\n<\/p>\n
\n\tIn \u201cA Very Jonas Christmas Movie,\u201d a synthetic holiday trifle whose chief asset is that it knows and even winks at how much it\u2019s a synthetic holiday trifle, one of the more amusing scenes has the Jonas Brothers showing up at a hotel in Amsterdam to see a cabaret performance by Ethan, an old enemy of Nick Jonas\u2019s portrayed by Andrew Barth Feldman. It seems that the two had been in a Broadway show together \u2014 a musical version of \u201cHome Alone,\u201d with Ethan as the Macaulay Culkin character and Nick cast as the dad. Ethan felt patronized by the pop star, and the two didn\u2019t get along.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe reason the Jonases have shown up is that they want to hitch a Christmas ride home on Ethan\u2019s private plane. (Their own tour jet blew up, because\u2026well, we\u2019ll get to that in a minute. It has something to do with meeting Santa Claus in a bar.) Ethan, scarcely hiding his contempt, calls Nick up onstage, where the two perform a duet from the show, a song that\u2019s at once a pretty power ballad and pretty awful (\u201cI will never leave you home alone ag-a-a-ain!\u201d<\/em>). But it\u2019s just plausible enough to give you a chuckle. Then, at the song\u2019s end, Ethan\u2019s contempt for Nick comes pouring out, and Andrew Barth Feldman plays this with just enough mean-boy panache to raise your chuckle to a giggle.<\/p>\n \n\tIf you like Christmas movies the way I do, you\u2019ve seen the genre evolve, in a major way, over the last decade. It used to be that we got a handful of them each year in movie theaters. The small screen was reserved for what I thought of as Hallmark-type TV-movies, including the occasional kitsch Christmas cookie like \u201cA Very Brady Christmas\u201d (1988). But streaming changed all that. The small-screen Christmas movie is now an industry, with dozens of feel-good holiday entertainments coming out of the processor, almost all of them some combination of the following: wholesome, silly, romantic, artificial, fizzy, reverent, and too brightly lit, with the Christmas cheer poured on like eggnog spiked with even thicker eggnog.<\/p>\n \n\tSo it says something that \u201cA Very Jonas Christmas Movie\u201d feels like a disposable stocking stuffer even when compared <\/em>to the G-rated Christmas-globe world of made-for-streaming holiday fare.<\/p>\n \n\tThe movie casts the Jonas Brothers as genially stylized versions of themselves, and it sticks them in the middle of a \u201cCan we make it home for Christmas?\u201d plot that\u2019s like \u201cPlanes, Trains and Automobiles\u201d made on a streaming budget. As the movie opens, in London, Will Ferrell is taking his family to see the final night of the Jonas Brothers\u2019 latest tour (the joke is that Ferrell loves the Jonases more than he does his own children). As they come offstage, we see that the three have been playing together for so long now (20 years!) that the thrill is kind of gone. They\u2019re not teenage pop stars anymore. They\u2019re grown men with families who\u2019ve come to take their career, and each other, for granted.<\/p>\n \n\tThat might be just what you\u2019d expect. But Santa Claus (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), appearing incognito as a short-white-bearded eccentric who happens to be sitting next to Joe at a bar, gets an earful of Joe\u2019s troubles and puts an instructional curse on the brothers: They will not be able to make it home for Christmas until they rediscover their bond and start appreciating each other again. Which they will do over the course of 80 minutes of haphazard road-trip-through-Europe adventure.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tSome of \u201cA Very Jonas Christmas Movie\u201d is standard holiday-special treacle, with all the dramatic richness of a fake fireplace log. But it\u2019s broken up by musical numbers that go down easy, since a lot of them, as composed by Justin Tranter (and sung with sweet vibrance by the Jonases), come off like Michael Bubl\u00e9 heartwarmers. A few of them are staged with a wink; during a production number set in a train station, the brothers do a double take after the dancers perform a hands-under-the-knee homage to a move that became a meme from \u201cCamp Rock 2.\u201d And there\u2019s a romance that wastes no time falling into cringe terrain: On the train, Joe, the swarthy womanizer of the group (he\u2019s the only one who isn\u2019t married with kids), just happens to run into\u2026his old childhood crush (Chloe Bennet)! Who is now a thoracic heart surgeon! And has just broken up with someone!<\/p>\n \n\tThe cringe factor almost works for the movie. Kevin, the one who has never left New Jersey, is the nerdish Ringo of the group, and he\u2019s sitting on something he needs to tell the rest of them. We think he\u2019s quitting the band, but it\u2019s really just that he wants the chance to sing a lead vocal. And Nick, though he\u2019s the youngest of the three brothers, acts like the oldest, organizing the tour details, redoing the set list, making it all happen\u2026and no one appreciates him for this<\/em>. \u201cA Very Jonas Christmas Movie\u201d is a very white people problems movie.<\/p>\n \n\tYet that\u2019s all part of the mild guilty pleasure of it. The Jonas Brothers, in their straight-arrow Middle American dudes-with-purity-rings-all-grown-up way, are likable, in part because they\u2019re always poking holes in each other\u2019s egos. And the movie is willing to be daft and a bit loopy, as in the episode where they find themselves aboard a private plane and the pilot, after trying to take sexy selfies of himself, winds up knocked out cold on the floor, with the automatic-pilot mechanism turned off. It will take crash-landing in the snowy woods, and having to scream at a pack of wolves, to make the Jonas Brothers rediscover their love for each other.<\/p>\n \n\tThey\u2019re all quite comfortable in front of the camera, but to me the clear stand-out as an actor is Nick Jonas. What he has, that his brothers don\u2019t, is the ability to hold an audience, curious and intrigued, even when he\u2019s doing nothing \u2014 it\u2019s just a vibe, a sense of things going on behind his lean, sly visage. I like the Jonas Brothers and hope they continue on, especially if they ever get it together to do another song like \u201cSucker,\u201d their 2019 hit that\u2019s the best track they ever recorded. (They perform it in concert during the closing credits.) But at this point, as \u201cA Very Jonas Christmas Movie\u201d more or less acknowledges, they\u2019re an oldies act. The movie reaffirms their place in the pop firmament, but it also made me think: If they ever do start to get too old for this, Nick Jonas might have the big screen waiting for him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In \u201cA Very Jonas Christmas Movie,\u201d a synthetic holiday trifle whose chief asset is that it knows and even winks at how much it\u2019s a synthetic holiday trifle, one of the more amusing scenes has the Jonas Brothers showing up at a hotel in Amsterdam to see a cabaret performance by Ethan, an old enemy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":33904,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[6804,5200,19357],"class_list":{"0":"post-33903","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-guilty","9":"tag-pleasure","10":"tag-trifle"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33903\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/33904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}