Whoopi Cheese In Your Stocking: Call Me Claus

A new development in my life is the weird amusement I’ve found from gooey holiday cinema. If there’s a lesson to be learned at the end, then by golly, I can’t imagine why it doesn’t fit the criteria for reviews on the Doll’s House!

Quick Plot: Little Lucy visits Santa on Christmas Eve in the 70s (not the miniseries The 70s, although that did have the same director) asking only that he brings home her father from Vietnam for the holidays. Despite the fact that her head illuminates the Santa hat with a foreshadowing magic, Lucy returns home to learn that pops has died overseas. 

Bah Humbug.

Flash forward a few decades to an adult Lucy, now played by Whoopi Goldberg like every character Whoopi Goldberg has ever played. Lucy works as a grumpy executive at a shopping network, the kind of late night TV crack that keeps stoners entertained and midwest housewives broke. With the arrival of December, Lucy has to hire a new Santa Claus to hawk red velvet lingerie, something that proves ridiculously difficult in LA, where apparently not a single actor exists that can even mildly deliver a ho ho ho. Thankfully for her, the big man himself (Nigel Hawthorne; yes, Nigel Hawthorne) has just arrived in town to start shopping for a new replacement.

See, in case you didn’t know, every 200 years, a new Santa is trained to take over the job of delivering gifts to Christian boys and girls. If this doesn’t happen, the North Pole melts and the world ends.

Hey, it’s a new theory of apocalypse!

Due to her earlier hat magic, Lucy is the prime candidate for job but this being a made-for-TV Christmas movie, there has to be a whole lot of anti-career woman propaganda to spout off first. Understandably embittered by Santa’s failure to, you know, not kill her dad, Lucy is resistant to take on the lifelong contract/enslavement. Thankfully for children everywhere--and apparently, THE PLANET--Lucy’s boss makes her realize that wanting to turn Shop-a-Lot into QVC is evil, evil, eeeeviiiiiiiiiiiiil.

And yes, every time you hear the words “Shop-a-Lot,” you have to first remember that no, they’re not talking about the Johnny Depp movie and yes, Shark Attack in the Mediterranean is back on Instant Watch and you should get to it.

So yes, Call Me Claus is no Shark Alarm, but it’s not an overly painful exercise in gingerbread syrup. Goldberg is working on autopilot, because when you’re Whoopi Goldberg filming a TNT Christmas movie, not much more is required. But hey, even lazy Goldberg has her charms, though some of the supporting cast’s mugging (Taylor Negron, you weren’t funny in Nothing But Trouble and that trend continues) and the script’s insistence on cramming in dated pop culture jokes certainly makes some parts grate. 

By some I mean most.

High Points

Some of the home shopping network humor packs some gentle punches

Low Points

It’s bad enough to cast Broadway dynamite Brian Stokes Mitchell in a non-singing role, but plain offensive when a film that stars a fantastic singer instead opts to use one of the worst covers of my favorite holiday song (Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas) instead of just forcing it into his contract to perform

Lessons Learned

James Brown is almost as good as Daddy

Hindu people don’t even celebrate Christmas

Goblins are what happens when gnomes and leprechauns get drunk on the beach at night. I guess trolls happen during the day?

The Winning Line

Allow me to set up:

After little Lucy’s trip to meet Santa Claus, her family returns home to find two U.S. soldiers waiting at the door. Anybody who’s ever seen any movie ever knows what that means. Lucy, of course, hasn’t seen any movie ever so when she asks her mother what the news is, the response follows:

“It’s Daddy. I’m afraid he really IS coming home for Christmas.”

Sass Factor
It's Whoopi Goldberg yo! Her very NAME is sassy.

Montage Mania
How else can we express Lucy's change of heart than with a montage that lingers on still photos and such?

Stocking Stuffer or Stuffed With Coal?

Call Me Claus is harmless holiday entertainment, which ultimately makes it fairly dull. As I said about the similarly innocuous Snowglobe, one could always do worse when it comes to pained Christmas cheer, but that doesn’t really mean there’s any reason to watch it. It’s there, on Instant Watch, and when you need your Goldberg fix or Bruce Vilanch cameo, you can queue it up without killing too many braincells. I’m not saying you SHOULD, but you know, if you do, that’s that.