Love’s Christmas Journey (2011/Fox DVD)/12 Days Of Christmas (Lifetime DVD Set)
Picture:
C Sound: C+ Extras: D
Mini-Series/Telefilms: C-
Now for a
set of holiday telefilms I could have done without…
Love’s Christmas Journey (2011) is from the makers of the
trite Love Comes Softly and wow, is this one soft. One of Ernest Borgnine’s last works, Ellie
(Natalie Hall) has lost not only her husband, but her daughter (just to make it
more dramatic) in the days of the Old West and goes to keep an eye on her
brother’s children while he goes to buy land.
By
staying family-oriented, she’ll meet a good man, have a good holiday and
everything will be wonderful… except for the viewer who will be bored by the
predictability, obviousness and formulaic writing they’ll have to endure for a
long, long, long 171 minutes. This was
made in two parts, so it qualifies as a mini-series, but it was much like a
coal in your Christmas stocking, so see it when you are very awake and not
operating heavy equipment. There are no
extras, but Jo Beth Williams and Sean Astin also star.
12 Days Of Christmas does not celebrate the classic
song, but collects 12 forgettable Lifetime telefilms from the Lifetime network
that seem like they were made a lifetime ago (or like living a boring lifetime
if you watched all of them) and include quick paycheck work like Home By Christmas with Linda Hamilton
that we previously looked at and I still cannot remember it, Road To Christmas with Jennifer Grey, Holiday Switch with Nicole Eggert, Recipe For A Perfect Christmas with
Christine Baranski, A Christmas Wedding
with Sarah Paulson, A Very Merry
Daughter Of The Bride with Joanna Garcia, Luke Perry & Helen Shaver, Deck The Hall with Gabrielle Carteris, His & Her Christmas with Dina
Meyer, Under The Mistletoe with
Michael Shanks, Holiday Wishes with
Amber Benson, Christmas In Paradise
with Charlotte Ross and Will You Marry
Me with Wendie Malick.
They are
curios at best depending if you like or even know the stars in them, but unless
you like the channel, but they are all so flat, listless, dull and slight that
they all have that save sense of being boring.
Some of the actors are even trying to make these work, but they cannot
win when the writing is so safe and slight that they all blur. There are no extras and I can see why.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image on all the programs (save a few in 1.33
X 1) tend to be soft by both design and being shot badly, usually on HD video
equipment. Performance is not a strong
suit here, but a few have some moments of good cooler, but not much else. The lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 on Journey is no better than the lossy
Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo on the rest of the telefilms and are basic at best, so
don’t expect anything sonically interesting here either. Some of the telefilms are even a little more
sonically constricted.
- Nicholas Sheffo
