And You Thought Spending Time with Relatives Was Bad

Less than two weeks until Christmas!

Along with the presents, the cookies, the carols, and the poker (oh, wait. Is that just with my family?), come another tradition of the holiday season. It’s about two weeks into December, so naturally the awfully stereotypical, made-for-television Christmas movies have begun to trickle onto the weekend line-up.

Usually theater-released Christmas movies (aka real movies) are legends. They survive the test of time to be rewatched again and again by people like me. It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, and Elf are just a few of the many that find themselves being played over and over by people, young and old, wanting to relive the ghost of memories past.

Unfortunately this epidemic of TV movies is hard to escape, and this year I sat myself down on the couch and decided to actually watch one.

It’s called The Mistle-Tones, about an a capella group competing for a spot to sing at a holiday show at the local mall. Amongst other groups, their main competitors are the Snow Belles (must every a capella group’s name be a pun? No, really. Is this some unspoken rule you learn when you start one?), led by the straight-up bitch Marci (Tori Spelling), who has it out for the completely good, angel-voiced Holly (Tia Mowry).

Holly has to put together an awesome arrangement for her group (of coworkers: her possibly-gay, wise-cracking male friend, the over-weight, supposedly-straight male acquaintance, the pretty-but-completely-timid HR rep who has to stick her nose in everything, and the uptight-at-first, karaoke-loving boss). The Snow Belles consist of supposedly pretty, pick jumpsuit-wearing, perky middle-aged women, not unlike their leader.

For a full plot description just add “predictable” before every noun.

 

The Mistle-Tones not only lacks originality, but also subtlety. From the beginning of the groups’ formation, it’s obvious the Mistle-Tones are having tons of fun practicing in comparison to the strictly-run Snow Belles. The romance between Holly and her boss was written from the beginning when he was still completely business and also somewhat of an asshole.

It’s one of those movies which you can guess what happens before it does; I feel like I’ve seen the movie dozens of times before. Even Spelling agreed that The Mistle-Tones is just a baby of two movie parents. And I paraphrase: “It's a combination of Mean Girls and Glee” [said in an interview with E! News]. I mean, these two things have each been spun in so many directions so many times because people think it’ll give their movie/TV show a freaking edge. Instead all it does is make me slightly nauseous and wish I was surrounded by my relatives as they ogled over how much I've grown.