'T'is the season to be jolly and also to fill up a cold rainy December day with blandly entertaining TV movies with a festive theme.
These movies usually involve a combination of romance with a little seasonal fantasy and this one is no exception. A young single woman with a bent for science and particularly astronomy has seen her career working for a prestigious professor sidetracked in Washington. She reaches her nadir when learning the improbable news that the existence of a new comet she first sighted years ago has now been officially claimed by another country.
With Christmas approaching, she decides to get away from it all and returns to her hometown of Wellsboro. There she reconnects with her family and revisits her old school where she worked as a teacher and mourns the loss of her kindly science-professor mentor. There is also, naturally, love interest for her in the form of one that got away, an aspiring arrow-straight local politician and the other a fellow teacher with whom she always had a spiky, competitive relationship. Guess which one she ends up with?!
The movie turns on the town's Christmas carnival when she steps onto a magical carousel which magically appears and whisks her back five years to enable her to revisit the family, career and of course romantic decisions she made before which have left her unfulfilled in all these things in her current life.
Everywhere you look in the cast, diversity is apparent which is okay, if just a little over-obvious at times. The different narrative strands are neatly intertwined with the only surprise being that the biggest historical rewrite of all which you half-expect doesn't actually happen at all.
The little-known cast engage well with the somewhat saccharine material but there's plenty of snow and Christmas decorations around, even if unfortunately we also get a turgid, oversung Christmas ballad, but even that can't mar too much the pleasant, feelgood vibe of this slightly above-average movie of its type.
These movies usually involve a combination of romance with a little seasonal fantasy and this one is no exception. A young single woman with a bent for science and particularly astronomy has seen her career working for a prestigious professor sidetracked in Washington. She reaches her nadir when learning the improbable news that the existence of a new comet she first sighted years ago has now been officially claimed by another country.
With Christmas approaching, she decides to get away from it all and returns to her hometown of Wellsboro. There she reconnects with her family and revisits her old school where she worked as a teacher and mourns the loss of her kindly science-professor mentor. There is also, naturally, love interest for her in the form of one that got away, an aspiring arrow-straight local politician and the other a fellow teacher with whom she always had a spiky, competitive relationship. Guess which one she ends up with?!
The movie turns on the town's Christmas carnival when she steps onto a magical carousel which magically appears and whisks her back five years to enable her to revisit the family, career and of course romantic decisions she made before which have left her unfulfilled in all these things in her current life.
Everywhere you look in the cast, diversity is apparent which is okay, if just a little over-obvious at times. The different narrative strands are neatly intertwined with the only surprise being that the biggest historical rewrite of all which you half-expect doesn't actually happen at all.
The little-known cast engage well with the somewhat saccharine material but there's plenty of snow and Christmas decorations around, even if unfortunately we also get a turgid, oversung Christmas ballad, but even that can't mar too much the pleasant, feelgood vibe of this slightly above-average movie of its type.