Happiest Season

The movie practically vibrates with its own meta tension.

Duvall dovetails the seasonal pap with her characters’ pain, treating it like ointment for their mellowing emotional stings. The message isn’t just about liking Christmas. The message is that everybody deserves a Christmas movie.

An ode to impossible expectations, pride, bravery and loyalty, Happiest Season wraps up everything you could want for Christmas in a neat, thoughtful little bow.

Tonally, Happiest Season is a bit uneven; it can move from broad hijinks to high emotion a little too quickly. But it also delivers wonderfully heartfelt moments.

It’s a cute movie with a lot of heart. It’s just that this heart was retrofitted from other movies’ tropes and is, as such, an awkward fit. For the next lesbian Christmas movie (please let there be a next one), it would be great to build a story about queer holiday celebrations from the ground up.

Watching Happiest Season is like opening the wrong present on Christmas morning: You’re a little bummed out and it’s too late to put it back in the box.

It’s never a good sign when characters in a film promptly declare: we are aware you are watching and we’re here to teach you a thing or two.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

i actually laughed.... accidentaly bumped into it on netflix after we ran out of good english movies to watch, with no drugs and vulgar words. lesbian theme is usu not in our repertoire to watch. the twilight girl is actually quite funny because the director used her inability to act and mumbling very well. good lines and with support of a few veteran colleagues made this holiday rom comp palatable.

It's a fairly feel-good film, but it's so sweetened, that it ends up cloying the palate. Putting aside the positive element of its inclusive theme, the problems lie in the fact that its narrative resources of acceptance and pain are rooted in cliches of "moments of revelation", therefore the climax and the conflict are so predictable that you see them coming almost from the beginning, and that, no matter how hard it tries, the film never manages to shake it off. And it takes that issue until the end, because for that same romantic and Christmas theme, the film has no choice but to unify the entire plot in a happy ending, so naturally you know where everything is going at all times. So the whole functional capability of this film lies in how much you're willing to buy from it as a viewer. If you're looking for a story like this to have a good time, you will love it, but it will only take you that far, yet in the end, that's all this film is looking for.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Dan Levy's scenes are the only factor keeping this movie from negative stars. At one point one would think the movie is a Hallmark spoof, but no that is the real plot. Thewriting is **** you can get cuts of Levy on you tube that is the way to go