Valentine's Day Competition

source: The Valentine Competition

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The movie is set in a town called Valentine. The main character Catherine returns home to work at her mother's garden store after graduating with her MBA. Her mother is very Type A, as is her daughter. Catherine meets the manager of purchasing, Jack, who has moved to town to help take care of his parents and who is Type B. One of the workers at the garden store makes an ordering mistake and they receive 600 cases of flowers instead of 60 cases. They decide to have a decorating contest as a way to offset the cost, with the prize a free backyard makeover. As the contest ramps up, the neighbours get very competitive and decorating chaos ensues. The mother tries to rig the contest so that she doesn't have to pay for the backyard makeover. As I watched this movie, I kept having a sense of deja vu and then it hit me. I remembered a Christmas movie called Christmas on Chestnut Street (2006) A store decides to start a contest to sell off 60,000 Xmas lights, ordered by accident. The competition soon causes unrest among the locals, but the store's owner, Diane, wants to keep what has become a very profitable competition going, at all costs. I am getting tired of watching movies with almost the exact same plot. Doesn't anyone have any original ideas anymore?

This movie is scene by scene an exact copy of a Christmas movie out earlier this year about a neighborhood light competition. Every plot point and every character. I get that these movies are all mostly similar and original ideas are hard to come by, but this is a bit much.

The worst part of this movie is the father with Alzheimer's who was used for comedic effect. Nothing funnier than a depressing disease, right? All of his scenes were filled with cringe. The lead character came across as something less than human early in the movie, and her mother was an over the top villain of the mustache-twirling variety. Their personality faults were so forced that it detracted from any semblance of realism. All of the "funny" moments failed to deliver any laughs, and the entire thing just felt low budget. You could tell it was filmed through COVID times because extras were kept far away and scenes had little "life" to them.

The Valentine Competition