Christmas Next Door (2017)

Just perfect...

Excellent, smart action film.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

At the beginning Eric was annoyed at April because her violin students distracted him from his writing. He turns up his music which in turn annoys her. When the street is shown, the houses are not connected, and later Eric says to somebody that April lives 2 houses down from him. Somebody dropped the ball there! As a reviewer early said, watching the violin playing was cringeworthy. I think my dog could have done a better job than the actress. The story was typical light romance from Hallmark and I enjoyed it.

In an era of crass commercialism, it's great to see a film which has nothing to do with the economics of Christmas. A modern day re-telling of the story of Ebenezer Scrooge in the guise of a misogynist, this seems timely given the current climate where men who use women are forging a chain about themselves, link by link.

This would have been an OK enough Hallmark type of movie and I do like Jesse Metcalfe but Fiona is such a sloppy and LAZY actress. Did she honestly think -- and did the director and everybody else -- that she could just get away with "playing" the violin that way? She seemed to not even have bothered to get even one lesson about playing the violin, much less even just holding the bow. And for a story that also centers on her being an accomplished violinist who messes up her auditions because of nerves and who, at the end, is accepted to work in an orchestra for she is supposed to be that good if her nerves just did not get in her way -- she just absolutely ruined the effect and the storyline. Watching her "play" the violin is an absolute nightmare and she positively just thrashed all her scenes with the violin and just totally destroyed all believability -- the gall of the actress and the director and producers if they thought that the audience will accept or not notice this. It really and truly angers me that they think so little of the viewers that they feel they can get away with this!

As a musician, it was really cringeworthy to watch the scenes featuring violin playing. They made no effort to even pretend to she was a violinist. I would hope that the story is at least a little believable. Further, I found the dialogue to be poorly written, awkward, and uninteresting.