Christmas in Rockwell

There is the common premise of a Hollywood starlet going back to her home town to rejuvenate and hiding from the press. She meets a local and spends time with him while working on her Christmas activity checklist.

The obvious conflict occurs early and revolves around Alyssa being ratted out to the paparazzi. There is a significant sequence revolving around that and her trying to find who did it. I was put off by her assumption that it was Jake since he was trying to shield her from them right at the beginning. But Alyssa kept going back to blaming him. There were enough hints from earlier that made it easy for the viewer to guess the real culprit.

The movie revolves around the 25 year old movie that launched Alyssa's career and cuts from that movie are woven into the story as a kind of flashback.

The acting is fair to poor. Sets and scenery are cheap. There is a scene near the end which I will say is a parody on influencers or podcasters. Two of them are doing interviews of locals at a big event. The acting by the interviewers is either parody or it is so bad that it would rank high on the list of worst ever.

I thought the story wandered at times and had some rough transitions, which also could have been poor editing by the network showing this 2 year old movie. There wasn't a lot of tension or surprises and no great highs or lows.

Since there's only one review I'm adding my two cents. The one reviewer commented "There wasn't a lot of tension or surprises and no great highs or lows." It's because there wasn't a lot of angst and what was there seemed more genuine than a lot of movie similar to this that I actually am giving it a six star rating instead of five.

For heaven's sakes, it's a Christmas movie I don't need to be stressed by drama watching a low-key Christmas movie. For that matter I get frustrated with the formula writing of a lot of shows that contain this. I try to live my life drama free. I certainly don't need to watch it on TV.

I don't like that IMDb doesn't allow .5 star ratings because I'd give this 5.5 stars as a movie. I found it enjoyable enough to go up to six versus down to five

I almost didn't watch this because: I'm not a fan of Stephen Huszar (Jake). However; I actually liked him more in this movie than most I've seen him in.

The other reason is the picture of Trish Stratus on the movie cover I saw, for some reason, was putting me off. Looking at her IMDb profile it's obvious she's more WWE than a movie actor so I thought I'll watch a enough to confirm I don't like it and mark it off my list. To my surprise I liked it enough to watch the whole movie. And given she doesn't appear to have much movie acting experience I was surprised that she did a decent job. Better than other actors I've seen that have done a whole lot of movies.

The actor who I felt stood out the most, In a positive way, is Sherry Miller who played Trish Stratus' (Alyssa) mom/agent.