News You Can Bruise for 2025 January 1

• Leah's Perfect Gift (2024): I had a part in making this movie! It's based on Leah's Perfect Christmas by Catherine Beck, the pen name of a member of my writing group.

  Near the beginning of the film the story train is visibly shunted off the generic "Hallmark Christmas movie" setup into a story that is, at best, poking loving fun at Hallmark Christmas movies, and then it's shunted back onto the track at the end for a Hallmark Christmas movie conclusion. In the middle the movie's all right, but the book spends a lot more time on Leah's outsider's view of Christmas in a way that really rings true. Also, in the book they take the Metro North up to Connecticut rather than driving, which makes way more sense.

  The book is better, is what I'm saying. In a Film Roundup first, I will reproduce some of my old notes from the meeting of our writing group where we went over Leah's Perfect Christmas:

  Really cute, I don't have a lot to change.

  The best part was the dinner where Leah takes Gavin's bleu cheese because his mom won't make a meal accommodation, and then his mom makes a completely unnecessary meal accommodation for Maddie.

  The parents are ridiculous stereotypes, but I didn't reliably find them ridiculous to the point of satire. I'd like to see more of that.

  The main issue I felt was a kind of emotional monotony through the middle of the book. Often a rom-com has a red herring romantic partner. I would either introduce a red herring or make the Christmas experience—not necessarily the parents—less uniformly unbearable. There needs to be something to distract Leah from Gavin, because I'm not being brought through the story solely by the idea that Gavin isn't the guy he seems to be when they're in New York.

  I haven't read the final version of the book, but in the movie they chose door #2, giving Leah a variety of Christmasy side quests that let them showcase the many, many colorful sets and props available to the production.

• Beaches (1988): The chick flicks continue! On my way back from Japan I stopped in LA to see Susanna and family. She and I walked around Crystal Cove State Park, where the beach house seen in Beaches has been preserved as a miniature film museum. (According to the museum, that house was used in a lot of movies, but most of them were silent movies in the early days of Hollywood, so nobody cares anymore.)

  This reminded me that our mom loved the soundtrack to Beaches, or at least kept the tape in her car for a really long time until we knew all the songs. (Other albums I assume Mom loved from the same evidence: Neil Diamond: His 12 Greatest Hits.) So I told Susanna I'd watch the movie with Sumana when I got back.

  And... it's pretty good. The critical consensus is negative, but I thought it did a good job of showing a long-lasting friendship between two women, a friendship that is strained but never breaks. And there are a lot of good songs on that soundtrack. In the 20+ years since I last heard the Beaches soundtrack I've grown more able to recognize the musical homages going on in the songs. In particular, I correctly identified "Oh Industry" as "a Laurie Anderson thing."

And now, it's time to send off another Star Trek series with this month's Television Spotlight.

• Star Trek: Lower Decks (2020-2024): A standout of the Stream Trek era. I looked forward to every episode and thoroughly enjoyed the mixture of fan callbacks and traditional Trek stories. But there's one thing I didn't enjoy, and it's summed up by Sumana's common refrain while we were watching: "No one's making you be in Starfleet, Mariner." I griped about this in my roundup of season 1 and it never stopped being a problem. Beckett Mariner, the main character of the show, acts like a sulking draftee for nearly the entire series, even though she's a graduate of an elite military academy and a member of a post-scarcity civilization devoted entirely to personal betterment.

  She sulks on a ship whose crew starts out mediocre but improves in cohesion over time. She sulks on her punitive assignment to a crappy space station, which we later see get turned around by crew who came in with a more positive attitude. Other people improve, but she doesn't. There's a blissful couple of episodes when she actually leaves Starfleet and seems to be living the life she wants, but she comes right back. I can sorta make this make sense based on the exposition we get—mommy issues plus Dominion War PTSD, basically—but the series kept showing Mariner grow as a person, only to hit her reset button at the end of an episode or season. (Tendi did have sustained, persistent growth throughout the series, so it is possible.)

  The versions of Mariner and Boimler in the Strange New Worlds crossover were much more appealing than the cartoon versions, which probably indicates that the characters' flaws are exaggerated for comic effect vis-a-vis what they'd be like in a live-action show. But I don't find it funny to see people learn the same lessons over and over. It is a tribute to the writing of Lower Decks and the charisma of the actors that I loved the show despite this really annoying problem they never fixed.