The World is Burning and I can’t stop watching The Holidate

The inexplicable draw of bad things for bad times

Likes: Kristen Chenowith gets to be outrageous as the thirstiest aunt ever. The visual gag of Alex Moffat blowing up Thanksgiving decorations with a bike pump is good. That’s about it.

Dislikes: Writing, pacing, theme, it’s all horrible. Why does this movie look like it had some production value behind it Netflix? (And why can’t I bring myself to stop watching?)

Bottom Line: There are so many better things to do than watch this movie. And yet…

1 out of 5. ◆◇◇◇◇

by Jacob Schermerhorn

The world is on fire. COVID is still raging through areas. Racial violence is still destroying families and communities. The election for the future of the United States and democracy is here. I should go do more phone banking. I’m in grad school and I have a midterm exam to write.

And I can’t stop watching The Holidate.

Is it an avoidance tactic? Is it a previously undiscovered desire for masochism? Is it procrastination in its finest form, a Netflix movie?

I don’t know. All I know is I watched this film in ten-minute bursts. After getting fed up with it, I’d stop watching. But then I’d pick it up again later, get angry again and stop watching again. And so on until I finished all 100 minutes of it.

The premise is a classic romantic comedy set up in the vein of When Harry Met Sally, Sleeping With Other People, Friends with Benefits, The Ugly Truth etc, etc… Basically, can men and women be platonic friends without falling in love?

This time, it’s Sloane (Casey Roberts) as a single girl whose family is clamoring for her to finally find Mr. Right and Jackson (Luke Bracey) as a guy who wants a date for holiday parties without the emotional attachment. They have a meet cute in the mall and hatch a plan to celebrate holidays together.

And those are basically the stakes. Two detached 20(?)-something slackers who want a fellow person to make snide comments about other people at holiday parties: AKA a “holidate.”

But seriously, why are they even going to these parties? The characters don’t even seem to be enjoying themselves ever at them. They only ever interact with the same dozen or so people every time. Sloane’s family – trying (you can feel them trying and trying) to be delightfully off kilter like the family in While You Were Sleeping. – and Jackson’s comic relief friend (one of four people of color in this movie). So why do they act like attending a party solo is life or death? Sloane and Jackson’s lives together barely looks different from the “before” picture of them single.

Plus, Sloane’s plan to get her family off her back doesn’t even work! Each holiday goes through the same formula: Sloane’s mother or sister or someone tells her to find a real husband and not Jackson, a “crazy” set piece event happens (Sloane runs into her ex-boyfriend, Jackson blows off a finger with a firework, Sloane poops her pants after accidently taking laxatives, etc…) and Sloane and Jackson grow closer together.

For as much as, in a now hackneyed metacommentary, characters in the movie say they hate rom com contrivances, the movie can’t even pull off one competently. (Isn’t it Romantic, The Lovebirds, Always be My Maybe, all Netflix joints, pull this off way better than The Holidate)

And this movie is trying things. Weirdly ambitious shots are inserted into scenes with seemingly no consideration for what they are saying other than “This will look cool.” While planning for a wedding, the camera constantly spins around Sloane and her sister in law. While grocery shopping, the camera is inside the cart at a strange low angle. A map view of Chicago zooms in and out to different scene locations. There are whip pans at a drinking contest and slow motion at an egg hunt. Each technique is picked up, toyed with, and then discarded after that scene.

It baffles me why Netflix spent time and effort on this movie. Why does the orphanage in The Princess Switch look like it was decorated by someone who went to a Party City and the Holidate have the lighting, extras, and production value of something competent? The Princess Switch is cheesy and bad, but at least there was no accidently pooping scene in that movie.

My (ironic or otherwise) love of bad movies has been proven before. It is an entire subgenre of movie criticism unto itself. But when the world seems on the brink of catastrophe, why am I drawn to similarly catastrophic movies? Why am I not picking out a better-quality guilty viewing?

I hope that once the election is over, once stress from grad school dissipates, once we are past this COVID nastiness, I will be able to move on from thinking about Holidate. Or else I really do think my sanity might be gone.

(I’m only half serious about Holidate making me avoid work of course. Good quality stuff has also made me procrastinate during this time too!)