The Holiday Calendar: Just Another Holiday Obligation
The holiday season officially arrived to Netflix at the beginning of November when the romantic comedy The Holiday Calendar began streaming.
The Holiday Calendar stars Kat Graham (How It Ends and TV’s The Vampire Diaries) as Abby Sutton, a young woman stuck in the rut of her daily life. Abby is a talented photographer who dreams of owning her own studio, but instead she trudges through her days taking mall portraits and feeling too afraid to chase her artistic dreams.
Just before December, Abby’s grandfather (Ron Cephas Jones of Half Nelson and TV’s This Is Us) gives her an antique advent calendar that once belonged to her late grandmother. Unlike the cardboard advent calendars filled with chocolates found in grocery stores today, this advent calendar is a large piece of artwork that mysteriously opens a new door each day, only to reveal a tiny trinket.
It doesn’t take Abby long to realize that her grandmother’s advent calendar has magical qualities. Each day’s trinket is a symbol of something extraordinary that eventually happens to her on that day. When she finds a tree trinket, she later ends up meeting a charming man after accidentally running over his Christmas tree. When she finds an ice skate trinket, her date takes her out on a beautiful date where they ice skate as a scene of Christmastime bliss plays out in the background.
Abby shares the baffling story of her advent calendar with her best friend, Josh (Quincy Brown of Dope and Street), who is back in their hometown after traveling the world as a photographer and becoming a successful travel blogger. What brings Josh back home is his connection to Abby, but she is too caught up in the magic of her advent calendar to notice. Predictably, Josh continues to show his affection for Abby each day leading up to Christmas, but she is the last person to realize it.
Lackluster and full of clichés, The Holiday Calendar feels less like a holiday treat and more like a holiday-time obligation. The premise is wholesome—just the way a made-for-TV holiday movie should be —but the reality is a film that is uninspired and boring.
Still, The Holiday Calendar may manage to get hardcore lovers of holiday made-for-TV movies in the Christmas spirit. Netflix did not strike holiday movie gold with The Holiday Calendar like it did with A Christmas Prince in 2017, but it will give it two more shots later this month with the Christmas films The Princess Switch and A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding.
In Addition
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a highly anticipated Netflix Original Film that began streaming earlier this month. The western anthology is written, directed, and produced by brothers Joel and Ethan Coen (The Big Lebowski and Fargo). It follows six stories set in the Old West and stars Tim Blake Nelson, Liam Neeson, and James Franco, among others.
The Princess Switch is another Christmas-inspired Netflix Original Film that began streaming earlier this month. Starring Vanessa Hudgens (Beastly and Spring Breakers), The Princess Switch tells the timeworn tale of two women who look so much alike, they are able to temporarily switch identities to get a feel for a different life.
The Tribe is an intense and unique new film that is streaming on Netflix. It is a full-length film, with absolutely no spoken dialogue, that centers on the life of a Ukrainian teenager who attends a boarding school for the deaf.
A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding is a Netflix Original Film set to begin streaming on Friday, Nov. 30. It is the sequel to the surprisingly successful 2017 Netflix Original Film, A Christmas Prince. It follows the story of Amber and Richard one year later as they plan their royal wedding.