I unfortunately missed the last viewing of the movie A Town Without Christmas today, so I was unable to get any screen caps. And apparently, the only thing about this movie that pictorially exists on the internets is this tiny picture of the two stars:

And also, the cover of the DVD, which is available in the Netherlands, in case you’re looking for a last minute xmas gift.

This movie is about this little boy named Chris who writes a pre-suicide note disguised as a letter to Santa describing how he will go into the woods on Christmas Eve and do what needs to be done if Santa doesn’t bring his mom and dad jobs for Christmas. And then some nosy parker at the post office opens his letter and turns it into a national tragedy/hunt for a suicidal nine-year-old.

Patricia Heaton is a reporter living in Seattle who, I guess, works for the equivalent of New York City’s Pix News. It’s cheap ass, is what I’m saying. She’s sent off to the little fishing town Chris lives in to cover the search for him, alive or dead, and ends up meeting this total weirdo in the train station who’s also headed to the fishing town.

This guy is some kind of failed writer who’s been trying unsuccessfully for, like, twenty years to get this memoir about his boyhood supernatural experience in the woods published. He’s like Joey Potter in that he doesn’t get that fiction writers don’t have to write stories entirely based upon real events from their lives. His story includes something about leaving his foster house on a cold Christmas Eve night to go out into the woods and find the door to the netherworld, and then falling asleep on the ground and almost freezing to death, until a magical lumberjack shows up to light a match – A match – which somehow warms him up enough to survive. So… It’s supposed to be a children’s book, btw, so his publisher is like, “PLEASE write a new story that’s not so creepy and mind-effing and depressing,” and the guy is all, “THIS is MY LIFE and it HAPPENED and it’s REAL!” because he just doesn’t get it. He doesn’t get it at all.

Anyway, did I mention he writes for a greeting card company? His poems include things along the lines of, “Welcome to middle age. Next stop: death.” So, he gets fired right before the Christmas party. Which he actually can’t believe, because he was just sent an anonymous package filled with Thomas Kincaid-esque paintings, and he would have thought that this find – these slightly depressing scenes of a run-down town at Christmas time – would be the next big thing in Christmas cards. The firing doesn’t bother him in the least, because he becomes obsessed with finding the artist, and ends up on his way to the old fishing town, on the same train as Patricia Heaton.

I mean, the rest of the story doesn’t make any sense, so it’s gonna be hard to explain. Like, PH and Dumb Guy go to the same B&B, which overbooked, and end up having to share this basement room together, and decide they’re into each other, but in this way where they’re sort of grossed out by the thought that they can’t do any better but willing to put up with it. And it turns out that the paintings weren’t just paintings but premonitions and every scene in the paintings eventually comes true, but they’re not freaked out by it AT ALL! And Peter Falk plays this angel, Max, who’s actually a real dick, who keeps popping up and acting like he’s a different person each time, and the Dumb Guy is always, twenty seconds in, all, “Waaaaaaaait a minute, you’re that guy from the motel/bar/painting/general store!!”

Anyway, it turns out that the kid who was gonna commit suicide didn’t exist, and was a creation of this little girl whose parents were planning on getting a divorce. PH and Dumb Guy find her out and tell her that she has to let everyone know so they stop wasting time looking for a dead boy’s body in the woods, and when she goes to tell her parents, her father’s like, “Honey, what are you trying to say?” and her mother screams, “Let me HANDLE THIS!!” Assholes. No wonder this kid is making up suicide notes, you know?

Anyway, the best part of the movie is about the last ten minutes. There was supposed to be a Christmas pageant for the town which the mayor (the little girl’s father) cut from the budget because there wasn’t enough money for all the lights to be lit up. So, his wife tells the townsfolk that they’ll have the Christmas pageant without the lights and then everybody wins. And then they hook up lights anyway, and light them all, like, a million of them, and then the whole town loses power, and the woman goes tearing outside accusing her husband of having deliberately cut off the town’s power on a cold Christmas Eve night because he was annoyed that the Christmas pageant was going on, and I told you this movie is confusing.

But, Dumb Guy? He goes to the general store where he encounters Max who tells him that he over-ordered candles and candle holders, like, thousands of them. Dumb Guy grabs a box – A box – goes to his car, and then drives into the crowd of ppl standing in the dark outside of the defunct Christmas pageant, beeping his horn, and screaming like a maniac, “GET BACK INSIDE! EVERYONE BACK INSIDE! I HAVE CANDLES!!!” The one box turns into fifty and everyone grabs a big taper and places a plastic drinking cup around it, which quickly melts and deforms around the candles. Then a bunch of carolers sing Deck the Halls, but half of the carolers just sing, seriously, just sing, “Don! Gay!”

And then Max shows up in the woods in a tuxedo, Dumb Guy and PH stop making out so Dumb Guy can go talk to him, he discovers that Max was the lumberjack, and Max intimates that he may or may not actually be Santa Claus (?) and then disappears in front of them and Patricia Heaton goes, “Hey, who was that?” Like, HOMEBOY JUST DISAPPEARED! Lunatics.

If someone in the Netherlands has the dvd, please send it to me. Thx and Merry Xmas.