Sonic the Hedgehog

The Movie Snob goes slumming.

Sonic the Hedgehog  (C).  How can I, The Movie Snob, give this ridiculous, soulless movie based on a video game such a high grade?  It’s about a blue, hobbit-sized space alien who looks vaguely like a hedgehog, acts like a caffeinated 10-year-old, and runs so fast that time seems to stop when he reaches top speed, for crying out loud!  Hear me out: cute alien Sonic (voice of Ben Schwartz, Renfield) is hiding out on Earth near a small Montana town because bad space aliens want to capture him and harness the energy he can generate.  But then Sonic accidentally causes a huge blackout, setting sinister government forces (led by a scenery-chewing Jim Carry, The Number 23) on his trail.  So he quickly befriends a good-natured local police officer named Tom (James Marsden, Enchanted), and Tom agrees to drive him to San Francisco where, through a dire mischance, Sonic’s little alien rings that would allow him to escape from Earth have been lost and landed atop the Transamerica Pyramid.  It’s all preposterous, but Marsden has an easygoing charm, and I laughed a few times at the silliness and one-liners, so why not give it a C?

A Biltmore Christmas

A new Hallmark Christmas movie review from The Movie Snob!

A Biltmore Christmas (B).  It’s Hallmark Christmas movie season again, and we started off with an enjoyable new release.  Obviously the film is set at the beautiful Biltmore estate in North Carolina.  Our heroine Lucy (Bethany Joy Lenz, Extortion) is a Hollywood screenwriter sent to the Biltmore to help her get in the right frame of mind as she works on the script for a remake of a classic movie called “His Merry Wife.” She discovers that she can travel back in time to 1947, just when the movie was being filmed at the Biltmore, and she seizes the opportunity to investigate rumors that the classic movie was originally supposed to have a different, more somber ending. Of course she meets a charming fellow—Jack (Kristoffer Polaha, Jurassic World Dominion), who is an up-and-coming actor with a potential break-out role in the movie. But how can their budding romance work if Lucy returns to 2023? Tune in and find out!  Star Trek stalwarts Jonathan Frakes (TV’s Star Trek: The Next Generation) and Robert Picardo (TV’s Star Trek: Voyager) have co-starring roles, which is what actually attracted me to the movie in the first place.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

The Movie Snob checks in with a DVD review.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets  (C-).  Despite being a big Lord of the Rings fan, I have never gotten into Harry Potter.  I never read the books, and I saw a random sampling of maybe three of the movies back in the day.  But my daughter is getting old enough for at least the first couple of movies, so I recently watched this one for the first time.  It’s a meandering slog of a movie (2 hours and 41 minutes) with only a couple of highlights—namely a creepy encounter with a horde of giant spiders, and a climactic battle with a monster at the end.  Otherwise, it’s mostly sleuthing by the trio of Harry (Daniel Radcliffe, What If), Ron (Rupert Grint, Cherrybomb), and Hermione (Emma Watson, Noah) as they try to figure out who or what is stalking the halls of Hogwarts and turning students (and one cat) to stone. Because a whole faculty of fully fledged wizards and witches can’t figure it out, apparently. Kenneth Branagh (Dunkirk) pops up and seems to really enjoy himself as a purported wizarding wunderkind who makes the ladies swoon.

Monster High 2

The Movie Snob suffers through a new made-for-streaming movie.

Monster High 2  (D).  After a mediocre opener, the Monsters High franchise is back with an even more lackluster sequel!  So, Hogwarts-clone Monster High has become more accepting of monsters that are a little different, like ones that have a human parent and ones that want to practice witchcraft.  Our half-human, half-werewolf heroine Clawdeen (Miia Harris, Monster High: The Movie) is even running for student council president.  Enlightened!  But then a mysterious attack by witches threatens to unravel the students’ tolerance for difference, and Clawdeen’s pal Draculaura (Nayah Damasen, Monster High: The Movie) goes on a daring diplomatic mission to see if an enduring truce can be struck between monsters and witches.  Is treachery afoot?  Are there lame song-and-dance numbers?  Will there be a Monster High 3?  Yes, yes, and I fear the answer is yes . . . .

Miraculous: Ladybug & Cat Noir, The Movie

New streaming review from The Movie Snob.

Miraculous: Ladybug & Cat Noir, the Movie (C-).  This is a new Netflix movie based on an animated TV show that my seven-year-old girl has liked and sometimes loved for a few years now.  The TV show is comfortably formulaic: Ladybug and Cat Noir are superheroes in Paris (France, not Texas).  But they are also ordinary high-school students who must keep their superhero identities secret, even from each other.  In every TV episode, the supervillain Hawkmoth turns an ordinary citizen of Paris into a lesser supervillain that Ladybug and Cat Noir must defeat with their quick wits and super powers. The heroes win, Hawkmoth grouses that next time he will surely defeat Ladybug and Cat Noir, and the credits roll. Personally, I kind of like the TV show.  This movie, however, falls short. It assumes that the viewer has no familiarity with the TV show, which I guess is OK. But it seems to change a few details about how the heroes’ powers work, which will annoy the many viewers who ARE familiar with the TV show. And the movie makers also make the film a musical by dropping in a few instantly forgettable songs for the characters to sing.  So I didn’t really care for it, nor did my daughter.  Stick with the TV show instead.

Monster High: The Movie

A streaming review from The Movie Snob.

Monster High: The Movie  (C).  The Borg Queen aptly described this Paramount+ and Nickelodeon release as a poor man’s version of Disney’s Descendants franchise. In this live-action film, the (monstrous) teenaged children of various famous movie monsters attend a boarding school that is beyond a magic portal and thus safe from the predations of those awful humans. Our heroine is Clawdeen (Miia Harris, TV’s Just Beyond), a new student who yearns to fit in but has to conceal that she is only half-monster—her mother was a werewolf but her father is human. And there’s some sort of weirdness going on at the school suggesting that treachery is afoot. Throw in some mediocre song-and-dance numbers, and you’ve got a 92-minute time-waster. My six-year-old daughter liked it and was still singing one of the songs days later, so there is that.

Hocus Pocus

A new review from The Movie Snob.

Hocus Pocus (D).  Well, in this case it looks like the sequel improved on the original. I finally saw this 1993 flick, and I was not impressed. The plot is pretty much the same as in the sequel—a modern-day teenager in Salem, Mass., accidentally summons up three long-dead witches (Bette Midler, Parental Guidance; Kathy Najimy, Hocus Pocus 2; Sarah Jessica Parker, Sex and the City), and they run amok trying to accomplish some nefarious scheme that will allow them to rule Salem forever before the sun rises and banishes them back to Hades or wherever. The frequent use of the word “virgin” had us hitting the mute button frequently as we watched it with our six-year-old daughter. Otherwise, there was little to hold my interest.

The Sea Beast

From the desk of The Movie Snob.

The Sea Beast  (B-).  Here’s a newish animated fantasy from the good folks at Netflix, and it’s pretty good.  In this world (of roughly Napoleonic era technology), giant sea monsters are real, and heroic hunters set sail to hunt them down and keep the sea lanes and coastal towns safe from their depredations. And the greatest monster hunters of all are Captain Crow (voice of Jared Harris, TV’s The Crown) and the dauntless crew of his ship Inevitable.  While the Inevitable is in port, an orphaned girl named Maisie (voice of Zaris-Angel Hator, Morbius), the daughter of two hunters who went down with their ship, attaches herself to Captain Crow’s right-hand man Jacob Holland (voice of Karl Urban, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers).  Then they’re off to hunt the greatest sea monster of all, the fabled red bluster.  But are the sea monsters really as wicked and bloodthirsty as the history books say?  There’s more than a whiff of How to Train Your Dragon about this movie, but it’s still a fun ride, with lots of authentic-seeming nautical jargon getting spouted left and right . . . I mean port and starboard.  I just wish they had excised the small handful of curse words that pop up here and there.

Noelle

A last gasp of holiday cheer from The Movie Snob.

Noelle (B).  I was previously unaware of this 2019 release, but apparently it was the first live-action original movie made for the Disney+ streaming service. (IMDB.com says it got a limited theatrical release in the U.S. too.) Anyhoo, it’s a cute if predictable tale in which Santa Claus’s son Nick Kringle (Bill Hader, Maggie’s Plan) inherits the family business but then abdicates shortly before Christmas.  This prompts his sister Noelle (Anna Kendrick, Up in the Air) to hitch up the sleigh and head to Phoenix, Arizona, where Nick is believed to have gone. Hijinks ensue. A few familiar faces pop up in small parts, like Shirley MacLaine (Bernie) as an elf that Noelle drags along on her adventure, Julie Hagerty (Lost in America) as Mrs. Claus, and Michael Gross (Tremors) as the head of the council of elf elders.  I thought it was an enjoyable-enough exercise, but I read one reviewer who cautioned that one subplot could be triggering for some kids—it involves a boy whose Christmas wish is to spend Christmas with both of his recently divorced parents, one of whom has apparently remarried.

Disenchanted

From the desk of The Movie Snob.

Disenchanted (C-). Fifteen years after the charming and clever Enchanted, we get this disappointing sequel.  In the original, we started with a generic animated fairy-tale sequence, but things got twisted when a wicked stepmother sent the sweet-natured heroine through a magical portal into real-life New York City. Amy Adams was, of course, excellent as the wide-eyed and innocent Gisele.  In this sequel, 15 years have passed, and Gisele has become disenchanted with her life in the real world. So she instigates her family’s move to the suburbs, where her teenaged stepdaughter Morgan (Gabriella Baldacchino, Unschooled (TV movie)) is miserable and where Gisele herself quickly but unintentionally antagonizes local queen bee Malvina (Maya Rudolph, Bridesmaids). Frustrated in her quest to find a fairy-tale life in the real world, Gisele turns to magic, with predictably chaotic results.  The musical numbers are not memorable, and the plot is sort of a yawner. Co-stars Idina Menzel, Patrick Dempsey, and James Marsden return from the original but have little more than bit parts.  It is kind of fun watching for little visual homages to past Disney features. Does Disney do this in all its movies, and I just haven’t noticed?

Turning Red

A new review from The Movie Snob.

Turning Red  (D).  This new animated offering from Disney/Pixar demonstrates that it is unsafe to assume that every new animated offering from Disney/Pixar is appropriate for your six-year-old child.  Parents!  Always always always do your homework before watching! Anyhoo, this is the story of Meilin, an overachieving 13-year-old girl living in Toronto’s Chinatown. Growing up is hard enough, but then Meilin is struck by a family curse—when she gets excited, she suddenly morphs into a very large red panda! (Which is not a panda at all, but a mammal more closely related to weasels, raccoons, and skunks.) Also, she and her three best pals are huge fans of a boy band and are struggling to raise the money for concert tickets without Meilin’s ultra-strict mother finding out about it. Anyhoo, this movie is not for little kids; girls’ puberty issues are prominent, so parental discretion is a must!  Also, the movie looks too kindly on disobedience to one’s parents.  All in all, I didn’t like it.

The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl

The Movie Snob haz sadz.

The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl  (F). Here’s another one from Robert Rodriguez, director of Spy Kids. Since Spy Kids was not very good, I expected this one to be bad, and my expectations were more than satisfied.  It’s an uninspired story about a lonely boy named Max (Cayden Boyd, X-Men: The Last Stand) who keeps a “dream journal” in lieu of having friends. He dreams up two pint-sized superheroes, the titular Sharkboy and Lavagirl, and then they suddenly show up and whisk him off to their home planet for some singularly unmagical adventures. At least the thing is only 93 minutes long. David Arquette (Scream) and Kristen Davis (Journey 2: The Mysterious Island) have tiny parts as Max’s squabbling parents. George Lopez (Henry Poole Is Here) doubles as Max’s teacher and as a villain on Planet Drool, which seemed unfair because he seemed like a decent enough teacher. Oh, and a very young Taylor Lautner (Twilight) stars as Sharkboy.

Frozen: The Musical

The Movie Snob leaves the house for a touring Broadway show.

Frozen: The Musical.  A week ago I don’t think I was even aware that there was a Broadway musical based on the Disney movie Frozen, but lo, last night I made the trek down to Fair Park’s Music Hall and saw it.  My reaction:  It’s fine. The children in attendance, including my six-year-old, seemed to really enjoy it.  But was it anything special?  I didn’t really think so.  There are lots of new songs, but none of them made much of an impression on me—not even the one written for Oaken, the guy who runs the snowbound shop where Anna and Christof try to shop for supplies.  (And to say that that song isn’t memorable is pretty remarkable, given that it features a bunch of dancers who I think are supposedly in the buff because they just emerged from a sauna. They’re all wielding leafy branches as fig leaves, and it struck me as comical rather than bawdy.)  And they cut one of the better songs from the movie, namely Anna and Elsa’s duet in Elsa’s ice castle during which Elsa learns she has inadvertently frozen the whole world.  On the other hand, the sets and special effects were pretty impressive, and the vocal talent was good.  Sven the reindeer was entertainingly animated.  Olaf was brought to life by making him a large puppet with his puppeteer standing right behind him, but I didn’t think it was too obtrusive.  Anyhoo, I thought the stage version of Beauty and the Beast was quite a bit better, but this one is fine for an evening’s entertainment.

Over the Moon

Another review from The Movie Snob.

Over the Moon (C). Here’s another Netflix production, although this one apparently got a limited theatrical release in the USA back in October 2020. Like Wish Dragon, it is set in modern-day China. A 13-year-old girl named Fei Fei is still trying to come to terms with her mother’s death a few years earlier when her world is rocked by the news that her father is contemplating remarriage. (The new woman seems perfectly nice, but she has an 8-year-old son who’s more than a little annoying.) Fei Fei addresses this crisis in the only logical way: she builds a rocket ship to the Moon, where she plans to find the legendary goddess who lives there pining for her own lost love, get a selfie with her, and thus prove to her dad that he should stay alone forever. The part of the movie set on the Moon is garish and not especially involving. It’s a musical, but the songs aren’t memorable. The omnipresent Ken Jeong (TV’s Masked Singer and I Can See Your Voice) voices an annoying Moon creature who becomes Fei Fei’s sidekick. Anyhoo, it’s an OK way to spend 90 minutes with your kids, as long as they can handle the film’s strong focus on grief.

Wish Dragon

The Movie Review tackles a fairly recent movie.

Wish Dragon (B). I have an experiment for you to try at home. First, make a wish for a remake of the Disney classic Aladdin set in modern-day China. Next, pull up this 2021 direct-to-Netflix movie. Amazing! It’s like your wish came true! This is actually a pretty good little movie, and if you liked Aladdin I’m confident you’ll like this one. A little boy and girl meet in a poor neighborhood and swear eternal friendship. But then the girl moves away to a rich neighborhood, and years later she has become a famous model. The boy is still living in the old neighborhood, but he dreams of reconnecting with the girl. Enter a magic lamp teapot, complete with a wish dragon inside. The characters are likeable, and the story veers away from Aladdin just enough to keep things interesting. The Movie Snob says check it out!

Encanto

The Movie Snob finally posts this review he wrote a long time ago.

Encanto  (C).  Disney’s 60th animated feature film has gotten a lot of good-to-great reviews according to Metacritic.com, but I just couldn’t get into it.  Maybe I was prejudiced by the one negative review I read before seeing it.  Anyhoo, the movie is visually impressive, and the songs (by Lin-Manuel Miranda (Moana), no less) are generally pleasant, so I guess the story is the weak point.  Deep in the Colombian mountains is a village where the preeminent residents are the members of the Madrigal family, and they are preeminent because each of them has a magical power.  Well, except for Mirabel, an awkward teenager (or twentysomething?) who inexplicably has no magical gift.  (Maybe her nerdy glasses interfere with the magic’s frequency?)  But then she has a vision suggesting that the family is about to lose its magic, and, when her stern abuela refuses to listen to her warnings, Mirabel (voice of Stephanie Beatriz, In the Heights) must figure out what’s going on by herself.  Her quest is just not that interesting, and I didn’t quite follow all of it.  There’s a lot of exposition in the songs, but they are often sung too fast to be understood. (Since I wrote this review, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” has become a smash hit. It is awfully catchy.)  The animation is pretty, and despite the PG rating I didn’t see anything inappropriate for the little ones.  So if you’re strapped for something to watch, you could certainly do worse than this one.

Clifford the Big Red Dog

A new review from The Movie Snob.

Clifford the Big Red Dog  (C-).  It’s hard to make a family-friendly movie that parents can enjoy rather than merely tolerate, and I think it’s even harder for live-action movies than animated movies.  This recent release missed the mark, in my humble estimation.  The premise is cute enough: an unhappy 12-year-old girl (Darby Camp, The Christmas Chronicles) comes into possession of a cute puppy that is deeply and inexplicably red.  Then, by some stroke of magic, the puppy, dubbed Clifford, grows overnight to roughly the size of a horse. Adventures ensue, especially once a nefarious bio-tech company finds out about Clifford’s existence.  The movie is generally fine for all ages, but there is a jarring and perhaps inappropriate sequence in which the heroine and her hapless uncle are led to believe that a minor but significant character has died.  That scene aside, the dialogue is not particularly clever, nor are the adventures terribly interesting.  Famous faces pop up in minor roles, such as David Alan Grier (The Big Sick) as a grouchy building superintendent, Rosie Perez (White Men Can’t Jump) as a receptionist, and the inestimable John Cleese (Monty Python and the Holy Grail) as the mysterious impresario of a peculiar pet emporium.

My Little Pony: A New Generation

The Movie Snob reviews an instant classic.

My Little Pony: A New Generation (B). Hey, I always thought these productions were called “My Little Ponies.” You learn something new every day. Anyway, I’m no “brony,” but my five-year-old daughter loves these shows, and they are a cut above some of the childish dreck out there. (I’m looking at you, Polly Pocket.) According to the internets, this one was supposed to get a theatrical release, but COVID changed the plans and Netflix bought it up for its platform. This show is set long after the events depicted in the series that features Applejack, Rarity, and that gang. Magic has disappeared from the land of Equestria, and earth ponies, unicorns, and pegasi have become estranged from each other. But one earth pony named Sunny (voice of Vanessa Hudgens, High School Musical 3) thinks this state of affairs is based on a big mistake, and after a unicorn named Izzy (voice of Kimiko Glenn, Nerve) wanders into town, she and Sunny set off on a quest to set things right. Some notable names show up in the credits, like James Marsden (Enchanted), Sofia Carson (Descendants), Ken Jeong (TV’s Community), and Michael McKean (This Is Spinal Tap). IMDB.com says it’s rated PG, but I don’t see why it didn’t get a G rating; it seemed perfectly family friendly.

The Complete Critical Assembly (book review)

A book review from the pen of The Movie Snob.

The Complete Critical Assembly, by David Langford (2002).  This one is really off the beaten path.  Langford is a writer of both fiction and nonfiction.  From 1983 to 1991, he wrote short columns reviewing science fiction and fantasy books for magazines including White Dwarf, a British magazine about role-playing games.  I read about him somewhere, and then I read a glowing recommendation of this collection of all of his columns.  Because 1983-1991 roughly matched my period of interest in sci-fi and fantasy novels, I searched the book out.  And, lo, I really enjoyed it.  Langford is an amusing writer, and sure enough he commented on some books and authors I remember from my youth.  For example, he has some unkind but funny words for the Thomas Covenant series of books by Stephen R. Donaldson and likewise the Well World books by Jack Chalker.  Other books he reminded me that I read back in the day: Harry Harrison’s East of Eden, in which dinosaurs evolved into intelligent lizard-people, Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality series, the alien-invasion novel Footfall, and Code of the Lifemaker, in which humans discover alien robots “living” on Saturn’s moon Titan, in an oddly medieval society.

Luca

High praise from The Movie Snob.

Luca (A-).  This 2021 Pixar release grew on me as I saw it over and over again (thanks to my five-year-old daughter), and now I can say that I really love it.  The setting is a picturesque Italian seaside town, circa 1960.  There, over one bucolic summer, three ragamuffin kids meet, become fast friends, and set out to defeat the town bully in the town’s annual three-stage race (swimming, pasta eating, and bicycling).  But there’s a twist—two of the kids are actually aquatic humanoids from under the sea.  They look human when they’re dry, but they turn into colorful, scaly fish-people if they get wet.  One of the two fish-people children is Luca, a gentle boy with a vivid imagination, an overprotective mother (voice of Maya Rudolf, The Way Way Back), and a yearning to explore the wonders above the surface.  Sacha Baron Cohen (Hugo) steals the show as the voice of Luca’s weird Uncle Ugo, who lives in the pitch-dark depths of the sea.  There’s a bonus scene after the credits, too.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

The Move Snob takes in a classic.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs  (B).  Over the years, I’ve seen bits and pieces of this Disney classic, but this is the first time I can remember watching it from beginning to end.  The plot is simplicity itself—the Evil Queen is homicidally envious of Snow White’s beauty, Snow White flees into a forest and finds sanctuary with seven hobbit-sized dwarfs, the Evil Queen serves up a poison apple, true love’s kiss comes along, and happily ever after.  No backstories, no deeper character motivations, just a handful of infectious tunes, especially “Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go.”  It’s hard to compare a movie like this to modern animated films like Beauty and the Beast or Soul, so I’ll just say it is cute and worth the small investment of time (83 minutes) if you’ve never seen it.

The Wizard of Oz

From The Movie Snob.

The Wizard of Oz (A). When I was kid back in the 70s, TV showings of this 1939 classic were a big event. When we recently tried it out on our five-year-old daughter, it had probably been decades since the last time I had seen it. Of course it holds up great, and only the scene in which the flying monkeys attack our heroes as they approach the Wicked Witch’s castle really frightened our daughter. One thing I don’t think I ever noticed before–in the opening Kansas scene, we find out that the awful neighbor lady, Miss Gulch (Margaret Hamilton, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer), has gotten some sort of court order or something for Toto to be confiscated and destroyed! That loose end isn’t tied up at all at the end of the movie, but I’m sure the Gales successfully appealed that order, right?

The Book of Life

New review from The Movie Snob.

The Book of Life  (C).  It is easy to confuse this 2014 animated feature with Pixar’s 2017 release Coco—in fact, The Borg Queen thought we were putting Coco on when we dialed up The Book of Life.  Both movies center on the Day of the Dead and feature a protagonist who would rather be a musician than follow the career path that tradition has laid out for him.  But The Book of Life has a conventional love story—in a Mexican village, two boys grow up in love with their playmate Maria (voice of Zoe Saldana, Star Trek Beyond). Two manifestations of Death make a wager on which boy the girl will marry when they all grow up.  There’s also a life-spirit called the Candle Maker (voice of Ice Cube, 21 Jump Street), who sounds like the Genie from Aladdin and is both amusing and tonally out of place.  And there’s a terrifying bandit who is seeking a medallion that confers everlasting life on its bearer.  And did I mention that Placido Domingo provides the voice for a deceased bullfighter who loved opera?  There’s a lot packed in here, and lots more stars provide vocal talent (e.g., Channing Tatum, Hail, Caesar!; Diego Luna, Rogue One).  But I found the movie merely average.

P.S. Wow. I actually saw this movie back in 2014 and totally forgot about it. Apparently I liked it more then than I do now, according to my review. Go figure!

Trolls

A new review from The Movie Snob.

Trolls (C). This animated feature came highly recommended by The Borg Queen, and I did get a couple of chuckles out of it, but on the whole I thought it was just OK. In this fantasy world, trolls are these happy little creatures reminiscent of smurfs, but they’re multicolored (painfully so) and more into glitzy parties and elaborate dance numbers set to pop tunes (like Earth Wind and Fire’s irresistible “September”). Instead of Gargamel, we have a race of ugly beings called Bergens (who actually look like trolls) who want to catch and eat the trolls. Yikes! When a Bergen finds the trolls’ secret village and captures some of the delicious little guys, it’s up to trolls Princess Poppy (voice of Anna Kendrick, The Last Five Years) and gloomy Branch (voice of Justin Timberlake, Trouble With the Curve) to go to the Bergen town and save their friends. Lots of vocal talent turned out for this one, including Zooey Deschanel (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) and John Cleese (Monty Python and the Holy Grail), but I still found it pretty meh.

A Dream of Christmas

The Movie Snob takes in more holiday cheer.

A Dream of Christmas (B+).  This 2016 Hallmark Christmas movie hits all the right notes.  Our cute heroine is Penny, an advertising copywriter who keeps getting passed over for a promotion.  (Actress Nikki Deloach, The House Bunny, looks like a young Erin Gray, which doesn’t hurt.)  She’s also vaguely unhappy with her husband, a traveling nature photographer who looks like a knock-off Eric Bana.  So when she wishes out loud that she hadn’t gotten married, an angel (?) hears her and grants her wish.  Suddenly she’s a senior VP at her ad agency, drives a cherry-red sports car, and is blissfully unmarried, having never met the man she was married to in her previous life.  (In a nice twist, her previously married-with-kids sister is also now single—because Penny and her husband introduced the sister to her husband.)  Three guesses whether Penny turns out to be happier in her new life.  To complete the package, the movie delivers both a musical montage and a faded star in a supporting role—Cindy Williams from TV’s Laverne & Shirley as the Christmas angel! Set your DVR, folks!