So, fun fact about me: when I was growing up, my mom owned a Southwestern art gallery. Several times a year, we would drive down from Denver to Santa Fe or Albuquerque or Taos, filling the car with art until there was barely any room for the people. I once spent eight hours sharing a seatbelt with a three-foot tall Navajo Madonna statue. Those trips were the inspiration for Secretly Enchanted, my shifter romance set at a resort outside of Santa Fe. That's also why I excitedly texted my mom and sister when I discovered the Mario Lopez Lifetime movie Holiday in Santa Fe on Netflix.
Tony Ortega (Mario Lopez) runs Casa de Milagros, a family-owned store stocked entirely with Mexican-American inspired Christmas decorations. There are dancing cactuses, gourds painted red and green, and Santas in serapes. While the business is successful, times have been tough, especially since the death of the family matriarch, Milagro, who was also the driving force behind their artisanal, hand-crafted designs. Tony's father Jose (Efrain Figueroa) and his sister Maggie (Aimee Garcia) are opposed to the deal, but unless Maggie can overcome her imposter syndrome and take over the artistic arm of the business, there won't be any new designs to sell in the store. Tony takes a meeting with Belinda Sawyer (Emeraude Toubia), a high-powered exec for a greeting card company that wants to take over their charming little store and make it into a soulless corporate Christmas store. Sparks fly between Tony and Belinda, but will they be able to come to terms that let the business grow along with their love?
Is this movie a 90-minute commercial for Santa Fe? Yes. Did I enjoy it anyway? Also, yes. I have a Saved-by-the-Bell-shaped soft spot for Mario Lopez, and despite his inability to walk like a normal human on screen I still found him charming. Emeraude Toubia is very beautiful and very good at looking at Christmas decorations as if she's never seen a glass ball before. And the Santa Fe-ness of it all was very nostalgic. Tony shows Belinda around Santa Fe, hoping to charm her with brass burros (real), a Winter Festival (not real), and a ham toss (not real, completely inexplicable). They also do a Tik-Tok style dance with Tony's niece in the Plaza that made me physically cringe, but not as much as the multiple scenes filmed outside of Santa Fe's Drury Inn, where Belinda is staying. Tony and Belinda have a lot of conversations while walking very slowly beneath the hotel's sign.
One of the weird things about this movie is that it is a commercial for Santa Fe that doesn't include anything real about Santa Fe. As I mentioned, Tony takes Belinda to a festival that doesn't exist to do a ham toss which also doesn't exist. There are many famous and delicious restaurants in Santa Fe, but Tony takes Belinda to a place called Lupita's that--you guessed it--doesn't exist. Why not have them actually go to an actual famous restaurant in actual Santa Fe? Mario Lopez also says, "green chile" and "mole" with the emphasis of someone who has never said either of those words aloud. Emeraude Toubia, on the other hand, takes the opportunity to roll her r's every time a vaguely Hispanic word comes out of her mouth. The only person who seems comfortable blending the language is Tony's father, Efrain Figueroa, who says things like "Ho, ho, Jose!" and "On Dancer, on Blitzen, on Manuelito!"
The romance between Tony and Belinda is also a little weird. They start falling for each other after Belinda decides to wear her sexy red lipstick to dinner, which is the Lifetime-movie equivalent of wearing crotchless panties. But after that scorching hot choice, there's not a ton of steam between Tony and Belinda. When he kisses her for the first time, both the character and the actor seemed surprised that it was happening. Tony talks a lot about how family is the most important thing, but he's also totally cool with Belinda leaving her family behind at Christmas to close this deal that would ruin his family business. When Belinda's boss arrives like a businessman ex machina to save the day and rewards Belinda with a big promotion, they decide to try dating long-distance. Sure, Belinda's in Chicago and Tony's in Santa Fe and they are both about to get a lot busier, but it's only, what, a four-hour flight? If you go nonstop? More like eight if you have to connect? That's fine! No problem! These two kids are definitely gonna work it out!
But the weirdest thing by far about this movie is Maggie's art. Maggie is suffering artist's block after her mother's death and can't handle the pressure of the whole business on her shoulders. Her plotline takes over the last third of the movie, after all the juice has been squeezed out of Tony and Belinda's relationship. Maggie's mother made milagros, which, to be clear, are carved and painted pieces of wood that have a bunch of little silver charms nailed into them. You can find them all over the southwest; they were not invented or designed by the Ortega family. Yet, the whole Christmas/art world waits with bated breath for the release of the Ortega milagro each year. This year, Maggie is struggling to come up with a design until Belinda convinces her that she should incorporate her blown glass ornaments into the milagro. Oh yeah, the Ortegas have a full commercial glass-blowing operation, complete with 1200℉ furnaces and molten glass, in the back of their tiny Christmas ornament shop, don't worry about it. Anyway, Maggie goes into an artistic frenzy and creates one of the ugliest pieces of art I've ever seen.
It's not a milagro. There aren't even any little metal charms nailed to it, like legs and birds and crosses. It is, at best, a display for glass balls that was decorated by a talented child. And those glass balls also seem way too large for the area in which they are ensconced. Aimee Garcia, who I enjoyed in Christmas With You, is acting her ass off in this scene pretending like she knows what she's doing. At one point, she's painting her heart out, in the depths of grief about her mother and discovering her own voice as an artist, and she's doing all that with her face while her hands are using a paper towel as a palette for her paints. A paper towel! What is happening here!
Of course, everyone in the movie is stunned by her artistry and throws money at her to get their own ugly-ass not-milagro tree. Which is pretty close to the experience of buying and selling art, actually. Ugly things sometimes sell better than beautiful things, and all it takes is one rich guy to be like "that's art!" to make something art. My mom and I still disagree about what art is, but we do agree that thing is ugly as hell.
This was a great start to my holiday movie extravaganza. What do you want me to watch next? Let me know!