I woke up this morning and went to the window of the hotel, looking down at the colorful jumble of lights in the plaza below, and with snow from the day before covering the ground. The plaza has an ice skating rink but it was closed, possibly for the shutdown by the governor. What might have been festive the night before was simply peaceful with undisturbed snow on the rink.
Around the plaza are some of the both the newest and oldest buildings of downtown Salt Lake City. There is something about the snow that makes a city feel comfortable in winter.
For her day job, J works at a firm that sells nutritional supplements. Her job has been remote since she started six months before the initial shutdown. She comes up here to Utah once a month for a few days to work out of the main office, which is visible from the hotel room halfway up one of the tall buildings one block away on the other side of the square.
I decided to come up to Utah this time to get away from Scottsdale for a few days, and in particular to see some snow. I have so many points accumulated on Southwest Airlines from my credit card that I could fly free for years. As such we had to fly separate flights coming up, as hers was expensed by the company she works for. In the terminal I walked by a television showing CNN reporting on the Electoral College vote in the states, which I saw just from glancing at the screen. Funny they never cared much about that before.
After arriving in Salt Lake City I took the light rail in from the airport, to make a little bit more of a fun adventure, The nearest station is only a block from the hotel.
Last night we watched a little television. The only thing that seemed interesting were the Christmas movies on the Lifetime channel. For several years running we have watched part of the the annual glut of such movies on both the Hallmark Channel and the Lifetime Channel. They are all fluffy romances with light plots. Each one includes a romantic scene at a holiday party that is a version of the movie trope I call the "Town Dance Scene."
These movie Town Dances are events that never happen in real life---every small town has a big annual event in which all participate and it is hugely festive with many strung lights. How many of these did I see during the two years of intense movie going? Way too many. Like this movie. We want to believe in a world in which such community events actually happen in the way they do in movies. We want to believe that such "real communities" exist in America.
To be sure, it's an old trope. At one point it was fresh (e.g. Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), which we watched two nights ago on TCM for the umpteenth time). Often they are Christmas events, but not necessarily. Other examples that come to mind from classic Hollywood are Remember the Night and Christmas in Connecticut.
It was believable in an America before mass media (Meet Me in St. Louis itself was a nostalgic fantasy set in 1903-04), when people really did need community events to experience anything outside the normal flow of life, but now it feels like a cloying fantasy of a reality that is nowhere near anything that anyone experiences. It has become lazy script writing to drive a plot.
During one of my last visits to Utah I saw one of these "Town Dance Scenes" being filmed for a Hollywood movie in the old train station in Ogden. The actress was on stage playing fake guitar beneath the strung lights. One of the locals told me that the actress, whom I had seen in several movies, was a B*tch Goddess who was making life hell for everyone on the set. I have since learned from online sources that she has this reputation in general, which is why her career has mostly tanked.
As far as Christmas movies, we have learned that there is a huge difference between Hallmark and Lifetime. The Hallmark movies are a much superior product on every level. The quality of scripts, the acting, directing, props, etc. is fairly decent, even if the stories are preposterous. Two nights ago in Scottsdale we watched one in which a man from 1903 is carried forward in time by a magic clock finds himself in the present day, where he falls in love with a descendant of his original housekeeper.
The story fails on so many levels. At the end we couldn't help think that the man from 1903 had no real chance of a life in the present day. Yet somehow it was watchable, because this Hallmark production value was just high enough to make it tolerable.
Last night we discovered that the hotel did not carry Hallmark, so we attempted to On Lifetime, it is as if they are barely trying. The movies are barely watchable. In the movie we watched last night, there was a scene in which the two love interests talk to each other in a car. The scene went on for five minutes. This is the laziest of script writing and directing. I was mocking the production so much it was making J crack up with laughter.
"What kind of cut was that?"
"Nobody talks like that!"
"Nobody ever says anything like that!"
One of the biggest flaws in these scripts in that the characters say and do things which, if you step back and think about it at all, make them horrible people.
Another flaw is how much the characters urge each other to do disastrous things. "Yes, go get her. She's your true love."
"NO NO NO, run away from her, she's toxic! She will make your life a living hell!"
The main female character in both Lifetime movies we watched were self-entitled princesses who got rewarded for insisting that the world must revolve around them. The men were uniformly weak and kept apologizing at every turn for everything they did. The older women are bossy and love to tell the younger women what to do, as if they possess some form of "wisdom" beyond bitter manipulation. Every movie features a white person getting sage advice from a black person at some point, because black people are smarter and wiser. Lifetime in particular feels the need to shove social justice issues into their programming, whereas Hallmark is more "traditional" in its stories, which is another reason we prefer that network.
By the end of the Lifetime story last night I couldn't even tell if it was meant that the main female character was deceiving people the whole time (in her attempt to purchase a hotel in her home town).
After watching two of these in a row on Lifetime, I realized the entire tension of the story is the "kiss that almost happens but doesn't," strung out for two hours of broadcast time.
You can't tell me this terrible product is because they churn out so many movies. Television has always been about churning out stories. They used to release one new Route 66 episode a week back in the early Sixties and each one of those was an intricate masterpiece of cinematography and scriptwriting by today's standards.
There is something pleasant however in being able to tear something apart based on its inferior quality. It was fun to find the flaws in it all.
Meanwhile, the election goes on of course. Now that the Electoral College voting day is over, I feel a bit relaxed. I don't know what happens at this point. I'm just a spectator. I think the story line is going to be amazing somehow.
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