Double Feature: Let It Snow (2019) & Holiday Joy (2016)

Christmas is less than two weeks away and we’re working hard on these holiday viewings.  Netflix does have a nice selection of new movies and some that aren’t as new but still new additions.

Here we go!

Let It Snow (2019)

Director: Luke Snellin

Cast: Isabela Merced, Shameik Moore, Odeya Rush, Liv Hewson, Mitchell Hope, Kiernan Shipka, Matthew Noszka, Jacob Batalon, Miles Robbins, Joan Cusack, Anna Akana

In a small town on Christmas Eve, a snowstorm brings together a group of young people. – IMDB

Based on the novel of the same name with 3 stories by 3 authors (which I haven’t read), Let It Snow is a surprisingly fun little film intertwining the three stories together to make one movie. Its style is in the style of Love Actually. It doesn’t land quite as well as Love Actually does but the three stories depending on which one you like more works more or less in the context of the story. Its main groupings goes to the childhood friends Angie “The Duke” (Kiernan Shipka) and Tobin (Mitchell Hope) and JP (Matthew Noszka); Dorrie (Liv Hewson), her best friend Addie (Odeya Rush) and Dorrie’s crush Kerry (Anna Akana); and lastly, Julie (Isabela Merced, previously known as Isabela Moner) and Stuart (Shameik Moore). All of these characters eventually end up, along with some friends and other supporting characters end up because of being snowed in during Christmas Eve at this local restaurant called Waffle Town.

Let It Snow is rather basic and simple and yet with the snowscape background and its interesting characters and stories about different types of friendships and relationships and a variety of different issues, these characters all end up having a Christmas Eve that becomes rather memorable and changes some of their things in life as they figure out how to be honest to themselves about their feelings and their future. It has the rather feel good elements present that makes it a decent watch. Is it something that is spectacular or very stand-out as a holiday film? Probably not. But to satisfy a simple little holiday watch, this one does deserve a chance. And that’s coming from myself who isn’t really much of a John Green fan (which explain why his segment of relationship is the one I liked the least) whereas my fave with genuinely fun moments although a few wooden acting moments between Julie and Stuart however the story itself is fairly charming.

Kiernan Shipka has definitely found herself an actress with a few Netflix films at this point. She does have quite a nice fun element to her characters. At the same time, the start of this one that plays a rather funky character, the Tin Foil Woman and the narrator is Joan Cusack who while a little odd somehow has this glue effect to the three stories.

Holiday Joy (2016)

Director: Kirk D’Amico

Cast: Bailee Madison, Jennifer Robertson, Sandy Jobin-Bevans, French Stewart, Ethan Pugiotto, Luke Bilyk, Natalie Ganzhorn, Darren Eisnor, Kolton Stewart, Jeni Ross

A shy high school student’s Christmas wish comes true only it isn’t exactly as wonderful as she’d hoped. – IMDB

Take a little of changing identities and the holidays and we have this film Holiday Joy where Bailee Madison’s character Joy becomes a member of the next door neighbor’s  family, a wish that she has of breaking away from her lacking family. The grass is greener on the other side is definitely used here as comparison and literally but it also gives the valuable lesson that what you see on the surface of the beautiful appearances sometimes aren’t really as you expected. The whole reality vs. expectations is the main basis as everything that Joy believes is better all turns out to be very much the opposite. It also emphasizes on everyone’s part having a crucial effect despite her feeling of insignificance and such. Holiday Joy is more about the message it carries but has a rather lacking execution with some questionable acting and some plot points that might not make a ton of sense as with such plots that bring in the whole identity change and incoherent things that just leaves it one that shouldn’t really be questioned to begin with.

Holiday Joy is a rather simple sort of story. Its not exactly a Christmas story but is set during the holiday season. There’s some nice elements of using “change” as its main focus and then takes a fun little play on how the accident that makes Joy’s reality change also eventually finds her figuring out how to change it back but not really at the same time. Its a nice little change on the usual formula. Its not an outstanding movie but for people okay with some simple and straight-forward type of TV movie, its an alright choice. For myself, I do enjoy Baileee Madison (mostly when she was in younger roles) so it had an appeal for me but a lot of performances here left a little bit to be desired.

That’s it for this double feature!
Have you seen these two films? What are your thoughts?

My Weekly Adventures: Announcement Time!

Hey! A late post going up today! I had to insist on this going up today because I do have an announcement here, which if you are familiar here, you’ll have an idea of what happens in February.

Life’s pretty routine when it comes to the beginning of the year. January is a crazy month in general so I don’t have as much time to do a lot of stuff outside of work and home. I also have some personal stuff that’s been lingering in the background that I have to settle (well…follow-up at this point). Either way, enough of this serious stuff but not a whole lot to talk about in this weekly adventures.

Snow Storm

Winter took a while to get here but it finally did. We got a snow day of maybe 20cm or something. I don’t remember anymore but then it turned around a few days after with some lovely ice rain and such turn it into a slippery ice rink and then massive puddles because the city didn’t get the snow cleared fast enough.

View this post on Instagram

Well. Thats nice. After conquering skating rink (aka icy roads), we head for a few lakes (giant deep puddles of mush and water). It is an adventure to a bus stop this morning. Fellow montrealers and others in surrounding area, be safe on the roads today if you have to go. #montreal #suburbs #icyroads #badroadconditions #giantpuddles

A post shared by Kim (@tranquildreams) on Jan 24, 2019 at 4:59am PST

Ultimate 2000s Blogathon

So, we’ve been attacking everyone with announcements and reminders but I’d like to share for anyone who is interested to share their fave 2000s film in a form of review (or some other format that we can discuss). You can find all the details HERE.

Yokato Yokabai

View this post on Instagram

Not even a snowstorm can stop us from going to getting a nice bowl of #ramen at @yokatoyokabai . #food #mtl #montreal #japaneseramen #comfortfood #warmbowlofgoodness #delicious #porkbelly #lotusroot

A post shared by Kim (@tranquildreams) on Jan 20, 2019 at 1:11pm PST

As I mention the snow storm above, the crazy people in us decided to go get ramen as per our last year’s journey with my good friend. This adventure took us to another ramen place which we’re having debates whether we like it between than the other place. I think this place is better because I like the sides. Of course, this also sparked my first time pushing a car because it got stuck. Luckily, my husband and I had a passerby that hopped in to help us both push which was the extra strength that we needed to get out. All around a memorable day, I’d say.

Montreal DemoNight 2019

A few nights ago was Montreal DemoNight 2019. I was swamped with work and overtiming like a crazy person but luckily they did stream it so I was still able to watch it. There are quite a few games that look incredibly interesting. I don’t have much to talk about right now but I’ll leave it for the recap. I’m usually more efficient but the recap will be out some time over the weekend over on the Game Warp blog.

Announcement: Valentine’s Marathon

And we’re here again. Valentine’s Marathon starts tomorrow! This time I’m going to be a bit more ambitious and do a little Netflix Alphabet Valentine’s Marathon in the form of double features. I couldn’t think about a feature franchise (since I didn’t finish last year’s) and I wanted to get through my neverending Netflix list so this seems like a super awesome idea. If things go well, I’ll get double features everyday from Feb 1st to 14 but lets be realistic that it won’t happen whether its not being about to catch up with watching movies that fast or writing up fast enough while having other stuff going on on the blog since I won’t just do movies, of course. So we’ll see how things go.

As this post goes up, I’ve already watched A-D films so hey, who knows, right? 😉

Cute Kitty Pic

That’s all for this Weekly Adventures!
Hopefully next time, there will be more to talk about!

The Progression of the Ongoing Snowstorm…

Today, I feel a need to take a slight detour from normal programming to show you all the monster snowstorm that we haven’t seen in quite a while. Talk about winter going out in full-on style.

Here’s last evening when I left work. Thanks to changing our clocks the weekend before, there is still light.

Here’s when I finally made it back near my place.

Last night we shoveled the driveway once and I didn’t capture any of it. But this is what we woke up to…and theres my husband shoveling and you can’t see but our darling neighbor eventually lent us his snowblower to get rid of the few feet of snow we had.

And now..back to that (almost) same shot when I left work but this morning getting back to the office…

The storm is still going on right now so I’m not exactly sure when it is supposed to stop. I heard it should some time today.

Were you hit with this storm?

Christmas Lights, Hangouts with Friends, and Movies!

This weekend has been crazy with horrible snow and ice and all sorts of crazy precipitation.  I spent a good part of it shoveling and sitting at home catching up a lot of stuff. Thats actually a pretty good thing, except the shoveling part since I like fluffy snow but technically I was just picking up ice pellets and it was crazy heavy.

Now that I’ve had my rant on the weather.  Friday night was super awesome.

You know that crazy person that walks in a crazy snow storm and then pulls out their camera to take pictures, yeah, that was me! I have to revisit for a few shots in Old Montreal but in front of the Notre Dame Church it had some super nice lights.

Lights outside Notre Dame Church

Outside Notre Dame Church

That snow in that area was so high.  I almost fell flat on my face walking across there to continue on my path to meet up with my friends. The night out with friends is always fun.  We went to Les 3 Brasseurs (me and my best friend’s favorite hangout spot) for dinner. We all had steaks.

Steak at Les 3 Brasseurs

It has some fried onions and sweet potato fries and cooked vegetables as sides.  All very delicious! I had  craving for beef so that pretty much took care of that.  Afterwards, we headed to play some Glow in the Dark mini-putt at this joint that opened up their branch in downtown called Putting Edge.

 

Going into Putting Edge

 

One of the ending parts. Very cool! 🙂

You see the shadows of my friends at the far end if you look really hard. I was the last person since I was responsible for the scores.  I was doing so well in the beginning and then ended up losing.  I was never very good at this but hey, it was super fun and thats what counts! 🙂

After that, we ran off to catch a late night movie: THOR THE DARK WORLD in 3D! Yay! The review for that will be going up tomorrow. But at the theatres, we had a bit of time before the movie so we played a game of air hockey and fooled around with the movie promotional panels there.

First for Captain America…

My best friend and I

And then, right next to it was Rio 2! I never saw the first one but I was in the mood to be silly and my best friend joined me also 🙂

Hilarious stuff, right? I was out pretty late.

Saturday was a day with one of my good friends as well.  He needed to wrap up his Christmas shopping and I decided to tag along. We went for a nice brunch at Allo Mon Coco in Quartier Dix30.

His meal: Weekend Special Egg Benedict

My meal: 2 eggs with bacon and sausages!

Super delicious! Was great! 🙂

Despite walking in the on and off ice pellets falling from the sky, I stopped and took some shots of Christmas decorations.

Christmas Tree in Square Dix30

 

 

Around the Christmas tree in Square Dix30

Sunday was a lot more calm as I was mostly trapped at home from all the ice pellets and the snow truck passed by two times and I wanted to punch them because I couldn’t shovel fast enough.  It took me two separate times: the first about 20 minutes and then after that, an hour and a half or so to wrap up everything.  I had already shoveled another 20 minutes the day before probably on Saturday after the shopping.  Winter just started and if ice pellets are whats happening, I’m already fed up.  Any volunteers?

Either way, we celebrate the Lunar Calendar’s celebration of Winter for dinner tonight and my mom whipped up a simple and delicious meal.

My mom is THE best cook in my life! 🙂 She’s just awesome! If I could acquire a fraction of her cooking skills, I’d be set.

This weekend, I also managed to bake three different treats, it’ll be up very soon, so keep your eyes out for it! 🙂 I just have one more thing I’d like to do, then it’ll be pretty cool.

I’m already late with my weekend personal post so I’ll end it here!

Hope you had lots of fun this weekend!

I’m looking forward to my time off very soon to catch up on TV series, 2013 movies and maybe more baking, or and I have a specific sort of movie I need to watch…its just so much more fun to watch Christmas movies..haha!

Here’s a cat picture of my darling cat who is using her way to move me from my chair so she can sleep on it last night (and every other night as well).

Don’t we just love cats? Talking about that, its bedtime for me!

Good night/evening/morning to all of you, wherever you are! 🙂

Winter is Here with Icy Roads, Lots of Snow and Parties!

My fellow friends and bloggers, this week, you know winter is here. Why?

Well, after the mild weekend passed, it came back on Monday with decreasing temperatures all the way to Thursday and what does that bring? My most hated part of winter: ICE.

Because you know, I bought some kickass snow boots last year and as deep as those groves under the boots are, it does not grip on ice.  So just my luck that the first ice we get, I add on my many injuries this year and my body goes all creative and I slip walking to the bus stop on Tuesday morning because there was a bus coming and I stepped on the foot of a driveway. Which begs the question of how the F did they get out of their house without falling? Excuse my anger..moving on, while most times I land on my very well-padded butt or even on my hand, I landed on my knee.  Bone to cement, my friends, hurt a lot and let me tell you, walking this week was pretty painful and the bruise is only looking worse. To spare you looking at it, I pretty much have half a purple knee right now.  Not pleasant!

Moving onto happier things: That same night, I went back to the arts and crafts show with my coworker and bought a little something as a gift to my boyfriend and me.  I’ve been doing this a lot where its planning for the future.  I love this!

Mail/key holder that you can make notes on top

There was another one with a mirror and ones with candles.  All very awesome but I only have limited funds and for $45+tax, this was an alright deal and its useful 🙂

Suffice to say though, I was pretty happy when the weekend came around because it was more of a relaxing time.  I finally had the chance to spend some time at home on Saturday morning. I took the liberty of snapping some pictures of two of my favorite things in the world!

My cat sitting/playing by the window among the plants

Christmas Cactus in full bloom 🙂

That night, I started the first night of the holidays although its not really to celebrate the actual holiday but for a going away party with a good friend.  He’s going off to follow his dreams and he reminds me every day that if we persevere and keep at our dreams, we’ll get there.  Giving it our best shot is what matters 🙂 I wish him the best in his future career and lots of success! The party was partially at dinner at a restaurant called Elixor located in the Laval area.

Caesar Salad –> My boyfriend’s entree

St. Louis Burger –> my boyfriend’s meal

Chicken and Ribs Combo–> my meal

Yeah yeah, my cheat day everybody consists of ribs. I was literally scared to look at my calorie count but at least I enjoyed it! Thats what matters 🙂 Great times with friends!

Yesterday evening also marked the first actual snowstorm which is still going, although slowing down now. We pretty much had no snow on the ground yesterday, maybe 1cm, on the grassy area (if even that much).  I geared up in my snow pants! Thank you mom for the foresight 🙂

Sweater and Snow Pants ready for shovelling!

And lets open the door and check out the damage! VOILA!

Winter Wonderland!

Oh yeah! Nice fluffy snow 🙂 May have taken an hour to shovel the whole driveway but I expect a second round when the plow goes by eventually but hey, its still quite pretty, don’t you think?

I know some of you got hit with this storm also.  Did it stop yet?

That pretty much wraps up my weekend.  I still have to get a few things done today so I’ll be running off but I have next week’s posts pretty much planned out, just have to write it all up 🙂

I always end with some vids so this was the 2013 Youtube Rewind video that I liked quite a bit since I recognized a few of the Youtubers and it was pretty cool!

They didn’t have embed enabled.  Moving on! How about some Ellen Show fun?

I’m just glad I don’t have to do anymore shopping as its pretty much done! Woohoo! Are you all set for Christmas?

How about a little Christmas joy in Disney style?

Okay, I know, just one more little share that I loved from Pinterest! Feel free to follow me there if you’d like 🙂

How was your weekend?

Hope you’re all having an awesome Sunday! 🙂

Snow Day in Montreal!

Last night before I went to bed, I already knew there would be a snowstorm.  Since the last two times we had that similar forecast, it was a false alarm, I didn’t really give much thought to it. This morning, I wake up.  You can feel the snow caked on the window and its hard to see clearly whats going on outside.  When I get out of bed and lean out, its white EVERYWHERE! The driveway is covered in centimetres and centimetres of snow.

However, I had chose today  (out of my optional days) to go to work, so I toughed it out and went.  I ended up waiting for the bus for 30 minutes and right when I was going to give up, it showed up.  In those 30 minutes though, you witness how low the visibility was or maybe just how clueless some people are.  There was a white car that decided to NOT put on their lights.  Hazardous and dangerous..definitely not a smart thing to do and I hope that car did not get in any accidents.  Two minutes later, there was a car in the opposite side of the road driving in the opposite direction of traffic…very scary stuff.  Not good either when the roads were barely cleared and it only had the minimum one lane available.

When I got out of the bus, I had to trudge through deep deep snow.  The sidewalks in my partially touristic area was not cleared. The snow storm raged on for another few hours and it had pretty much died down by the time I left work at 4:30pm.  The weather forecast just announced on the radio that we tallied up 40+ centimetres of snow.

Of course, we can’t go through this day without some good deeds.  Well, a partial good deed.  When I got home from work, the snow pile at the foot of my driveway was about more than half of my 5 foot 3 height.  When I was getting back into my coat to go out to snap some pictures (which will follow in a bit), I see a snow removal truck clearing my driveway.  Note that, I don’t pay for that service because I’m capable of doing it myself, just depends the duration, and it makes me exercise more during the holidays.  So, I thought some guy was crazy to do that and my neighbor pops out of the side of my driveway and says that he asked them to shovel my driveway also.  He even helped me shovel some of the bits and pieces away.  You have no idea how thankful I was because he had a point when he said that it would take me ALL NIGHT to clear it.

Whats funny is that I see people digging out their cars in Montreal.  At my place, we spent an hour digging out our trash can and recycle bin.  Thank you snow storm for the wonderful mother daughter shoveling bonding, collectively aiming to rescue the snow buried trash cans and recycle bins.  It was a lot of fun.

So you’ve read about my awesome Montreal snow day..it wouldn’t be my blog if I didn’t show you some pictures that I promised.

I’ve been wondering whether I should put this up.  Its something my boyfriend and I did on Christmas Day and it works perfectly with the pictures.

Enjoy! And please mute the background if you find that it bothers you..haha! Just don’t tell me.. we were just having fun with one of our favorite songs.  Its already taking a lot of courage to actually publish this.  Still, it goes well with the topic, right? Winter has definitely come raging in on us.

 

 

 

 

Let it Snow!

I’m trying to get through this Christmas marathon and the weather now is starting to cooperate. We had snow (and rain) coming into this week.  This evening and tomorrow should have actual workable fluffy snow, at least I keep hoping for that.  Its the main reason why the winter photography has slowed down.  However, last weekend, I did step outside without a coat at my front door and snapped a picture that I liked of the drifting snow.

I wish to have the feeling of fluffy snow covering every corner of the lawns and the pavement.  Opening my eyes to a brighter sky in the middle of the night just by its reflection is one of the best feelings of winter.

 

For now, I’ll take this! While I wait for the probably storm coming tonight.  Tomorrow its the Chinese Winter celebration, so with snow, it’ll just complement it.

Anyone out there have more luck with snowy weather? Do you like snow? Or maybe you prefer rain?