Best movie of this year hands down!

You won't be disappointed!

Surprisingly incoherent and boring

An Exercise In Nonsense

I do like dark/bleak comedies, but this just takes too long and does not have enough to tell. Don't get it twisted, this is not a family picture nor your typical Christmas movie, which I all knew going in and you should too. The story does not just happen to be around Christmas time though, it's supposed to be that way, to show us what happens behind close doors and the other side of Christmas (see also Neighbors and their "way" of celebrating).The humor is not lost to me, but the message is not sufficient enough to warrant the running time. There are a lot of long pauses that are supposed to enhance the "message", but only succeed in stopping the movie in its tracks. The performances are good enough, but the characters do not have much to say other than the central message. A few nice set pieces (see Neighbors) are not enough to help elevate this. There are worse movies, but this misses out on a couple of things too

Awful. That's really it. To elaborate: depressing, icky, gross, disgusting, pointless, not fun. A waste of my time. I kept watching because it is labeled "comedy" and I was trying to understand why. Never got there. Nothing funny. I also kept waiting for her to commit suicide. That would have been a relief. 10 lines of text required, so here goes. This review was not intended to contain a spoiler alert but one cannot write 10 lines about it without revealing: that movies containing vomit scenes (more than once, I might add) are automatically NOT FUNNY. There were plenty of revealing sex scenes but they were not enjoyable because the main character was miserable throughout. If this movie were only billed as something other than comedy, it would have had an appropriate audience, and I would not have watched it when looking for a FREAKIN' COMEDY.

The obscene and mundane nature of this film will throw some people off, but dark comedies aren't suppose to avoid disturbances, drabness, or oddity. The Director, Zach Clark, manages to convey great emotion in everyday occurrences, sometimes without dialogue, which is quite a feat. He does it in a different type of Christmas movie that is centered around a tragedy, but which has a humorous touch that keeps it entertaining, and that conveys ideas with a real heart. Though Anna Margaret Hollyman isn't well-known, she does a great job anchoring the film as a character who desperately wants it to feel like Christmas despite being overcome with grief. If you enjoy dark humor and don't need a movie to lecture you, or be overly puritanical, I highly recommend White Reindeer. It is a low-budget classic.

***Pre-Review Warning: on the off-chance some well-meaning parent looking to entertain their children around X-Mas will, because of the title, stick this in the DVD and then disappear to go shopping, I feel compelled to point out THIS IS NOT THAT KIND OF MOVIE!! ^^^ (... review begins here...) The key to this film may be -- I am not sure -- the "thank yous" at the very end for the "kickstarters". I have seen a lot of films, perhaps more than I care to admit to, but this is unusual. Therefore (and apologies if I got this wrong) it looks to me like the Director/Writer is trying to make the jump from Editor (ie, employee) to Producer (employer) and, to accomplish this enterprise, has taken to heart the old adage, if you can't get $10,000.00 from one person, then get $1 from 10,000 people (or something similar, do the math yourself). So, bottom line, what exactly do we have here? Best I can figure, writer/director Zach Clark has taken upon himself, without any outside help (CLEARLY without outside help) the momentous task of de-constructing X-Mas. The story is about a young wife in her early thirties who is married to the weatherman for the local station. They have a superficially good marriage, adequate sex, she loves him, he has just got a job in Hawaii and her life is about to change. But unfortunately not in the way she expects. Coming home from X-Mas shopping, she finds hubby mysteriously (and graphically) dead from what looks like a robbery gone wrong, and she spends the rest of the film in a downward spiral of self-discovery (and the aforesaid X-Mas deconstruction) as a superimposed-on-screen "___ DAYS BEFORE X-MAS" timer counts down, perhaps as a teaching aid for those who may otherwise be missing the point. (A category which I suspect may include most of the "kickstarter" team). The rest of the story is taken up with the revelation that hubby had a black stripper-mistress, spending money for the sake of feeling better until there is no more; getting to know the Swingers next door; and the revelation that the wife may be pregnant. (If I got any of this wrong, write me, Tweet me, or just think really strong thoughts and I promise to pick them out of the Ether). The direction is promising, surprisingly, and with a better script and actors, might have actually resulted in a better movie. However since the Director is also the Writer, he will no doubt have to have a long talk with himself about that. The acting - well, er, except for Anna Margaret Hollyman, who comes across as genuinely fresh and interesting (and could in the Real World have carried a film similar to this entirely on her own) the rest of the cast seems to be volunteers or extras or (is this even legal?) extra-volunteers who may possibly have paid or "kickstarted" for the privilege of being in the film. Or so it seems. **Factoid: within 2 hrs of posting this review, 5 people coincidentally flagged it as "not useful," which is more people than there are actual leads in the film. X-Files anyone?**