hi! hello there! here's something you may not know about me: i am a casual enjoyer of the humble holiday romance movie. ever since being introduced to the genre with a christmas prince, i have been a seasonal appreciator of the red-and-green coded, glitter-clad, reason-defying stories that get cut and printed and released en masse.
the princess switch. the holiday calendar. hot chocolate holiday. champagne problems. i've seen quite a few of them, and i'm capable of enjoying them as casual, mindless entertainment and turning off the part of my brain that tries too hard to ask "would they really - "
because i know they wouldn't. not really. these movies aren't meant to represent reality. that's not the point of any of them, or of the genre at large. as long as what i'm watching doesn't stray too far into any blatantly offensive or tradwifey-type bullshit, i'm able to sit through just about any of it without cringing too much
but this movie i watched tonight just so. quite simply. does not get that no brain free pass, if only because it seemed to be laboring under the impression that it was not simple holiday schlock, and may in fact be better than the rest of its supposed genre
which is why i feel so strongly the need to make a list about everything that annoyed me about "the noel diary"
meet our main character, jake. he's a totally famous author. you can tell because there are paparazzi lined up outside this book signing he's doing, where he is condescending or annoyed with in some way to almost everyone who comes up to get a book signed
you can tell he's a serious author and a serious guy because when we look over his fabulous house (which he lives alone in with his dog, which is taken care of by a full time maid (again, totally normal things for authors to have)), we see he has a record player, and a radio, and multiple typewriters, and what is, i'm pretty sure, an edgar allan poe funko pop
our "plot" starts when he gets a call that his mother died a week ago, and jake has to return to the house where he grew up and clean out his mentally unwell mother's conveniently organized and barely even gross hoarder piles.
as soon as he arrives, he is greeted by his mother's long-time neighbor eleanor. eleanor is a prolific artist and seems to be doing great for being single at 60-something, but still needs help from jake setting up a dating profile. within a day, she has found a fashionable man with a fancy car and a questionable accent she is going on hours-long dates with. within a week, they are co-hosting christmas dinner together, appear in all their scenes together, and are firmly a "we"
jake has an adorable dog ava, whom he takes everywhere with him, including any business or hotel he visits, all the way across a road trip. not fucking once does he ever have this dog on a leash, even when they are in unfamiliar towns or countrysides where the dog could easily run away and be injured. what the fuck, jake
while cleaning out his mother's house, jake is visited by a stranger named rachel. rachel is an attractive not-old woman who likes all the same musicians jake does, enjoys physical media like jake does (including physical road maps??), and sleeps in band t-shirts. can you guess what her role in this movie is?
rachel is visiting jake's house because she's searching for her birth mother, and this house was the last known address rachel has of her. jake says he doesn't know anything about that. we later find out her mother was jake's live-in nanny when he was 4-5 years old. which seems a liiiiiittle old to have absolutely zero recollection of someone who was in his life for that long, in such a major role.
rachel is fluent in 4-5 different languages and aspires to work as a translator at the UN. this is only brought up in the context of her being able to order fluently at an italian restaurant, and is never mentioned or addressed, even in passing, for the rest of the movie.
being a holiday movie, this movie spends most of its runtime smothered in snow. there is an absolutely random one-off scene where it is instead raining, and i'm entirely convinced this is just for the purpose of giving jake a "sad in the rain convincing love interest not to leave yet" scene. it does nothing but snow for the rest of the movie.
rachel decides the best way to pursue the only lead she has about her mother is to go on a roadtrip with jake (who she has known for about. a day.) to visit his father (who he has had 0 contact with in 35 years, since he apparently abandoned his family after the death of jake's older brother). she goes in jake's car, with no transportation or escape route of her own. this is undeniably made worse by the fact that a repeated stated character trait of rachel's is that she needs certainty in her life in order to function. girl, please.
at the first pit stop, rachel goes into jake's bag to grab his wallet for him. she accidentally knocks out a diary he had in there and just immediately starts reading it. it is a mamma mia-style diary her mother kept the year she was pregnant with rachel. jake's only given rationale for why he had it was that. he saw it with his mom's stuff and grabbed it. he also had no clue it was her mother's mamma mia diary.
they have to stay at a bed and breakfast overnight when "the pass" gets snowed in. i made a joke about how there was definitely only going to be one room. the innkeeper said there were two. jake made a joke about how if this was a romcom there would only be one. don't steal my jokes, jake.
rachel goes to a bookshop conveniently across the street from their adorable b&b (which also conveniently allows dogs) and grabs jake's first novel. this isn't so we can actually see into jake's interior through the scope of his writing or so rachel can gain insight that will either raise or lower her opinion of him, but so jake can peep on her through the door between their connected rooms and watch her in her pajamas (a blondie t-shirt and nothing else) audibly gasping at his book. y'know. just so we, again, can understand just how fucking good an author mr. multiple typewriter owner is
jake also apparently writes the full text of his novels in what are probably moleskine notebooks. what a good righteous author man he is.
rachel reads more through her mother (noel)'s diary (see - the noel diary) while they're driving and gets to a part where her mother wrote she wanted to name her angelica. this makes rachel emotional enough to ask jake to pull over in the middle of the countryside. the moment where she's reeling from this revelation is where jake tries to kiss her for the first time, before his un-leashed dog tries to run after a rabbit. did i mention rachel is recently engaged?
also there's a part in noel's diary where she says she read magic treehouse books to him. still no memories of the woman on his part.
also also this diary was written in 1987 and the first magic treehouse book was published in 1992 so apparently it's a time traveling holiday romance too
everything about jake's dad. the man is living in the middle of nowhere and, again, has had absolutely 0 contact with his living son in 35 years. because he left the family after he felt guilty about his other son's death because he...let him climb up a treee he fell out of, which killed him immediately i guess? but when jake shows up at his house, he insists he only left him with his apparently already unstable wife with no additional support because he thought doing so would help her. he also insists he tried to call and write to jake on numerous occasions, and apparently, his mom was just hiding all the letters and voicemails from him which is, again, just the most paper-thin of excuses. i don't care if you and your wife "don't find comfort" in each other anymore, unless there is a fucking court order keeping you apart, just go and visit your son in person!!! even once a year might do the trick!!! but whatever, seems like jake forgives him. they eat chili together.
also rachel and his dog have to spend hours waiting in his cold car while jake is just like, decorating a tree with his dad and not inviting them in. they get some mail and a wedding announcement noel sent to jake-dad and leave. whatever.
they have to stay at another adorable inn on the way to her next known address and this one really only does have only one room. it also has about 500 candles of different shapes and sizes which are all inexplicably lit when they have dinner in there.
jake and rachel sleep together. whatever. what's more important is that rachel's normally curly hair is inexplicably straightened for their candlelit dinner scene alone, and back to its normal state when we see her leaving jake in the middle of the night post-bone session. what is the continuity in this movie.
rachel has apparently not left to go see her birth mother in person, because it's good enough for her to know from the diary that her mother loved her. she does not indicate any desire to continue seeing jake. she leaves her mother's precious diary with him as well.
you know who does immediately go to see noel? jake. honestly, i barely remember the contents of their conversation, but i'm pretty sure rachel was barely even mentioned. we also never see rachel meeting noel afterwards. clearly her most important child-parent relationship is with this little white boy she was the live-in nanny for 35 years ago when she was a pregnant 17 year-old
oh yeah, did i mention rachel and noel are both Black? i feel like that may also add a layer to the whole live-in nanny not even vaguely remembered by her charge thing.
rachel is having a christmas eve with her adoptive parents and waiting for her totes important fiance to arrive, and jake is calling her repeatedly. he is also calling her from about 20 feet outside her parents' house on the lawn, ignoring all her requests to leave this be. he also mentions absolutely nothing about her mother and having met her to rachel, he just absolutely needs her to say that she doesn't love him, or else he won't leave. she tells him she doesn't love him.
loser didn't even bring a boombox for his romantic gesture. amateur hour.
old lady neighbor eleanor (who is, again, firmly now an item with her bf of about one week) gifts him with a painting of his mother's house (you know, the house where his brother died, his father abandoned him without a word, he grew up so miserable that he left at 17 and never came back to until his mother died alone. that house).
at the end of the movie, rachel is there waiting across the street for jake, without any further rationale stated for why she's decided to blow up her life for this man, and the movie ends on a freeze frame of jake's smile.
thank god it's finally over.
and there you have it, everything you need to know about a movie you now never need to watch. peace on earth and god bless the poe funko.
2087
vaporwave
stormborns
kianamaiart
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izzy806
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