Reviews

Overall, I thought the storyline was fine. It was very slightly different from the usual hallmark set ups.

It was nice that the leads had social anxiety, though I don't always know that it was played true. For example, would a socially anxious person willingly draw attention to themselves at a costume-optional event by coming in costume?

I also thought the mother was contributing to her problems. If a daughter calls looking for advice, I don't think it's healthy that the only advice that is offered is to not give up what you want for another person (I'm paraphrasing here, but that was the gist.). Sometimes what someone wants is that other person and deciding to want that doesn't always mean they're giving up everything. Her situation, as she points out, is not just about a guy. It's about her friends, her interns, and the offer of a great job doing what she loved and her mother should have heard all of those pieces before giving her any advice. I thought her father's advice was much healthier - figure out what it is that your gut/heart is telling you. What I liked about this storyline, however, is that it differed from the usual storyline of girl goes to some town, meets guy, falls in love in 5 days, and decides to give up a successful career in the city to stay with small town man not knowing whether they're compatible, where she'd live, or what she'd do for a living. That is a toxic message, the one in this movie wasn't.

Lastly, the thing that bothered me the most is that a big message of the movie is that seals shouldn't be kept in captivity and that humans ruin everything for seals but the movie delivered this message by using multiple captive seals that had been highly trained to do tricks for human enjoyment.

The movie was needlessly depressing.

I understand setting the stage with the problems of a married couple that stopped making time for one another, but it got tiring repeatedly watching them get in their own way and make mountains out of molehills.

Regardless, the leads lacked chemistry, which made it difficult to believe they were ever a couple.

Everyone else was very quirky, which was cute in the beginning but became grating over time.

All of the animals were very cute and made the movie palatable.

Like all Hallmark Christmas movies, it was clearly not filmed in winter.

The opening was chaotic and confusing, which didn't help to set up the story.

The plot is fine enough. The kids play stereotyped roles: the acerbic teen, the do-gooder, the extreme introvert, and the social butterfly. The acting is pretty decent. The parents are seasoned, respectable actors... All things considered, the movie is fine - it's a lifetime Christmas movie, what can you expect? But the cinematography is awful. There are way too many split-screen transitions. It's like the person putting this together just discovered this type of transition and thinks it works for everything and then someone came in and talked them down from using it to switch between EVERY shot to just 90% of them.

It seems like the two actors playing the mom and future step-dad didn't get along or were repulsed by one another or something... it was weird how little they touched one another for playing a couple that was supposed to marry. And, at the ceremony, they were about 4 feet away from one another the entire ceremony and he never 'kissed the bride'. It was super weird. Add to that weirdness was the awkward dialogue and the fact that for some reason the daughter didn't want to tell the caterer about the break up because she 'doesn't want to complicate things'. Her actions were the very definition of complicated. It's hard to be a fan of this movie.