The Note

As a highly emotional person with absolutely no life, I'm a sucker for holiday movies of the type Hallmark usually shows around Christmas-time each year. Between Thanksgiving and the New Year, if a movie uplifts personal spirit, promotes feelings or thoughts of closeness with family, or otherwise has a happy ending, chances are I'll cry and I'll like it. Not so with Hallmark's latest effort: "The Note". I thought the script was very weak and the story itself just wasn't believable. The movie is about a Newspaper columnist who finds a note in a plastic bag following an airline crash. Assuming the note was written by a passenger on the flight, the lead character, Peyton Magruder sets out to to find the note's intended recipient - it's clear the note was written by a father to his child. With little else to go on, Magruder -played by Genie Francis - takes us on an unbelievable, unrealistic and ultimately unrewarding journey. Blame the script, mostly. I hadn't seen Genie Francis in quite some time and I was really pleased to see how she had changed since I'd seen her last (long long ago). I think I like her and I'd like to see her in something else; she has an interesting and expressive face. It's a good face. Even Ted McGinley who has unfortunately been type cast as the henpecked neighbor from Married With Children was fine. The rest of the cast was awful! The storyline was dreadful! I was tempted to rate this movie one star but I relented because I thought Genie Francis brought it up "a couple of notches" as Emeril might say. While it's a blessing that Hallmark isn't making any more of the dreadful "meet the Santas", their latest fare including this movie and another recent one in which a child sets out to find a husband for his mom (I'm glad I don't remember the name of it), make you wonder if maybe Hallmark's best efforts aren't behind them.

I don't know whether it is the poor sound quality, the flat acting, or the predictable dialogue, but as soon as I tuned in on Amazon Prime I knew it was a Hallmark movie and that did it for me. Why can't they rise above those obvious cheesy elements and aim a little higher?

I rate this a "7" if you're watching this on a DVR (digital video recorder) and a "6" if not. Basically, this story starts out good, gets cheesy in the middle and is way overdone at the end. If you're armed with the ability to skip through some highly predictable corny stuff in the middle, it's kind of interesting to watch. A saving grace of the movie is that there's a great twist at the end.

Basically, the movie is about a journalist who's about to lose her column "The Heart Healer" due to low readership. While pondering her situation at the ocean, she happens upon a washed up note from a plane that just crashed nearby. She begins to write about her search for the intended recipient and the movie progresses from there.

While it sounds good on the surface, it gets a little cheesy when everyone she meets is somehow "touched" and for the most part "reformed" by the note. For a lot of people, this middle section can be a bit too sappy.

Still, the movie is not "so" bad that I would say it's not worth watching. If you have a DVR, you can spare yourself from some of the scenes by fast-forwarding - and enjoy the overall story line. If not, I'd say it's a bit too hard to sit through without changing the channel.

A good-feel of a Christmastime movie. Took me back to when it was ok to put heart-warming messages in films. And the fact that it dealt with a newspaper reporter was a big win for me. Genie Francis played her role with graciousness. Yeah-maybe it was a tad far-fetched that such a miracle like the one she had could really happen. But I like to be won over with happy endings in this era of divisive thinking on a large scale. The parts of the preacher and the songwriter were great, and the bad -guy TV reporter was believably smarmy. People constantly being on cell phones did not dominate this film (yay for 2007!). I am glad I found it on Amazon Prime for a trip back to a less toxic time in our country.

Admittedly, this movie is extremely sappy, or corny. It lays it on pretty thick. But that doesn't mean that some of that emotion doesn't stick to you.

The acting is good enough as is the production.

The story is a captivating mystery as the viewer longs to see what is the message that a dying man intended for his child. Peyton works her way one by one through the candidates and each one teaches her something about living. If you were really good, you might have seen the answer to the mystery, but I thought the clues were subtle. Unfortunately for me, I already knew the answer because I watched the sequel first.

As in the sequel, I didn't get invested in the relationship between Peyton and King, but the movie was really much more than that story.