Falling Like Snowflakes - Hallmark

Christmas in July is officially here and Hallmark Channel kicked it off this week with Falling Like Snowflakes. How was their first new Christmas movie of the year? Well, I’ve got a lot of things to talk about so let’s dive right in and get to it!

Hi, I’m Stephanie and this is the Magical Movie Club - a place to come and chat about Hallmark Christmas movies! On June 29th we watched Falling Like Snowflakes, starring Rebecca Dalton and Marcus Rosner.

I’ve only found a couple of other Hallmark movies that Rebecca Dalton has made, including Christmas by Design and The Dog Lover’s Guide to Dating. But I remember her best as the replacement who took over the role of Tara for a couple of seasons on the series, Good Witch.

Marcus Rosner, on the other hand, has been very busy with Hallmark lately, with movies like Flipping for Christmas, Love on the Right Course, and another one we’ll be watching later this month called An Ice Palace Romance. 

This past Saturday we watched Falling Like Snowflakes. The movie opens up in the snowy mountains. Teagan, played by Rebecca Dalton, is up there with her camera gear taking pictures of snowflakes captured on a black cloth. It turns out she’s quite the talented photographer and an expert on all the different types of snowflakes. Her work is currently being displayed at the Winslow Gallery run by her friend, Charlotte.

She’s hoping her work will do well at the Christmas Eve auction coming up, mentioning the money they bring in would help with fixing the heater at their local community center. Which is where she is teaching photography classes to kids over Christmas break.

One of those students is a girl named Julie. She’s waiting outside in the snow after class. And although we haven’t met him, yet, she mentions her dad is running late picking her up because he’s up on Crescent Pass, where it’s snowing pretty heavily, making sure the roads are clear. 

We find out that her dad is Noah, played by Marcus Rosner, and yes, he drives a big snow plow. Teagan drives Julie home and when she and Noah meet, there is obviously some awkwardness between them that Julie picks up on right away.

Now, I’m just throwing this out there, but with Julie being in Teagan’s class right now, how is it that she and Noah haven’t run into each other considering, Willow Creek doesn’t appear to be a very large town, and Noah, who left town to go away to college and start a career as a weatherman, came back to take over for Teagan’s father when he retired to run her family’s business? Or at the very least reached out to each other considering they said they grew up together? 

Oh, and on a completely different topic, I noticed later that evening when she was back home working on her computer, she has three Christmas trees all in the same room. Now I know my husband and I are a little crazy with how many trees we have in our house but we don’t have more than one tree in a room.

Anyway, as I often do, I digress! Actually, as we’re getting back to the movie now, it just so happens that Noah and Teagan run into each other in town the very next morning when he’s out getting coffee. Imagine that?!

Well, Teagan was on her way to meet with an art collector at the gallery who is fascinated with her photo collection of snowflakes. He tells her he will buy her entire entire collection at the auction if she can add one more photograph. We learn that apparently, she has captured 34 of the 35 known different types of snowflakes. The missing one is that of a rare 12-sided stellar dendrite. This one forms in extremely harsh weather conditions and is the most difficult to find. 

Oh, and this art collector tells her he will also make a donation to the community center to make all the needed repairs. But, Christmas Eve is less than one week away so she hasn’t much time. And that’s what this movie is all about!

It’s a fun movie. It’s a sweet movie. But as you can see so far there isn’t any life-changing moment, yet. Most Hallmark movies, the really good ones anyway, have something happen early on that forces one of the main characters to step out of their comfort zone. Often it’s losing a job or maybe ending a relationship. But as of right now Teagan is a photographer who loves capturing snowflakes and she’s been tasked with doing exactly that!

In the next scene we meet Suzanne. She’s another photographer who wants to meet with Charlotte about displaying her work at the auction as well. The initial conversation between these two was kind of forced, in my opinion. It didn’t feel natural to me that Charlotte would be telling Suzanne about Teagan off chasing snowflakes to complete her collection which will help make the auction a massive success. That didn’t seem appropriate to me when she was meeting her to view Suzanne’s work. 

I mean maybe this is a stretch, but think about it. If you were going on a job interview, would you want this potential employer to start the conversation by telling you how amazing the last candidate was, who was just interviewed, right before you showed up?

Well, that’s actually the only nice thing I’ll say about Suzanne because they did a wonderful job of making her not likable. You see, she wanted to submit the winning photograph of that snowflake herself! And she wormed her way onto Julie’s good side, you know, Noah’s daughter,  to get her to tell her as much as she knew about how Teagan takes those magnificent photos. She was really sleazy that way. And kudos to this actor for pulling it off as well as she did!  Whenever we saw her throughout the movie, she was desperately trying to either find that special snowflake or she was covertly trying to get Julie to spill more information about Teagan.

Well, Teagan meanwhile, was now on the side of the road up a mountain where it’s very cold and although there is snow everywhere, it’s not actually snowing at the moment. What does happen in this scene, though, is Noah drives up in his snow plow and Teagan flags him down. She was fishing for information about the weather conditions up at Crescent Pass, where he was just coming from. And, she wanted to ask for his help in navigating the storm so she could look for that rare snowflake.

Of course they went up the mountain together, and in his great big snow plow, too. He even asked Charlotte to watch Julie while he was gone.  See, that’s another reason why I’m surprised he and Teagan hadn’t run into each other before now.

As you can imagine, they reconnect and reminisce a bit while they’re on the road together. They pretty much tracked the storm and all sorts of things happened on their journey. On the pleasant side, they stayed the night at a cute little place up the mountain called the Evergreen Inn where they met Wayne, the man running the place, who was decked out fully in a Charles Dickens’ period costume ready for caroling later that night.

On the not so pleasant side, they slipped on some black ice and veered off the road and crashed the truck. The truck was actually okay, it was just stuck. They needed to find help to get it back on the road.

Now I thought things were really going to get interesting at this point, because at the very same time that they slid off the road, Suzanne was outside facing the rough weather still trying to find her own snowflake. I was convinced they were going to run into each other and maybe they would be forced to have to help each other, whether this meant physically helping to get out of the storm together, or maybe even working together to find the snowflake. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I really thought the story was building up to something big like that.

But nope. Wayne just showed up with the truck all ready to go, they didn’t even show us how he got it back on the road, and the next time we saw Suzanne she was at the gallery showing Charlotte her terrible photos. I mean she was a lackluster photographer at best. She turned out to be no real threat at all. And then her character just went away and became irrelevant. Nothing became of her. She and Teagan never even met or had a conversation together. So what was the whole point of having her in this movie?

Now there was one more tense moment in the movie when Teagan lost her camera up in the mountains, and the weather conditions were so bad she didn’t know where she was when she lost it. So, they couldn’t look for it and they just had to go back home. Again I thought this is where there’s going to be some clever, unexpected twist in this story now, right?

No. Apparently, we never got to see this, but early the next morning Noah went back and wow, would you look at that? He just happened to find her camera buried in the snow up the mountains and it was in perfect condition! Oh, and it turns out she did capture a photo of the amazingly rare snowflake.

Yeah, that was it. It was seriously anticlimactic. We never even got to see him go look for the camera. 

Now before I continue I will say there was some sweet chemistry between the two of them. Obviously they got their happy ending, and Julie was a great kid and very supportive.

But where was the character development? I’ve got to ask, were either Noah’s or Teagan’s lives transformed in any way by the events in this movie? I mean besides falling in love again. That was certainly good. But what else? What was the pivotal moment that caused their lives to veer in an unexpected direction? Did anyone make a life-altering decision or find their purpose in life as a result of taking a picture of that snowflake? No, nothing like that came even close to happening.

Let me give you an example of what I think would have made this story better. Suppose Noah hadn’t actually moved back to “Willow Creek” just yet. Maybe he and Julie could have been visiting his mother for Christmas, or something like that. And perhaps he could have been offered a prestigious job as a weatherman for a big-city news agency. And, at the same time, what if Teagan’s dad was still running his business but was looking to retire and had no one lined up to take over or to sell his business to. I feel all of this should have been part of the movie, not just a couple of sentences recapping something that had already happened. If they had, then Noah’s choosing to stay would now be a life-altering decision that he would make because of Teagan, not just because of other circumstances.

I know I’ve said it before, but my favorite Hallmark Christmas movies start with the characters at the very core. A fun story is absolutely necessary, too, but without entertaining characters whose lives are somehow transformed by their experiences, then at best all we have is a movie that follows a recipe or checks off a list of requirements to fill the two-hours. Well, more like an hour and 40 minutes without commercials.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened with this one. I feel like that’s two weeks in a row where Hallmark didn’t necessarily show us a bad movie, but again, this one just wasn’t anything special. And also like last week’s, will I remember this in a couple of years? Probably not.

I was not emotionally attached to anyone here. Which, now that I think about it, let me add to something I said a moment ago. My favorite Hallmark Christmas movies are the ones where I experience something special, or feel a connection with the characters. When it’s all over I want to remember how I felt for having seen it. And this time I felt like the ending was too abrupt and anticlimactic. And without any character development whatsoever, I’m giving this a 2 out of 5.

So how about you? Did you feel the same way, or was this enough of a story that you would watch it again? Please share your thoughts about it, too, in the comments below.

Well I think that wraps up my review of Falling Like Snowflakes. Which means next week we’ll be watching, not a new movie, but a special extended cut version of the ever-so-popular Three Wise Men and a Baby with Andrew Walker, Tyler Hynes and Paul Campbell. I won’t actually be on Twitter that night, which I’m a little disappointed about, but I’ve got other commitments that night. But no worries, I’ll have a lot to say about it right here on YouTube next week.

Until then, and as always, thank you so much for being here and being a part of the Magical Movie Club. We'll be back next week to chat more about our favorite magical Christmas movies!🎄

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