Yesterday I realised that my back-to-back watching of festive films has started to feel like bingeing on junk food. This sort of thing is fine in small doses, but when you supersize it every day, a bellyache is inevitable. Speaking of junk food, my next film is 2014’s A Cookie Cutter Christmas – an entire film based around a cookie baking competition. It’s as exciting as that sounds. Christie (Erin Krakow) and Penny (Miranda Fridon) are two schoolteachers and ex-best buds who take their rivalry to extreme lengths while plotting to win the school’s big Christmas bake-off and the heart of James (David Haydn-Jones), the hot new single dad in town.
Director Christie Will Wolf’s film ticks so many Hallmark boxes. Single parent? Check. Cute kid who needs a mother/father figure? Check. Guy/gal who’s new in town? Check. Love interest who’s practically a saint? Baking as potent aphrodisiac? I could go on.
However, this one is a bit of a snooze-fest compared to all I’ve seen so far. To be fair, Penny makes for a satisfying cow of an antagonist, harbouring the pettiest of grudges, just because Christie sang over her in a Christmas pageant one time when they were children. Her transparent bitchiness is consistently entertaining, constantly smirking, rolling her eyes and organising functions under the pretense of being charitable, when she really just wants to rub her rival’s nose in it. Problem is, Krakow and Haydn-Jones as the central romantic pairing are just a little too uninteresting and altogether beige to save the film from monotony.
This film also stretches the believability of just how many school baking nights the parents of pupils would be actually willing to attend. I mean, who gives a toss?
By the climax, everyone learns to be better people through the magic of elaborate cookie baking and we’re reminded that Christmas is the time to get over ancient grudges and reconnect with old friends – even cookie-sabotaging bitches. I’ve seen family and friends hold some petty grievances over the years about some stuff that seemed pretty trivial to me, and it’s been great to see them get over at least some of that enmity and build bridges. This film makes me think of that, so I guess that’s worth something.
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