How A Nanny For Christmas (2010) Can Be Considered Truly Bad

Around Christmas time, certain television channels throw their made-for-television movies onto the screen.  You see them all the time with formerly famous movie or television stars.  The stereotypes of these movies are that they are sappy, romantic, and tend to end happily.  One such movie is A Nanny For Christmas.

A Nanny For Christmas tells the story of an ad executive who loses her job and ends up being hired as a nanny.  But that’s not all.  She’s a nanny for the owner of an advertising agency.  That’s still not all.  This woman falls in love with someone that works at her boss’s advertising agency.  Oh, there’s still more.  Dean Cain is the owner of a chocolate company that the advertising agency is trying to land.  It’s oh so complicated.  In reality, it isn’t.

There are three types of bad movies.  There are the bad movies that are terrible yet still extremely enjoyable.  These are the “so bad it’s good” type of movies that were discussed when I watched Starcrash.  The second kind of bad movies are the horribly terrible movies that you hate.  This category is based primarily on your own opinion and feelings rather than the quality, though quality is still a major factor.  The third category is the one that A Nanny For Christmas falls into.  These movies are bad, but they simply exist.  There’s nothing that the viewer will remember once they watch another movie.

Lifetime channel makes a lot of movies that I think would fall into the third category.  I don’t know for sure since A Nanny For Christmas is the first of their movies that I have watched.  It does fall into this third category, however.  The acting is passable but nothing special.  The plot is watchable but doesn’t make me care at all.  There was nothing exceptional about this movie, but there was also nothing terrible.  To be honest, I kind of liked.  The problem is that, come next week, I won’t know what I liked.  This might be worse than a movie that gets you to outright hate it.

Movies are supposed to get some sort of emotion out of the viewer.  The worst kind of movie would then be the kind of movie that doesn’t get any emotion.  There are movies you love, movies you have fun with, movies that you hate, movies that mean something to you.  Then there are movies that do nothing.  You watch them, and you don’t dislike them.  They simply do not resonate at all with you.  And there’s the problem.

A Nanny For Christmas isn’t necessarily a poorly made movie.  The issue comes with the connection between the viewer and the material, which is not there.  There is nothing in it that gets me invested in the romance, in the struggle for a good job, or in the familial issues of the children and their parents.  Add in the fact that any of the plot problems were tied up in about three minutes at the end of the movie, and you have a meaningless movie.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, so I’m going to end it with this paragraph.  A movie should strive to resonate with the viewers.  There should be an emotional connection between the movie and the viewer, whether it be love, hate, or any emotion in between.  A movie such as A Nanny For Christmas could be considered an extremely bad movie because it fails to have that resonance.  But I had a pleasant time with it, so it can’t be that bad.  Right?  Right?

There is one thing I would like to say before the end:

• If you have any movies to suggest for the Sunday "Bad" Movie, you can contact me on Twitter or comment below.