Two movies that I'm warning people off of. This one is the first.
Hallmark movie:
A Little Christmas Charm. I don't know if it was the way the actor played the role, or if it was written this way, I thought he was rather pushy and arrogant, kind of stalkery. He acted more like a regular Lifetime movie character they have the rest of the year, when they have the obsessed stalkers going after the female leads. And this is a HALLMARK movie.
He kept asking her out. She'd say no. He actually stood in front of her a couple times, not letting her by. I wanted to yell at the TV, "What part of NO do you not understand??? When a woman says NO she means NO." She even says to him one time, "Are you stalking me?"
Then when he told her he was a reporter and wanted to help her out with the charm bracelet, I thought for sure she was going to say, "How do I know you are a real reporter and not just trying again to get me to go out with you, or trying to get me into your kidnap van."
And later in the movie, when she needs him to come through, he wimps out on her because it no longer fits HIS needs. And his BOSS orders him to continue. He doesn't come around on his own.
To quote a famous quote by Maya Angelou, "When someone shows you who they are, believe it, the
first time." He already showed he was pushy, arrogant, overruns boundaries and feelings to get
his needs met. Now, when it no longer suits
him, he proves he's not a man of character, wimping out on the woman.
There is a
lot of stuff we tend to overlook in Hallmark movies, as it's supposed to be light fluff and we just go with it. THIS was not one of them. I thought for sure, I couldn't be the only one thinking this way. Someone else on the IMDb.com must have written a review with the same point of view. Yep! Here are
two: (No, they are not by me.
)
Creep leading man "I could not get past the first 20min because
the lead male was a straight up creep and stalker and I couldn't bear to watch 2 hours of them inevitably falling in love. Can we please scrap romantic storylines that start with
a pushy male lead who condescends to the female lead, ignoring the multiple times she clearly tells him she's not interested in him, as if it's charming? This isn't the 1950's anymore, Hallmark,
if a woman says she's not interested it's not because she's 'playing hard to get.'"
And:
Good Once You Get Past the Stalkerish Beginning " [. . .]
He's basically stalking the poor girl. He's a reporter, which appears to be how the writer
thinks it's okay for him to be this way, but that didn't make it better because he wasn't even initially researching a story. The innocent and completely unrelated to his job or her mystery first meeting is just two strangers bumping into each other and then
him trying to flirt, but she clearly rebuffs his not quite as smooth as he thinks romantic advances. He later sees her in a jewelry store by chance. . . but before he announces himself,
he eavesdrops on her convo and hears about the lost charm bracelet and then
proceeds to insert himself into her search for information, and
she firmly discourages it and tells him she's good on her own. After she's rebuffed his romantic advances and his professional interest, he still thinks, this is a good situation and I'm going to keep being this kind of intrusive, . . .
Ashley even said to him something along the lines of '"why are you stalking me?"
There was another Hallmark movie this year that had a similar mystery theme of finding apiece of jewelry and wanting to find the owner. I think it was called
The Christmas Ring. That was a lot better than this one.
Hopefully the movie is a good one!
)
