"It's not about them - it's about you."
Hello everyone!
That, and I honestly just want to give my brain a rest every once in a while.
Especially with all the spectacular happenings on the shows still running at the moment!
We're headed into an actual drought soon when the summer shows end and the autumn ones won't even begin yet since who knows how they're going to shoot now, which means I'll have plenty of time to play catch-up.
But before I can play catch-up, I have to play 'find the movie'.
A Man for Every Month, to be precise.
Links to some previous Hallmark works can be found at the bottom of this page.
Now, as for the catch-up bit.
I'm the kind of person who will, if possible, hunt down a complete list of Hallmark releases for a given year, and some very generous soul (or many, more like) have made a Wikipedia page about that, which means I frequented it pretty often.
I usually pick the movies I'm going to watch based on the cast line-up, so when I saw one with Aaron Jakubenko playing the lead role, I was ALL for it.
Except ... I couldn't find it.
Billed as 'My Favourite Bachelor' for some reason I have yet to understand, the search gave me virtually zero results. It feels like someone at Hallmark tried shooting for a different title, but it never stuck, yet stayed on their list that way.
Oh, yeah, this isn't QUITE the Hallmark movie. It just aired on Hallmark, but was made by Pixl.
ANYWAY after doing a deep dive into Google and trying to find this thing, I unearthed the ACTUAL title and managed to get a view out of it.
So here we go!
Megan (Carlson Young) is a shy, quirky writer who works for an online magazine and generally writes blogs about pets and such - she dresses the part in items covered with animal print, and I mean dogs and cats on the shirts.
And then, with the arrival of a new video producer, Scott (Jakubenko), things suddenly change as Megan's work colleague pitches the idea of continuing with a blog the magazine had already done, Man for Every Month, only finding a girl who would actually go out with these guys who apply and they could video everything in a sort of vlogging series.
Naturally, Megan gets chosen, despite her protests that she really is NOT dating material.
Scott waves his hand and off we go, and since the movie is initially really confusing because we jump from Megan to a girl named Vanessa (Justene Alpert) to Megan's boss Brenda (Jolene Blalock), let's give Vanessa a shout-out here.
For most of the movie, our girl Vanessa, Megan's roommate, is on the hunt for a boyfriend, and she 'plays the game' aka she does everything that books about dating tell her to do, which is how she ends up giving Megan advice on the subject.
Naturally, Megan being Megan and her quirky self, this fails miserably and people are literally beginning to despair when the idea is pitched that she's going to put on glasses with a hidden camera in them so Scott and the rest can see what's happening, and she'll also have an earpiece so Scott can walk her through whatever her date is doing.
This actually works out a whole lot better than I thought it would, given I was expecting something to spontaneously combust with how clumsy Megan is.
Things get better, in a way, when her date Jack shows up and they kind of click, although what the women see as clicking, Scott sees as something else, being the only one in the room to read Jack's intentions correctly - even to the rather disastrous results it brings to his own friendship with Megan.
See, while Megan obviously always thought Scott was cute (this kind of did not help their first meeting where he didn't see her coming and poured coffee all over her shirt), Scott needed to spend some time with her and get to know her through the act of trying to help her with this dating scheme. And you can clearly see he's doing his best because he WANTS her to succeed and WANTS her to be happy - while also throwing some tuck-your-hair-behind-your-ear kind of things that made me sit up and go MEGAN CAN YOU SEE THIS.
She could not.
And because for some reason the shy, quirky girl is also full of prejudice, she believes office gossip her friend delivers - that Scott's a player - over Scott himself, specifically during an argument they have when he tries to warn her that Jack isn't honest or sincere at all, he's only doing it as a publicity stunt for his own acting career. So after Megan snaps that she isn't taking notes from a womanizer anymore, Scott is hurt, and says so, which is a step-up from the usual norm in these movies, as he clearly explains that, yes, he dates, but so does everyone - so is Megan right now, and if something isn't clicking, he's upfront about it rather than leading people on.
He gets promoted and moves to a different floor so there's no more interaction with them anyway (especially not of the kind when he drops by her and Vanessa's place unannounced to see Megan in all her face masking glory), but Megan feels terrible (as she should!).
She also clocks in that Jack really isn't into her, specifically, during an office party when he reveals he was signed for a reality show and the two of them can keep on doing 'their thing' like before.
This shows Megan that Scott was actually the only one telling her the truth, since both her friend AND her boss made a mistake about Jack, and after a few morose vlogs she finally decides she knows what she has to do, and asks SCOTT out on a date during happy hour, live, on the vlog, explaining the things she realized.
Scott shows up (naturally, and besides the entire office building watched that vlog so him not showing would be public crucifixion anyway LOL), wearing THE GLASSES, which Megan doesn't even remotely clock into before she takes them off, angling them so they get both her and Scott in the frame as they kiss - and everyone watching the vlog cheers.
And what about Vanessa and Brenda, the other two side-characters with pretty prominent stories? Well, Brenda gets hounded most of the movie by a forty-something man who believes men like him (a little older, with some more experience) should also be allowed in the Man of the Month feature; the two of them end up going on a few dates and become a couple.
As for Vanessa, she actually crashes and burns when one of Megan's dates turns out to be a neurosurgeon whom Megan believes would be perfect for her roommate; but Shawn (Christian Ochoa) quickly sees through what she's doing and politely explains that he doesn't have time for games. This prompts Vanessa to stop trying with him and just become her natural self in their other interactions, which actually wins him over contrary to what she was doing before, because she shows him she's extremely witty, highly intelligent, hard-working and compassionate, and he eventually asks her out on a date (where they also laugh over the dating books she used for the majority of the movie).
So all's well that ends well, and this quirky movie is one that's pretty good to watch!
To be fair I wasn't as into Megan as I was into Vanessa, because I've seen so many movies where the heroine is this quirky klutz and the hottest guy always falls for her. But overall, it was a lovely friends-to-lovers kind of story and it was a relaxing way to spend the evening, especially laughing over some of the escapades these women got themselves into.
But it did resonate with me in terms of just how hard the dating game can be, and how difficult it is to weed the bad from the good, so in that sense it was also educational to watch what worked and what didn't.
All in all, a successful movie night, and a recommendation from me!
xx
*screencaps by me, video not mine
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