Coup de foudre dans l'allée des sapins

The best part of Alicia Witt Christmas movies are her songs at the end. I hope the trend continues in the future. This movie covers no new ground, there are no storyline twists and you can see the ending coming after the first 5 minutes. But if you enjoy watching Alicia act, sing and play piano, you will like this movie. Just forward to those parts and enjoy the song at the end.

Andrew Walker and Alicia Witt are two of my favorite "Hallmark" actors, but this story is boring. It's too predictable and smarmy. The whole idea of a street rising up in protest is old-fashioned with few areas for originality. We all know that in the long run, the "little" person never wins and the dynamic should be for people to welcome change and find ways to meet it. Is there such a thing as an old-fashioned Christmas where profit is not the main motivator? We'd like to hope so, but how often do we see it.

Anway, this was a disappointing film for me and the only reason it got a 5 was for the two leads.

To me this looked like the typical Hallmark themed movie but with two of Hallmarks power leads in the main roles they managed to pull it off. I thought they had very good chemistry.

This is also the first time that I can recall that Alcia Witt has gotten to sing in one of her Hallmark movies, Christmas or otherwise, and she has a beautiful voice. That made the movie for me.

I think "pleasant" is the key word here. The story is fine, the pace seems fine, the cast is fine, but it lacks any real spark romantically. To me it seems like the leads could be really good friends. What I did really enjoy was Alicia Witt's piano performance, she's the real deal musically and we got a taste of excellence there.

Nothing original, which isn't unusual I suppose in these movies, but it was like a greatest hits collection of all the favorite tropes. Almost like it was a competition to see how many they could fit into 90 minutes. Good actors doing good work, but just lacking in anything that pulls you into the story because of how obvious the tropes are, and how little romance there actually is. Is this the new standard that the first and only real romance or kiss is at the very last moment right before the credits roll. I guess that would be ok if there were clearly visible sparks earlier on, that were not acted upon for propriety or other credible reasons. This movie had none of that. Oh well.