No maid talk at school
gonna 
about that mindset for a long, long while…
Rock On! Band Beauty In Disguise (2025) - another direct to reelshort compilation, this time following the adventures of a girl who must disguise herself as her own twin brother at an elite music school and win a band contest while she’s there. i’m glad christine love is getting some of that tiktok money…?? the way they introduce the concept is so funny - the first scene of the movie is the twin brother in a hospital gown dejectedly preparing to throw himself off a roof bc he got a hand injury just before school started. his sister yells that she’ll take his place… and we INSTANTLY cut to peppy musical montage of trimming her hair, chestbinding, inserting conspicuous bulge etc. i like that even though the same girl plays both twins they still put extra eyeliner and makeup on her whenever she’s meant to be girlboying instead of just regular boying. just so nobody thinks it’s, well, you know.
my favourite parts of the movie mostly had to do with the main girl struggling to deal with life in a male dorm portrayed in the same den-of-casual-erotic-temptation manner as sorority houses in revenge of the nerds movies. not only is everyone a shirtless tussle-prone hunk (our heroine gets a mild push once and immediately her menstrual cup rolls out of her pants) but she must also bite lip in anguish when faced with such casual male living space behaviors as accidentally brushing lips with your bro while he’s cradling you to teach you guitar, or tucking each other in at night, or my favourite, getting tanked off 2 cans of bud light and sensually stroking your friend’s tummy while he lies shirtless on the floor complaining about how hot it is. there are also some extremely memorable poolside scenes:
http://harmonyzone.org/dump/drowning.mp4
the constant internal monologues in these things are sooo good… also the dialog… i like that when we’re first introduced to The Boys discussing their new roomie it’s with the line “apparently he can play any stringed instrument and has the voice of an angel”. for the record, i think my other favourite part of the movie is when she zoom calls her brother to say she’ll take his place at school for a month but NOT take part in the band contest, and we see from his screen sharethat he’s already sadly walking outside to hurl himself off the roof again. i’ve had zoom calls like that. i also enjoyed the dramatic introduction of the school dean
this one felt a little more like a single continuous movie than the other reelshort comps i’ve watched, since it sort of tries to have an actual middle instead of replacing that whole section with 10 interchangeable sequences of an evil rich girl saying “you will NEVER have x” only to be dramatically / romantically?? proven wrong within the next 90secs of screentime. HOWEVER fans of the erotic bullying subgenre still get their fill in endless scenes of the evil cheerleader kidnapping and tormenting this mysterious new prodigy by pouring ice cubes on him, flinging a soda can into his face, stepping on his hand and saying “i’m sorry, was that your music hand?” this is what it’s like to be a short guy in college. my favourite is when she makes the whole school think he’s Problematic (due to aforementioned bud light incident) and wouldn’t you know it; next thing you know he’s been kidnapped by PC Thugs in leather daddy caps who say “cmon pretty boy… we just wanna give you a makeover” and then proceed to dress him up as a girl, tie him to a chair, and perform yoko ono’s “cut piece” on his t-shirt with a pair of scissors, thus threatening to expose the binder. we NEED to talk about how this is happening on campus these days, they’re saying in more and more places.
something else i thought was funny, that i might be off base with: the male love interest is an ex Disney Argentina protege with a noticeable accent - but me and my partner only started to notice it 15mins into the movie, which is coincidentally around the time that the 9 or 10 free sample episodes on the actual website run out. did they figure they didn’t need to dub the voice for the rest?
well, anyway. there’s some business where the male lead thinks he’s fallen in love with the girl version of the twin and so she has to pretend to be two people by constantly going to the bathroom and changing outfits and coming out to find she’s JUST missed her brother, etc, that thankfully the movie doesn’t expect us to care about too much. there’s a dramatic kiss at the Freshman’s Ball when they’re both in tuxedos but it keeps cutting to an alternate version of the scene where she’s in a dress just to, again, sternly indicate no funny business. there’s a truly baffling scene in the last 10 minutes of the movie where she gets locked in an office with some kind of official University Pervert Professor who had not been mentioned or introduced until then who instantly locks takes a little flail out of his cabinet and starts threatening her with it before the boyfriend bursts in to beat him up using grand theft auto character punches; the whole thing is wrapped up within 2 minutes and really makes you feel they got an urgent producer level re. suggested episode targets somewhere along the way.
at the end the evil cheerleader decides to unmask the whole scheme by asking why we’ve never seen both twins in the same room at the same time; they foil her by dramatically walking out onstage, bc the brother is well again now, but the film delightfully spends no effort at all trying to pretend they’re ever both in the same shot.
in conclusion i think whoever was putting the outfits together got to have a lot of fun.
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The impact sound that plays when Mr. Hottie jumps into the pool almost made me spit my drink!
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Accidental Surrogate For Alpha (2024) - i havent been watching as much hallmark stuff lately, i think its a clockwork orange kind of deal where after a life of sin and brutality the protagonist finds out that his heart’s just not in it anymore… however one advantage we have irl over dystopian novels is that top internet scientists are continually inventing whole new formats of dtv to stimulate even the most jaded palettes. and so now that halloween is over i ended up watching one of the many reelshort romcoms about being impregnated by a werewolf.
the twist in this one is that the main character is afraid of werewolves after they apparently killed her parents. but for the most part werewolves here just act like regular humans. so it’s unclear how much this is meant to be like a sensible worry and how much it’s like a clint eastwood in gran torino situation. she goes to the extent of stating “no werewolves” at the artificial insemination clinic, although in a wacky igor-style mixup, wouldn’t ya know it…! i really have to say i question both the methodology of the clinic staff (putting a new label on an existing semen beaker quite clearly labelled CATEGORY: WEREWOLF) and also their bedside manner. there has to be a better way of breaking the news of that kind of thing than by slowly turning to the patient staring at the tube and going “…so, exactly how scared are you of werewolves?”
the main lady can’t respec the pregnancy bc she only has three days left in her lifetime ovulation window, due to her evil ex switching out her vitamins for birth control pills(?!). one thing i really like about these movies is that they tend to go a lot harder on making the cheating exes and their lovers as evil as possible. i particularly enjoyed when nu-gf told our heroine to “take your crusty old uterus and go home.”
anyway, it turns out the werewolf baby daddy is Billionaire Alpha Dominic Moon, who appears to be running for werewolf president (“alpha king”/“lord alpha” - is this really an elected position?) and who needs a purebred werewolf wife and baby for political reasons. he confronts our heroine at the clinic, claming he can smell the baby is his, and offers to buy it. she refuses, but he still follows her around and rescues her when she’s attacked by loansharks looking to shake down her ex. this is really the one part of the movie where the werewolf thing comes into play, as the male lead briefly turns into a cgi wolf and attacks them, as well as growing claws to tear out someone’s throat - with cgi blood splatters!! this is never mentioned again and doesn’t seem to make much of a stir in the campaign press, so maybe werewolf murders are in fact more of a thing than the movie otherwise tends to suggest. teach the controversy. also his political assistant is a guy named “beta hugo”.
anyway after that he persuades her to move in with him and pretend to be his wife and also a werewolf and etc. it turns out pretending to be a werewolf is mostly a matter of like hideboud ritualistic social codes put on for the sake of the servants, like when they take a bath together and pretend to have loud sex for the benefit of the housekeeper outside. at one point during the performance alpha dominic announces “oh! you’re gonna make me wolf!!”.. a werewolf is apparently something of a cross between an amish guy and a smurf.
after that it becomes something of a political thriller, there’s a scheming electoral rival who is also a self-claimed “anti-humanist” (althusser?), an evil ex who is also the main guy’s press manager or something, evil maid, etc. the main guy misses “the big rally” by going to find his fake wife when she gets hit by a car, but it’s ok bc “video leaked that you left to save your wife and your numbers are through the roof”. there is chemistry, soundtracked by 1930s sexy trombone music from bugs bunny cartoons. he gives her a little bell only he can hear that causes him pain when she rings it… summoned by wife’s bell. she pretends to be a werewolf to score points on her ex (announcing “maybe thats why i couldnt get pregnant.. your nasty little human sperm were too weak!” - - very weird feeling to hear dialogue like this in a dtv romcom). however they cant have sex bc “physically being with a werewolf will hurt a human”. he also has hair like Mr Beast, which probably doesn’t help much.
at the end it all works out because she’s actually a werewolf already and she never noticed and it’s never come up before, leading to more questions about what it actually entails. and not just a regular werewolf but the thought-lost heiress to a prestigious line of “rogue alphas”, in fact something of a werewolf lindbergh baby whose mysterious disappearance is still being brought up many years later. hubby wins the election and his political opponents go to jail for the aforementioned hitting his wife with a car thing, and at the end they happily cradle a little plastic baby bc a real one is absolutely not within the budget of this film. but overall MVP remains the evil ex boyfriend, last seen being manhandled out of a campaign event after making a scene, which leads to this enjoyable exchange:
WEREWOLF SECRET SERVICE AGENTS: you know what we do with lying humans? we tear them limb from limb!
EX-BF: what? i’m sorry! don’t!!
truly our peoples have much to teach one another.
8 Likes
_NOW_ i understand where the audience for this
is coming from
Renovation Romance (2024) - no pics cuz im at my parents house but believe me when i say the main quality of this one is that it has 3-4 christmas trees in EVERY shot, sometimes going up to 7 for big scenes, incl one ominously looming over a distant balcony. there are shot-reverse-shot conversations in which both people have different christmas trees directly behind them. none of this is ever remarked upon.
the netflix description initially makes it seem like this will be abt the initial existing couple fixing their relationship. which is unusual for this kind of movie and sure enough turned out not to be what it was about - the moment i knew the relationship was doomed was when the boyfriend took a selfie 10mins in, an unpardonable crime in the romcom universe. both of them are also reality tv hosts working on the titular “renovation romance” show, which consists of renovating peoples houses at the same time as giving them relationship advice. much is made of the latter and the main lady calling herself a therapist and talking about ethics and such, to the point where it starts to feel like an unsettling omission that nobody ever talks about any of the qualifications needed for the renovation parts. it cant be the guy’s job bc he doesnt know what a support beam is. is it really ok to have these people chopping up your house??
well it turns out to be moot bc the only changes they make are to knock through one wall, paint one wall green and add a table. not even the many xmas trees need to be moved out of the way. theyre doing it for a couple where the guy looks like a Lesser Baldwin and the lady commits the cardinal sin of wanting to spend xmas in The City so ofc hes the romantic get and she’s doomed. a funny thing is that ofc while the main romance is preordained, at first it seems like it might be lining up a tetris stack of secondary relationships to solve as well - the flake boyfriend and city girlfriend fly out together, and even the production assistant seems like she might be getting something set up.. but its a trick! bc the dramatic end (on a live tv special!) involves both sets of couples breaking up, and the production assistant bf turns out to be an evil mole leaking info to the tabloids. so when the main two finally pair up at the end we see all the ditched partners standing seperately with the fixed smiles of losing reality show contestants. its a harsh world out there.. taking that selfie was your first mistake.
2024 things: the starter boyfriend looks like that immortality billionaire guy who drinks his son’s pee. the main lady looks a bit like kristi noem.
3 Likes
A ROMM COMM TUUM SPECIAL PRESENTATION
FINDING MR CHRISTMAS SEASON 2 (2025) - I watched the second one since it was all that was on Dailymotion. A friend told me about this over the holidays, and while it’s been since I’ve watched anything for this thread I felt this one pulling me back from retirement - a Hallmark-branded reality show that pits 10 hunks against each other in a contest to prove themselves the ultimate leading man, with their own starring role in a film on the channel as reward. I think one reason this was hard for me to resist was that “hallmark leading man” has always been a particularly empty signifier even by the standards of the channel. Definable mostly in terms of what they’re not… not too warm, not too cold, not too crass, not too sensitive, not too rich, not too poor, not too exciting, not too dull. The gals sometimes get small moments of vanity, ambition, contrariness - the guys are mostly stuck playing the role the wall does in racquetball, something to bounce off of, essential to be sure but maybe defined by regulation height, breadth and solidity rather than any more personal characteristics.
So I was interested in seeing the company itself try to articulate the values that it’s looking for. And of course any reality show is a grouping of Types Of Guy. In this case it’s interesting bc they’re all sorta hallmarkified from the get-go - no brash troublemakers here, just a lot of affable fit guys in dad sweaters - but there are still enough little shifts in emphasis to mark them as types. For example one plays football, one is a dad, one is worried about his mom. There’s a guy named Rustin - “like Justin, but with an R.” One is Venezuelan, one is gay - - apparently this was more directly addressed in the first season but the show’s hosted by Jonathan Bennett, “gay king of Christmas” according to this site I read and star of Hallmark’s first movie where the gay romance was the actual focus and not something rolled into an anthology. So on one hand it’s nice that it’s a little more inclusive and open about this stuff than you’d think, on the other hand, all the romantic scenes that form the episode challenges are still with women for everybody and it’s not like they do any with a guy for parity.. so it’s a land of contrasts.
The challenges each ep are like a mix of anodyne xmas-themed ones like “express yourself by decorating a cookie” or “write a card for your mom” (I was curious how they’d judge that, but they copped out and declared everyone was a winner) and then more substantiative acting-related ones that decide who goes to the next round. For the latter they actually do mostly try to make them specifically DTV romance themed - like a cowboy themed scene where they have to flirt on a horse, a winter scene where they have to flirt on skis, a heartfelt scene where they have to talk to a character playing their mom (one of the guys tucks a strand of “mom”'s hair away while staring deeply into her eyes in a way that’s hard not to read as also flirty… i guess that’s why they change it up on ya).
Easily my favourite was the scene where each guy had to do a “romantic picnic date” scene - this was midway through the season, and we’d already seen one of the contestants (a tall model dad whose main memorable quality until now had been the time he referred to his 8 week old baby as “still fresh, bro”) talk about how he wanted to try taking more risks to stand out. And so after his costar helpfully mentioned the picnic props were real food his take on the scene consisted of continuously eating grapes - like, picking up a grape, flirtatiously popping it into his mouth, mumbling his line (bc of the grape) and then picking up another and doing it again - until he was five grapes in and everyone was watching a bated breath in case he went for a sixth. The scripted scene involved the hero making a laboured comparison of the heroine to a molasses cookie and in this case he also jettisoned that in favour of an anguished 30sec dramatic monologue about how he felt his life was falling apart and how he needed something to hold it together… something… like molasses… whereupon the game actress chipped in with “me??”. Unfortunately the gambit didn’t take and he was dropped the same round. A funny thing about the structure of the show is that you get punished for being the worst contestant but generally not rewarded for being the best, so there’s something of a gamified commitment to mediocrity quite in keeping with the target format. It does make for kind of a funny disjunction against the reality show format when instead of being bitchy all the guests are sitting in a big circle having an anodyne-off.
THAT BEING SAID the little flashes of personality, weirdness or outside world glimpsed in this eerie context (christmas gewgaw manse in the middle of some unpopulated colorado field) come through all the stronger. Undisputed MVP of the first few episodes was Gabe, an extremely handsome and extremely uncomfortable looking man that we first meet in the introductory softball “tell us about yourself via custom santa costume” challenge, where he immediately forgets what he was going to say and stands stock still looking miserable and muttering “oh.. uh oh… uh oh”. And then the next time he’s in an acting challenge with a real person he does it again… even outside the challenges whenever it cuts to the guys hanging out everyone always seems depressed and uncomfortable when he tried joining in. During the talent portion of the show, where everyone had to try to use some party trick to win over an audience of moms (shirtless pushups, magic tricks etc) his choice was to solve a “puzzle cube” onstage in 30secs while standing on a balance board, an impressive feat that unfortunately also meant spending his time on stage silently fidgeting while avoiding eye contact with the audience. His final inspirational words in the Q&A were “all you have to do is believe in yourself and itl’l all happen… just like i did right here”(indicating puzzle cube). He got kicked out after that so we were all sadly deprived of the world’s first autistic hallmark leading man, to go with the barbie. But it seemed a perverse mark of integrity to me that he somehow ended up losing to the white rapper dressed as santa claus, sample line “these bars are a gift u could say that i rapped them” (and who has two seperate instances of boomboxing in the show, and each time it immediately cuts to a shot of one of the black contestants looking expressionless).
Other moments:
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guy whose santa outfit was “all american saint nick”, which involved putting a little cloth football and crucifix on his shirt
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other guy who went as “santini, the italiano santa claus” bc he was from new york, and so when he turned around it showed a little cloth decal of… the twin towers!! everyone was impressed.
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the time all the guys are shown having a heart to heart while passing the ball around outside, and the prop guys apparently couldn’t choose between a football or a soccer ball and so people are aimlessly passing around them both
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for some reason the words “mormon fujobait” are in my notes
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at times the combination of hallmark and reality show music cue conventions end up creating something i can only refer to as “hallmark trap house”
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all the episodes have a guest judge introduced as “hallmark royalty” who the contestants have to look like they instantly recognize and are excited about. these are mostly skinny white ladies with names like Hunter Predator but it gets really goofy when they move onto, like, hallmark directors. who the fuck knows who directed any hallmark film?
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(solemnly) “we’re down to five golden hunks”
Anyway - - the final challenge is to do three consecutive scenes that form the climax of an imagined hallmark movie, a period piece with all the guys in period garb having to push through a crowd of extras to catch up with a train, at which point it becomes hard to ignore that the fictional hallmark movies from the show somehow have far higher production values than any of the real ones on the channel. The winner - SPOILERS! - turns out to be white rapper, who I guess does go through the very romcom arc of “sassy” to “chastened and weepy” after almost getting kicked off. This last challege is also perhaps the closest look we actually get into how the hallmark machinery actually functions - after episode and episode of one-shot challenges everyone takes it as an incredible luxury that they get a whole two takes on each scene, and directorial advice like “just hit your marks”, and where a wise-old-mentor character mentions the kind of emotional connections you make being someone else’s love interest across 15 days of shooting.
Finally after all the torments a winner is chosen. Maybe for a sequel to this post I can watch the movie he stars in - HUH?
the BROTHER…?? not even part of the main couple? that’s cold. i guess what’s left is the central message of any reality show: that if you push yourself and work hard and do your best, and push through the misery and avoidable humiliations inflicted by people holding the carrot in front of your nose, you can attain a deep sense of accomplishment for something that means nothing and was never worth doing. moral for 2026: never try hard at anything
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Hunter King is just the name of a reality show on TNN