Holiday in handcuffs - 2007

Not bad. Very predictable and I didn't like the ending, but all the rest was nice and fun.
Trudie (Melissa Joan Hart) has a breakdown, frustrated painter who works as a waitress and gets dumped near Christmas and now she has nobody to introduce to her parents. She has to go and meet her family, to spend Christmas with them, and she's desperate for their approval, so she loses it and she kidnaps a man :-p David (Mario Lopez). She takes him to her family's place, an isolated cabin with no phones and no computers. Finally he discovers that her brother keeps a hidden phone and is willing to lend it to him (not suspecting a thing) so David calls his girlfriend explaining everything, telling her to call the police. After that is done with, he's much more relaxed because he thinks it'll end soon, so he plays the part, for fun. He understands now how she feels, and gets to know her and like her. During Christmas dinner her perfect family kind of breaks down: her parents have a big fight, her brother says he's left his perfect girlfriend because he's gay and her sister says she left school because she does not want to be a lawyer, she wants to open a gym instead! As if it wasn't enough the police arrive and reveal to them the truth: the man they know as Nick is actually David, and Trudie kidnapped him!
They are all arrested, but they are soon released because he won't press charges. He goes back to his engagement but his heart is not into it now because of course he thinks of Trudie now.
She reads of him in the papers (rich girlfriend..) and then she gets accepted in a gallery (well, one painting only, but still...).
Her family comes too, now happy because counseling works (really?? that easily?) and they finally talk to each other and she says what she really wants to tell them.
Of course it ends with the couple having their happy end, there was never any doubt that Trudie and David would fall for each other, that was obvious and expected, inevitable I'd say, but I didn't like at all the way it happened. I didn't like the obvious detail that he had bought her painting. They presented it like a romantic thing, personally I find it sad: nobody else liked it?
I understand it was the painting about their story, in a way, but had he chosen it in a gallery full of her works it would have been nice because it was about their night together (skating and talking..) but like this, the only one she had in the gallery, it's somehow different, as if nobody could want it unless trying to get to her.

-The skating scene was bizarre, it so obviously wasn't her, they should have masked it better, people have to believe, that's the magic of cinema! People should not point and ask 'who's that woman?', that's wrong. Still, the idea was nice.

The film was mostly nice and fun anyway, although basically the same plot (more or less) than her film "my fake fiancé", also with Melissa Joan Hart.


ITA un fidanzato per mamma e papà