This year a Christmas movie came out that kicked father/daughter suggestiveness to a whole new level. If you’ve seen it, or even seen the trailer, then you already know what movie I am talking about: Christmas Is Canceled, a last minute holiday incest-shipping gem (available on Amazon, I believe).
The premise is this: Emma has a nasty surprise when she learns that her father Jack’s (played by Dermot Mulroney) new girlfriend will be intruding on one of their traditional family Christmases, and even worse: his new girlfriend, Brandy, is her old enemy from high school. So we have a movie about an adult daughter, very close to her father, who is determined to sabotage his new relationship. The fics practically write themselves!
What makes this rare, beyond the favorable premise, is that both Emma and David are very attractive, and Jack/Dermot Mulroney, while being old enough to be her father, is not old. It’s convincing that Brandy would want to be with him, would be attracted to him, and by extension, it’s convincing that Emma could feel that way too.
I’m going to talk through the plot and spoil as I go, not that there’s much to surprise anyone. Overall, it’s a fun watch for fans of father/daughter but I wouldn’t call his a can’t-miss recommendation.
Emma’s mother has passed away two years ago and Emma seems to have slipped right into the wifely role despite having aged out of the house: in the first scene Emma has just returned from a research trip that lasted a couple of months. Jack comes home and Emma tells him that she picked up his dry cleaning and folded his laundry and she’s about to make dinner. Emma does live on her own but clearly is used to coming and going from her father’s house whenever she wants to. They also work together at the same corporate-type company.
Brandy, this enemy from high school, grew up across the street and has moved back into her parents’ empty house. She and Emma haven’t seen each other in 10 years, so Emma is most likely about 28 years old. (Jack is 54.) Brandy comes over to say hello and it’s clear that she and Jack are already together but they pretend they’re not because Jack hasn’t told Emma yet. Brandy offers some kind words about Emma’s mom and brings up a time when she took the girls to the mall and bought them both bras with pineapples on them. The story being about bras, possibly one of the girls’ first bras ever, is weird and wonderful on so many levels, and Emma actually brings it up later after she finds out that Jack and Brandy are dating.
We cut to two weeks later and Emma’s friend Charlyne is trying to invite Emma out to do stuff, but Emma has traditions with her dad that she would rather do. Charlyne wants Emma to be a “normal twenty-something” and when Emma tries to defend herself, Charlyne points out that she cooks pot roast for her dad and that her clothes are probably from Talbots (which, if you’re not aware, is typically known for having clothes for older women).
Emma says she’s doing it for her dad, but Charlyne asks her if she’s doing it for him or for herself, and if maybe she’s the one who’s really lonely, not him. In an ideal shipping situation, it would be both, of course. But the implication that Emma isn’t just doing him a favor, but actually wants all that, is good.
Emma brings her dad some breakfast at work, which seems to be something that happens all the time. He apologizes and says he forgot to tell her that he had a breakfast meeting. This breakfast “meeting” is with Brandy, who comes strolling in, dressed inappropriately for the office. The two had planned to meet at a restaurant but Brandy had left a message with Jack’s secretary, Bea, to meet at the office instead, which may or may not have had an ulterior motive. Bea, the secretary, appears not to have told Jack on purpose and clearly disapproves of Brandy. I think we can all guess what direction this movie will go but wouldn’t it have been great if Brandy was just awful for Jack and everyone thought so, not just Emma.
It has been two weeks since Emma came back from her trip and Jack still hasn’t told her. He’s had plenty of opportunities – not just that first night when they had dinner together at home, but presumably every day at work as well. That’s pretty significant, I think. Naturally he doesn’t want to tell her, it’s an awkward conversation to have and he can be certain she’ll disapprove because she wastes no opportunity to insult Brandy, but at this point it’s ridiculous. And in fact Jack doesn’t tell her, Emma picks on the implication from talking with Bea.
I also think it’s very significant that Jack started dating Brandy while Emma was away for two months. Sure, you could say that Emma was crowding him and he was never going to meet someone while she was occupying so much of his time, but you could also say that being lonely and missing Emma is what caused him to reach out. When Emma was there, he was content, but when she was gone for so long, he started realizing that he actually was alone and partner-less.
Emma follows them out to spy on their conversation, still skeptical, but then they start kissing. Emma runs out yelling, “Stop raping my dad!”
It’s interesting, though not surprising, that Emma sees Brandy as a predator in this situation. And we might very well have had a different movie in which Brandy just wanted to stick it to because of an old rivalry Emma and had no other motives.
Emma runs by, pulls her dad into an elevator actually slamming his nose, and then literally has a panic attack.
And when Jack confirms what Emma saw, that he and Brandy are seeing each other, Emma starts dry heaving. Not just pretending to illustrate her point, but actually dry heaving. Of course this is a movie so you’re not going to have any fun drama with out extreme reactions, but canon is canon: her reaction is clearly extreme.
Emma points out that she and Brandy are the same age and went to school together. Jack tries to distance himself from that by saying that he didn’t even know that she and Brandy were friends before and Emma’s hilarious and just gives him this hard look and says, “We weren’t.” Because Emma hated her, of course.
Brandy catches up with the elevator and she and Jack force Emma to come out even though Emma wants to live in the elevator now. Brandy says she had told Jack that Emma was mature enough to handle this – and the implication of course is that Emma is actually not mature enough to handle this. Then Brandy tells her that she’s not losing a dad, she’s gaining Brandy. And Emma’s reaction is hilarious again. But in what world would that be a comfort? Brandy’s total cluelessness is great, though after all the digs it can’t be a surprise to her that Emma doesn’t like her.
One great thing that comes from this is that Brandy clearly understands that Jack and Emma are a package deal. There has to be peace with Emma or else it’s not going to work.
Brandy goes on and on about things that she and Jack had said to each other, “We” this and “We” that, and Emma understandably find that hurtful:
She’s on the outside, they’re the unit excluding her. I really felt for her. That was a great piece of dialogue.
When Emma learns they’ve been together for two months, she’s devastated. All the sound becomes very distant and she’s very much in her head. And then it only gets worse when Jack says that he and Brandy are spending the holidays together. And then Brandy is actually the one who says, “And we want you to join us.”
Well, I would have been furious too.
Her reaction is hilarious. I’ve got to give the actress credit – her comedic delivery is great.
Emma tells Charlyne, who does sympathize. But points out that Jack is hot.
And that’s so great from a Jack/Emma suggestive stand point. I mean, let’s just imagine for one moment that this isn’t a mainstream movie, this is an incest love story that I am writing. What kinds of scenes would I include in order to get my father character and my daughter character together? SCENES LIKE THIS.
Emma and Charlyne are at Emma’s apartment, and then Jack comes by and Charlyne leaves. Jack apologizes for not telling her, and says he was afraid she would disapprove because she could be “judgmental”, and Emma outright tells him that she disapproves. He says he was waiting to tell her until he knew it was something real, but that excuse doesn’t hold much weight with me, because it’s doubtful he’s more serious about her than he was two weeks earlier when Emma first got back. So that makes sense for the first part of the relationship, but not for what we’ve seen in the movie so far. In fact, when Brandy appears at his office and Emma is standing right there, he seemed desperate to hide it, and their company was sponsoring an event at Brandy’s bar so there was an excuse all ready to go for it too.
Emma has these interesting lines about never really having imagined him dating again.
She does say she would be happier if he was with someone else, not Brandy. Understandable. But would she really? If there had never been any Brandy and Emma had come home to find her father dating someone his own age, a Talbot-wearing, pot-roast-cooking woman in her 50’s, would Emma have been OK with it? I think she still would be having a hard time.
Jack says that Brandy has brought a spark to his life that he needed, but even he admits that it “might not last”. And then he asks her to come spend the holidays with them, and Emma says that she’s not sure if she can. I love that even after their serious, calm conversation, after she’s had hours to digest, and after he’s apologized, she’s still not sure she even can be around them.
Charlyne suggests Emma take the high road, get through the week, process her emotions like an adult, and lets the relationship fizzle out on its own. But just then a photo gets posted to social media of Jack and Brandy being flirty and Emma flips out. She decides then that she has to break them up.
Jack and Brandy are a little ridiculous. When Emma shows up four days before Christmas – not to get through the week like an adult, but determined secretly to break them up, they’re wearing matching aprons that say Mr. Right and Ms. Right. Um, who does that two months into a relationship? Predictably, these belonged to Jack and Emma’s mom, and when Emma sees it later she literally faints.
Brandy welcomes her and Emma can’t resist being snide about it. But who can blame her? Notice how she calls it her house even though she doesn’t technically live there anymore?
Everyone is going to have different opinions about this, but to me, the mom having only been dead for two years, this looks pretty callous. Two years is not that long, especially since Jack was married to her for 25+ years. It wasn’t a divorce, she died. Maybe it’s not too soon to start to think about dating again, but the aprons?
When Emma looks around the house she notices some differences, there are a bunch of framed photos of Jack and Brandy (yeah, super premature) and they’ve gotten an artificial tree because Brandy has allergies. These photos have apparently replaced Emma’s trophies. Well, she tried to play nice but she freaks out and runs right back out, not having been there for more than two minutes. She goes for a drive and Jack calls but she doesn’t answer.
She ends up at a bar, and of course here enters her love interest, coincidentally someone who is also from her high school, Josh. Emma mentioned him once earlier – she’d had a crush on him and Brandy had stolen him out from under her. (Which means they already have a history of being interested in the same guy.) Josh is a bartender and recognizes her…as Brandy’s neighbor. Emma invites him to join them for an event the following night, purely out of revenge against Brandy (and maybe her dad, too…again, SCENES I WOULD USE) and having nothing at all with her still being interested in him. He turns her down, though, but she eventually convinces him by making a deal to get more business for the bar.
Emma takes Brandy out the next day to have their makeup done. The woman at the salon thinks they’re sisters, which means, canonically, that Brandy resembles Emma, and therefore that Jack is dating someone who looks like his daughter.
I thought Emma was going to pretend to play nice but she takes her claws out at the salon. She asks Brandy if she’s dating him for his money – she’s not, she seems to have plenty of her own. Then Emma asks if she wants Jack to be her new daddy – and we know that Brandy’s parents went through a divorce, perhaps a rough one, so this isn’t a crazy theory. But Brandy implies that Emma is the one with daddy issues.
Then Brandy says that she’s had a string of bad relationships with guys who cheated on her, but Jack is “honest”, “strong”, “sweet”, and “funny”. Emma agrees with everything but funny. Brandy tells her that maybe she doesn’t know her dad as well as she thinks she does. And then Emma says she knows him better than he knows himself.
Obviously she’s set up here to be proven wrong and that’s unfortunate, but I wish they could have chosen something better than funny. How would you not notice if your dad was funny?
The conversation culminates in this:
And it obviously shakes Emma hard. This is a big time scene I would include – someone her own age literally telling her that her father is a “spectacular” lover? And just saying there’s things about her father she doesn’t know – it’s all such great set up for Emma discovering these things about him herself.
They go to this event the following night, and the three of them walk in together. Brandy does have her arm around Jack and Emma of course doesn’t, but the host clearly thinks Jack’s walking in with two hot ladies, not a hot girlfriend and his daughter. Jack even points at him like, “yeah, I’ve got two”. And then Emma even points out that Jack looks like a Russian kingpin with his “high class hookers”.
In the first scene, we learn that Jack was wearing something he wouldn’t normally wear and Emma makes fun of it a little. The way he’s dressed here, I think we can imply that this is not his pre-Brandy wardrobe. The host even says, “Cool t-shirt”, which wasn’t an insult but was sort of awkward. We could certainly infer that it’s almost a little silly.
The host tries to guess who the ladies are, getting it completely wrong.
Josh shows up later, and Emma says they’re going to give “him” a taste of his own medicine, implying this is really all about irritating her dad. She’s disappointed that Josh dressed up so nice, but says that it’s OK, Jack will hate him anyway. We can imply from this that Jack, in general, has not been a big fan of Emma’s boyfriends past. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work – Jack welcomes him and even as Emma tries to introduce ideas to make Jack not like him, it continues not to work. So here’s one place where I would have diverged, if this was my story.
Emma says he’s in the “fog of whore”. There’s lots of puns in this movie.
I assume Emma is also hoping to either get John and Brandy back together, or to at least rub Brandy the wrong way, but Brandy and Josh seemed to have parted amicably and they are on excellent terms.
Brandy takes Jack out to the dance floor, so of course Emma drags Josh out to dance. Also, Josh and Jack? Four letter common guys names that start with J? Weirdly similar, right? Emma’s watching her dad and Brandy the whole time she’s dancing, it’s just like her dad is the best friend who she suddenly realized she’s in love with and now she’s trying to make him jealous, like that kind of romcom. And the cuter Jack/Brandy are, the heavier Emma hangs all over Josh.
Emma is disappointed by how things have gone, but she’s feeling optimistic about the following day.
Emma and Jack have matching pajamas, matching mugs, matching stockings, cookie baking traditions, tree decorating traditions, ornaments with histories, photo albums full of pictures with stories behind them, etc.
Jack apologizes after he and Emma get engrossed in one of the photo albums but Brandy wants to hear all the fun stories. But Jack gets uncomfortable, almost like he doesn’t want her to be a part of that. He starts remembering Emma’s mom and getting sad.
Of course this is the inevitable part where we’re supposed to start feeling sorry for Brandy. And it’s not that Brandy’s ever unsympathetic. In fact, Emma calls her her “nemesis”, but we never hear about anything bad that Brandy did back in the day except the Josh thing. Apparently Emma told Brandy she had a crush on him, and Brandy hooked up with him anyway. Her defense for this was that she “didn’t think it was a big deal”. The moment where they talk about it does make her look pretty bad.
For some reason there’s some kind of party, and Emma has it at the bar where Josh works because that was the deal she made with him. As if there wouldn’t already have been a venue two days before it happening. But anyway, she invited a bunch of Brandy’s old friends from high school – the “detention” crowd. We do know Brandy was frequently in detention and she and Josh were D students. After Jack meets the old friends it’s clear it had the effect that Emma had hoped for – he doesn’t approve of them. Emma wanted an odd mix of people at the part to show that Brandy’s people didn’t mix with Jack and Emma’s people, and when Brandy and Josh try and liven things up with “beer Olympics”, it’s clear Jack isn’t exactly loving it, especially because it seems to be throwing Josh and Brandy in together a lot. So Jack tries to step up his game and keep up with the young crowd.
Jack wins an arm-wrestling match that no one thought he was going to win and he rips his shirt open (like Josh had had his shirt off) and Charlyne says, “I told you you had a hot dad.”
Jack does hurt his back doing some kind of keg roll and decides to head home but overall it seems to have been OK.
Josh is trying to have a moment with Emma, but he can barely keep her attention. Her mind is still on her dad and Brandy. He thinks he’s getting somewhere with her, but then Emma asks him to hit on Brandy, to test her.
Unfortunately Emma thinks she’s caught her red-handed, but Josh had just asked her into the bathroom to smoke, so Emma was accusing her before the moment had played out yet. Brandy says she never would have cheated on Jack but we don’t really know for sure.
This is when they hash it out about what happened in high school. Brandy apologizes and Emma seems like she might be able to forgive her for what happened back then, but it has no effect on how she feels about Brandy dating her dad, which was pretty great. She straight up asked Brandy to break up with him. Well, Brandy finally loses it, she’s finally had enough, and basically declares war. She says Emma was psycho for thinking that Brandy was trying to steal him away, but now Brandy was going to do it for real. Apparently they had been talking about Jack retiring and moving to the west coast? Yikes.
Then we have a long Emma and Josh segment. Emma gets drunk. Josh lives above the bar and takes her home to sleep it off. She wakes later in the night and has a look around his apartment and then they hook up. It seems like she leaves immediately after. Josh wants her to stay but she’s still not super into it.
So it’s Christmas Eve and I guess it’s night the following day but that’s a little confusing. Anyway, Emma comes to the house and walks in on Jack and Brandy having some wild desk sex.
Brandy is very insistent that they not apologize. Emma had every expectation that she and her dad would be ice skating, as they always do. Brandy says, “This isn’t family time, it’s sexy time.” Bitch, it’s Christmas Eve.
Jack tries to mediate between them, he thinks they’re both behaving badly. Emma straight up starts listing everything that’s wrong with Jack and Brandy’s relationship, which of course makes Jack very unhappy with her. She does say that he hates those hipster shirts that Brandy keeps buying him, so now we know exactly what’s up with that. Jack’s mad at her, but she did successfully drive a small wedge between him and Brandy.
Things get ugly on Christmas Day. Emma had mentioned a lake house several times where they used to go as a family. Emma has apparently bought it, and this makes Jack upset. He says something about how Emma is pretending like their family was idyllic and it comes out that Emma’s mom had an affair. And this was apparently something she had confessed to Brandy because she and Brandy would get coffee sometimes while Brandy was struggling with her parents’ fighting and divorce. Jack says they were happy when the mom died, though. I’m not sure what this has to do with the lake house, though Jack being a little fed up with Emma at this point makes sense. We don’t know for sure, but it seems most likely that Emma had done this before she even knew about Brandy so it wasn’t done in reaction to her.
Well, Emma tells her dad that she’s not sure she wants to be a part of his future with Brandy, and naturally she’s still very upset with what Brandy had said about him considering retirement and moving. She kind of puts out an ultimatum, her or Brandy, though I think she would have cooled down and reconsidered. Brandy ends up being the bigger person. When her parents got divorced they each started new families and she says she fell through the cracks, she wouldn’t wish that on anyone and she doesn’t want to destroy Emma and Jack’s family. So she walks off. I’m not saying she didn’t mean it genuinely, but there was no more perfect way to make it all about her and to make Jack furious with Emma and to ruin Emma’s Christmas.
At the beginning of this movie I tried to predict exactly how it would go. I figured Emma would be the one to help get Brandy and Jack back together again, but she was advised by Charlyne to just step back and not interfere. It’s New Year’s Eve, the night of the party that Brandy was throwing at her bar sponsored by Jack and Emma’s company. Jack and Emma run into each other outside and Emma apologizes. Jack says he might not totally be without blame. And then they go in and Jack and Brandy get back together. It’s clear there are still some issues in Jack and Brandy’s relationship, especially kids. And Jack says he doesn’t even want to move to California.
What I love about this ending in particular in that, though Emma says some nice things about Brandy, she still doesn’t like her, or the relationship. She’s being more mature about the situation, but she still doesn’t like it.
Right after Emma’s fight with her Dad on Christmas day, she decides to relocate to Botswana. I didn’t see that part coming. Her company is doing work there. And Josh just kind of decides to go with her. I mean…OK? That’s crazy. Well, what I like is that she was so upset over fighting with her dad that she uprooted her whole life. She basically had a life crisis.
At the end, Emma and Josh are about to kiss in the driveway of the house and then Brandy and Jack come home and Jack makes them move out of the way so he can park the car, interrupting the kiss. I mean, I would be lying if I said he seemed upset about them being together, but it did end on a note of interference.
There’s no conversation between Jack and Emma about the fact that she’s moving to the other side of the world. I don’t think it’s for forever, but she did pack up her apartment. They just glazed over that whole thing. Maybe they thought it would muddy the message. But it seemed like a glaring error to me. Just at Christmas dinner my cousin was talking about potentially taking a new job that would take him internationally and my uncle was like, “I already see you less than I like!”
Emma and Jack really are shippable, it’s not just the premise of the movie and all these suggestive little things that add up. But we didn’t get to see them interacting one-on-one very much. I would have liked to have seen a lot more of that. I barely have any caps of them together in the same frame because they weren’t in the same frame hardly ever! It’s hard to talk about chemistry or things like that when they barely have any scenes together that allow for that.
ETA: I almost forgot to mention that Emma remembers a time when she borrowed a tampon from Brandy in high school and wonders if that makes them “Eskimo sisters”, which would normally mean they had both had sex with the same man. Does she want this to be true? Of course it’s a ridiculous jump from borrowing a (presumably brand new) tampon, but that makes it all the more interesting.
shipcestuous2 