First, I need to share this with you: How One Lifetime Holiday Movie Pulled Off Kissing Scenes in COVID Era: Plexiglass Barriers
Ahahaha what?? You guys. They used. Plexiglass. And then removed it in post!! I feel like the better answer is to cast people who are married or live together and kiss each other non-professionally. But whatever. Plexiglass!!! Someone at Lifetime was watching Pushing Daisies and had a major brainwave.
Christmas in Vienna
This had to have been paid for by the Vienna tourism board, right? I mean, I definitely want to go to Vienna now. It felt like one-third of this movie’s dialogue was about pastries, and the other two-thirds were about music and Christmas. This movie starts Sarah “April Kepner from Grey’s Anatomy” Drew as Jess and Brennan “his face is kind of familiar to me but I can’t place it” Elliott as Mark.
I would estimate that about half of Hallmark’s heroines are named Jessica. This Jess is “Jessalyn” but they only say her full name once, so she joins the ranks of many Jesses before her. Jess and Mark (another pretty common Hallmark name) go through a pretty standard Hallmark love story that, without a wacky concept or quirky small town, ends up feeling more like a romantic dramedy than most of the other Hallmark movies.
The real star here is Vienna, and they know it. Most of the returns from commercial began with indulgent shots of Vienna set to pop Christmas songs. And they should be indulgent! They earned it! I don’t know if it’s the setting or what, but this whole movie felt like a higher quality production. “There truly is no Christmas like a Christmas in Vienna!”
Jess is a violinist visiting from the Minneapolis Philharmonic to play in a Christmas Eve concert. (In a conversation about where they’re from, she describes her hometown of Philly as “kind of the Vienna of the US” which…sure? Do they have to grease lampposts in Vienna when there’s a big, uh, soccer game? Is it always sunny in Vienna? What would Viennese Gritty look like?) She plans to sightsee in the weeks leading up to her Big Concert, but gets roped into babysitting her friend’s cousin’s kids so her friend can sell hand painted ornaments at the Christmas market. Mark is the cousin. They have a meet-cute at the Christmas market before they’re introduced by Jess’s friend, which kicks off the flirty/prickly tension between them.
Of course, Jess has started to lose her passion for her music and is considering putting down her violin for good. But bonding with Mark’s kids over music (and pastries, I cannot emphasize how much they talk about Viennese baked goods) helps her rediscover what she loved about music! Mark is a diplomat and his professional crisis is whether or not to stay in Vienna or keep moving his kids around. Mark and his kids basically absorb Jess into their family unit in a way that only happens to single women near a widower in a Hallmark movie. They do various touristy and Christmassy things around Vienna, including ice skating and then sitting under this massive bush of mistletoe.
They bond over Christmas and music and Vienna and his kids. We learn that “love is learning the song in someone’s heart and singing it when they need it most” and that Jess’s parents love to dance to “Silent Night” even though, as Mark says, “you’re not supposed to dance to Christmas carols.” There’s a very Von Trapp family moment (minus the Nazis) at the Christmas Eve concert and it’s honestly quite charming. I forgot to take notes for a little bit at the end there because I was so focused on the movie. Ultimately, I recommend this one! Charming leads with good chemistry and so. many. pastries. Let’s all go to Vienna!!
FINAL RATING: 4.5 out of 5 apple strudels
Is the title a pun? This is one of Hallmark’s straightforward titles. Christmas in/at Location!
How many other Hallmark movies have the two leads been in? Sarah Drew: She hasn’t been in any Hallmark movies, but she’s been in two Lifetime Christmas movies, Twinkle All the Way and Christmas Pen Pals.
Brennan Elliott: 3 non-seasonal movies (Cupid, Inc., Kiss at Pine Lake, All Summer Long), 1 Valentine’s movie (All of My Heart), 2 fall movies (All of My Heart: Inn Love, All of My Heart: The Wedding), 4 Christmas movies (A Christmas Melody, Love You Like Christmas, Christmas Encore, Christmas at Grand Valley), and 3 movies in the Crossword Mysteries series (um, what): A Puzzle To Die For, Proposing Murder, and Abracadaver! Brennan Elliott is one of Hallmark’s superstars, it appears.
What does Christmas mean? “Christmas is about love.”
Last minute plans/impending deadline? Jess has two weeks in Vienna before her concert! Two whole weeks!! Usually Christmas Eve is five days away in these movies.
Real Santa? No, but we do get to see Austrian Santa.
How white? Quite white, but not entirely. I’m not sure what it’s like in Vienna, but I assume it’s not the most diverse city.
Bingo? Negative.
A Timeless Christmas
The description of this movie is: “Charles Whitley travels from 1903 to 2020 where he meets Megan Turner and experiences a 21st century Christmas.” And that is pretty much what happens!
It did remind me of the Lifetime movie The Spirit of Christmas, which has a modern day woman fall in love with the ghost of a man from the 1920s. It’s like Hallmark saw that and said, “Let’s avoid the questions about ghost physics and dive into all of the questions about time travel physics.” (Actually this was based on a book that came out in 2018.) It makes me wonder why the ghost/time traveler can’t be the woman in this inevitably heterosexual pairing. Is it because it’s more palatable if a man from the past finds modern independent women attractive, versus the message of a modern man being attracted to old-fashioned femininity?
Charles is a man from the past who is excited about the future (he hears there are two brothers in North Carolina who are building a flying machine!) and Megan is a woman in the present who respects the past (she’s a historian and director of the museum in Charles’ former home). I liked that, as a historian, she wasn’t all Owen-Wilson-in-Midnight-in-Paris about it.
There are many references to past/present/future and time, of course. When Charles wonders how you know true love when you find it, his housekeeper responds, “Time will tell.” And when Megan asks him the same question later he tells her the same thing. “You can’t let the past control your life” and he “never had time for love.” The time machine is a clock (so, literally a time machine) with an inscription on it:
According to the movie a “Christmas moon” is a blue moon in December, but according to my quick Google search it’s not a thing. Speaking of Google, Megan’s summation of the internet is: “We have access to all the world’s information. But we mostly use it to argue with strangers and send each other pictures of cats.” And newsletters!
I noticed that they avoided saying “2020” when they talked about what year Charles found himself in. They said that he lived “over 100 years ago” and now he’s in “the 21st century.” I took me a while to figure out that this is actually really smart. No one is wearing masks (god, can you imagine time traveling into the middle of a pandemic?) and everyone is gathering in groups of more than 10 indoors. I don’t know if the depictions of December 1903 are accurate, but I know that if I were to see this movie for the first time in 2025 I would immediately clock it as a “historically inaccurate” version of December 2020. (Sorry to bring the mood down, but you know we won’t be going back to unmasked museum tours and Christmas parties in less than a month. Or at least we really really shouldn’t!)
Charles is just so absurdly well-suited to the 21st century. He’s nonplussed by everything, and they handwave it by having him be an engineer. But I feel like he should have way more questions about how the internet works. I’ve grown up with the internet, and I don’t fully understand how it works. The stakes almost feel too low. You know he’s not going to return to 1903, and while it’s entertaining to watch them come to this conclusion, there is basically no tension.
That the actors have good chemistry is really this movie’s saving grace. It’s not a bad way to spend two hours, but I wouldn’t call it unmissable. I mean, it’s Hallmark, it’s all kind of missable, but you know what I mean.
FINAL RATING: 3.5 out of 5 Christmas clocks
Is the title a pun? It’s timeless because Christmas is a constant fixture in American culture but also timeless because he’s unstuck in time! Wordplay! Sadly this has nothing to do with the cancelled-too-soon NBC show Timeless.
How many other Hallmark movies have the two leads been in? Erin Cahill: 1 Valentine’s movie (The Secret Ingredient), 1 fall movie (Love, Fall & Order), and 2 Christmas movies (Last Vermont Christmas, Sleigh Bells Ring)
Ryan Paevey: 4 non-seasonal movies (A Summer Romance, From Friend to Fiancé, Unleashing Mr. Darcy, Marrying Mr. Darcy), 1 fall movie (Harvest Love), and 2 Christmas movies (Hope at Christmas, Christmas at the Plaza)
What does Christmas mean? We have three options. Megan: Christmas traditions are “about honoring our history and celebrating the passage of time, then sharing that celebration with the people we love.” Charles: “Christmas is about forgiving.” Megan’s mom: “It’s Christmastime! Tis the season to butt in!”
Last minute plans/impending deadline? Another Christmas Eve party, this one a fundraiser for the museum. But it’s actually already planned!
Real Santa? If time travel is real shouldn’t Santa be real, too?
How white? The supporting cast is pretty diverse, but the leads are still very white.
Bingo? People in Hallmark movies drink so much hot chocolate. It’s a fine beverage, but as an adult I’m not like “you know what we should do right now, we should drink hot cocoa” in the middle of the afternoon. Hallmark would have you believe that everyone drinks cocoa the way the Gilmore girls drink coffee. Even in Austria or 1903, gotta have our cocoa!
Next week I will send out the usual email about Saturday and Sunday night’s movies. But (I did not realize this when I first decided to do this whole thing) the week of Thanksgiving there is a new movie every night on Hallmark! I haven’t decided yet if I will send a newsletter every day for each movie or pair them up and send one every other day. Just know that we’re about to hit a streak of fresh Christmas cheer. Also I’m staying with my sister and her husband that whole week, so I might feature some of their input, if they watch with me and haven’t kicked me out for using their tv to watch Hallmark every day.