. They are part of the class deemed “cursed” due to disasters at prom, graduation, and other class events. They used the same early 30-something-year-old actors to play themselves as teens. And may I just say that as much as Botox, collagen injections and fillers do not work for 30-somethings, that goes double if they are playing teens. I speak of one of the secondary actors in particular.

Cut to 15 years later and the “achiever”, Elle, short for Noelle, played by Aimee Teagarden is in charge of planning the class reunion. We know that she is the focus mainly because her name is Christmassy. She indeed has fulfilled her potential, having made quite a name for herself as the Chief Technology Officer of a successful and important company. She leaves Silicon Valley for Hartford CT, looking forward to seeing her old friends again, particularly Kam the male version of herself whom she had a crush on when she was in high school. We next meet Devin the class clown, very appealingly played by Tanner Novlan. At the 2007 prom, he flooded both Aimee and the school gym with his malfunctioning snow machine. Tanner is the male lead and his chemistry with Aimee was amazing.

She is very wary of him because he was her complete opposite in high school and always getting into trouble. She is surprised that the irresponsible screw-up is now the loving father of a 13-year-old tech prodigy and running a successful event supply business. He has always had a crush on her though. The young actress that played his daughter was a star and a scene-stealer, by the way. As father and daughter, the two actors have an easy and natural rapport. She is very impressed that her tech-phobic Dad knows the famous Elle Chamberlain.

As the reunion plans come into shape we also reconnect with the inseparable couple whose marriage is falling apart even as their real estate agency is booming. The Nerd Girl is now an attractive and successful TV host up for a big promotion to a national morning show. She still lacks self-confidence despite her success and is inseparable from her best friend who is also her very flamboyant stylist. When the popular jock makes an appearance we think we spy a love interest for our likable TV host, but sadly he is attracted to her gay best friend instead! Aimee is very happy when her old unrequited crush, Kam, shows up. He is just like her: career and success-focused and very very busy. Too busy and important to help with the reunion, so she finds herself partnering with her old nemesis, Devin.

Of course, the inevitable catastrophes start to happen with a fire breaking out at their fancy venue and Aimee’s company being the target of a federal investigation putting her whole career in jeopardy. As she works with Devin in finding a new venue and tackling all of the challenges, she realizes that her worth is not what she does for a living, but what she is inside. She and all of her friends’ lives are happily sorted, which we learn in one of my beloved “one year later” epilogues. Hallmark is delighting fans by casting other popular Hallmark stars in cameo roles. This time was Chris McNally’s turn in a cute performance as an Elf-garbed photographer. I tend to like movies using ensemble casts and this one was no exception.

Rating: 8 out of 10.

Autumn in the City

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New York is so Nice!

This was fairly watchable despite a few troublesome aspects. One of which was the mismatch in the casting. Aimee Teegarden is an attractive and relatively youthful Hallmark leading lady and Evan Roderick as her love interest was a fresh new face and did well. Unfortunately, together, the pair didn’t work. Aimee is in her early 30s playing an almost 30-year-old. Evan Roderick is 6 years younger and could pass for 17. So, for me, the chemistry was off.

Piper has escaped from her hometown and her over-protective parents to pursue her dreams in New York City. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have any dreams other than escaping from her dead-end life in Iowa or Omaha or whatever. This leads to a series of temp jobs where she hopes that her destiny will hit her “like a bolt of lightning.” She is almost 30 years old. Honey, if lightning hasn’t struck by now, it’s not going to. The thing is, her passion is right in front of her, but she is totally oblivious. Big Clue: She is constantly drawing and coloring in her sketchbook which is never far from her side. So, Piper, art? Maybe? While waiting for her bolt out of the blue, Piper waves aside several amazing opportunities that most young ambitious *20* somethings starting from scratch would kill for. I could neither sympathize, understand, nor relate. She turns down a supervisory position in a museum, which I’m pretty sure would be snapped up by most master’s degree holders in the field just to get their foot in the door. She takes a job as the personal assistant to a Broadway star. But she is about ready to go on a national and international tour, including London. Piper doesn’t want to go (why not?????!!!!!!!) and quits or is fired. Then she gets a job in an art gallery where she promptly sells a painting they have been trying to get rid of for months and earns a 10% commission which the owner has to insist she accept. New York certainly is the land of opportunity and New Yorkers are all just waiting to give nice mid-westerners cool jobs. But not cool enough for Piper. Despite being a closerthanthis match to her artistic talents, she quits to go back home to her boring life and suffocating parents even ditching her own birthday party. (She is sad because her boss told her her cute sketches weren’t quite gallery show material.) Spoiler alert. She changes her mind at the last minute.

While all this is going on she gets to know Austin, the son of a world-famous journalist and Piper’s next-door neighbor. He is writing a  children’s book about Nathan the Squirrel rather than following in his egotistical mother’s footsteps. His mother won’t let up and she gets him a job he doesn’t want as a reporter and instead of just turning it down, he is a waste of space, acts like a petulant child, and gets fired. Both of these two lead charmed lives, however, even for Hallmark. Austin submits his manuscript to a publisher, thanks to some shaming from Piper, and, even without an agent, it gets accepted. And not only accepted but they want a whole series about Nathan! He had talked Piper into doing the illustrations for his pitch. Lightening Bolt! By the end, after a lot of “tragedy” and triumph, she has her dream career and a boyfriend. There were no pumpkins in this one (pumpkin spice lattes don’t count) but lots of leaves. Attention young midwesterners! Life in New York City really isn’t like this!

Rating: 6 out of 10.

My Christmas Family Tree

/ Rebekahrox / 2 Comments

Too Many Questions

**Spoilers**

Overall, this was a very good Hallmark. A young 30-year-old woman does a DNA test along with her best friend and discovers she has a paternity match. Her mother had died when she was 9 years old, and she never knew her father. She and her father decide to meet. The casting and the performances were excellent and the plot was compelling. First of all, there was no Hallmark Christmas set piece that wasn’t crammed in somewhere. I know some people enjoy the obligatory clumsy ice-skating scene and the gingerbread house making, etc. But I find them to be just filler most of the time: tedious and lazy. I’ve learned to live with them though.

There were several aspects, however, which took it down a notch or two for me. The idea that a DNA matching company would mix up the DNA results just because the two clients had the same name is way over the line. Did they also have the same birthdate? Same place of birth? Same social security number? And then according to the story, their desperate phone call to Vanessa was just another big oopsie, they were right the first time, and Vanessa really is Richard’s daughter? Not because of another phone call from the DNA company admitting their mistake, but just because he finally had the revelation that both “Patty” and “Trisha” are both nicknames for “Patricia.” OH, and he found a picture of the girlfriend in question and she bore a strong resemblance to Vanessa?

And what about that? So Richard had completely forgotten what his girlfriend looked like until he found her picture? A girl whom he was in love with, had meaningful sex with, and whom he had tried to find after he got back from his tour of duty? Whose picture he had kept in a box for 30 years? Because as soon as he saw Vanessa, wouldn’t the phrase, “you look just like your mother?” been uttered as soon as they met? Apparently, when he first met Vanessa, she didn’t even look vaguely familiar! What about the other Vanessa? Is she going to show up at some point? As another reviewer pointed out, didn’t Richard and the other Vanessa get the same phone call from the DNA folks that Vanessa got?

And how cruel to reveal that she wasn’t Richard’s daughter in front of the whole extended family. If she just couldn’t take it anymore, leave the room and ask to see Richard and Mrs. Richard privately so he could maintain some dignity. And so he could break the news gently to his young children. She is not twelve, she is thirty.

They should have had a “1 month later” where all these dangling loose ends were made palatable with some kind of explanation and closure, no matter how lame. I didn’t care about the romance, it was definitely secondary to the main story. The script gave Andrew Walker very little to work with.

Rating: 7 out of 10.

November 16, 2021