Christmas in Pine Valley

This had potential with a fun cast of characters running the business. However, the actor playing the reporter ruined this for us. He was not only a poor actor but also offensive and gruff. In what should have been a fun interview of how the older "couple" met, he kept on asking "and then?" which was annoying since they already answered his question. If he wanted more details, he should have asked follow-up questions like, "that must have taken you by surprise, or what did your family think? The female lead chose to stay in character with her overacting, phony, fast-talking bit which was completely devoid of humor and charm. Lies are always tricky and they have to be executed in a way that is not only funny but endearing. Again, this missed both marks. Instead of telling the truth to the distributor, the female coworker stepped on the lead's foot, then she kept hitting her in the side. Nothing funny about that, it actually made me wish the lead hit her back since she was being annoying. All this within the first 20 minutes before we turned it off.

The first problem with this movie was Andrew Biernat. The pine trees in the movie are less wooden than most of his acting. He just had no fire in some of the most important lines. Even though he doesn't have a lengthy list of credits, there are enough I'm surprised he was this bad.

The premise itself is sort of the flip side of the FAR superior Five Star Christmas, where a family pretends to NOT be a family, but guests of a lodge. Here a group of friends pretends to be a family to live up to the impression people have gotten from a blog about the farm and the business.

Most of the scenes regarding that are far too awkward for the reporter to have done anything but realize things were not as presented, and sadly there were many scenes that just didn't make a lot of sense ... such as when he immediately intruded to tell the female lead her pretend fiancé was wrong for her. We didn't buy that would happen when and as it did. That's just one example.

This story COULD have been funny and entertaining with good writing, but it didn't get that.

The script isn't good especially some of the dialog. The plot was hokey, a quality publication does a lot of fact checking and would have unmasked the deception early. The deception didn't bother me, it's a movie it's not real. A family in this day and age doesn't necessarily mean the members have blood or legal ties, they can just be good friends that feel like a family. Not the worst rom-com I've ever watched, but it's not great. The DB says it was filmed in Savannah, GA which is an odd place to film a Christmas movie, but the locations were nice.

Andrew Biernat and Marc Herrmann are both male models, which is obvious. Rene Ashton and Kristina Cole have been in other films I've seen The rest of the cast was good, not the usual actors we're used to seeing in Canadian made rom-coms.

I write my reviews as if I'm talking to my grandmother, so I always try to find something nice to say.

I think I would have to tell her to watch Gilligan instead.

The plot involves a small company selling hand made products from a farm who inadvertently create the impression they are a family, and are forced to carry out the deception in order to obtain the big order that will save them from foreclosure.

The lead actress is ok, she has her moments, but the leading man is basically a male model type who has yet to learn the acting craft.

I did enjoy the "sister" character, and some of the scenes involving wood-chopping and jealousy were almost amusing, but the plot was trite and the ending illogical and forced.

I can understand why GAC buried this one in mid-November.

Sorry, that's as nice as I can be.

Honestly, I wanted to like this, but it was painful to watch. The plot was SO predictable and had nothing original to it. Also, the script was ROUGH. It affected the performances and was just boring and cheesy.

This is unfortunately a result of the production (GAC/GAF). I have yet to find one of their films that isn't painfully corny and sloppy. This movie suffers from cliches that move it to D-level, direct-to-DVD. There could've been any number of changes that would've improved the whole film.

The acting suffered from the overly cliched characters and I did like the leading lady, but it was a hard film to watch. Our secondary romance worked out ok. That is part of what saved the move. The production design wasn't too terrible.