Hallmark Movie Roundup: The Weekend of Hallmark Movies

A friend and I got an Airbnb for the weekend and pretty much spent the entire time just watching Hallmark movies (and snacking). It was glorious and I highly recommend it to everyone. I don't have the energy to do full posts about each movies, but obviously I must share some thoughts.

For Love & Honey (2024): Andrew Walker is an archaeology professor in Malta, looking for something mentioned in an old manuscript. The treasure is bees, which he discovers with the help of a local beekeeper who runs a successful apiary. Whatever money the Malta tourism board paid for this movie was well worth it; Malta looked gorgeous. And Andrew Walker looks hot in sunglasses, so it's a win-win.
Dead Mother: Yes 

The Magic of Lemon Drops (2024): Lolly works at a restaurant with her father, who won't let her alter the menu in literally any way. Her aunt, who is #LifeGoals, gives Lolly four magic lemon drops--she can use three to see what her life could be and the fourth to choose to stay in one of those lives. The moral of this story is that if you manage to save one of your parents by a wish, the other will be dead in the alternate timeline. I appreciate that she rejected one timeline because it meant stifling her love interest's goals. That said, the logistics of the movie were confusing (the love interest worked for the Columbus Blue Jackets but was moving to a "cottage" in upstate Michigan). 
Dead Mother: Yes

The Snow Must Go On (2025): Isaiah had starred in an original Broadway production unspecified years ago, but he's now down on his luck, so agrees to spend Christmas with his sister and niece upstate...and then agrees to write and direct his niece's Christmas pageant in hopes of catching the eye of a Broadway producer. I kept going back and forth on whether I thought Isaiah was the worst and they dropped a subplot with a kid that I thought was going somewhere, but they did hire an actual Broadway actor and allowed him to sing.
Dead Mother: It probably mentioned the siblings' parents, but I don't remember the details. I'll just assume dead. Or retired in Florida. But probably dead.

Beverly Lewis' The Reckoning (2015): It turned out this was the third movie in a trilogy, but we just powered through. Katie/Katherine was raised Amish, fell in love with Daniel, was supposed to marry a bishop but didn't after she thought Daniel died, found her (non-Amish) birth mother, inherited her mother's many money and huge house, got shunned from the Amish, and is now running a charitable foundation with boyfriend Justin...when Daniel returns from the dead. This movie was nuts and Katie just needed a lot of therapy and to choose herself, but naturally that isn't what happened, even though Daniel came off as a creepy, incel stalker. Also, her household staff were probably a bit too overly involved in her life.
Dead Mother: Yes

Cozy Hallmark-watching vibes.

The Professional Bridesmaid (2023): Maggie is a professional bridesmaid (do we ever learn how she became one? No. Did it bother me the whole time? Yes. At least in Stacy Birchall's The Secret Bridesmaid, you get the full backstory) who gets hired to be a bridesmaid for the daughter of the mayor of Columbus, so she has to juggle fairly normal professional bridesmaid stuff with trying to keep a reporter covering the wedding from questioning the mayor about his views on a proposed condo development. Honestly pretty cute and enjoyable except for my annoyance at not having her backstory and the usual annoyance at writers not really thinking about what scaling her business would actually look like.
Dead Mother: Yes

Blind Date Book Club (2024): Meg runs a bookstore on Nantucket that's become known for doing a book club that uses that "wrapped in brown paper so you don't know the title, just a pithy description" method. Again, we have no idea what the logistics of this are--it honestly makes no sense how it's presented in the movie--and they also somehow seem to have multiple book clubs a week, and those book clubs involved free food and alcohol and activities like flower arranging or painting. Anyway, she's featured on NPR and YA bestselling author Graham Sterling decides to try to get the club to read his new book, which is a historical romance. I quite liked the discussion of what makes a book successful, and Meg was able to point to Graham why his books worked even though she herself wasn't particularly a fan. Also, Meg is debating whether she actually wants to run the bookstore; she was good at selling real estate in Boston, and she enjoyed it. I mean, obviously she's going to keep the bookstore on Nantucket, but the movie made her questioning believable. My other quibble is how much they were outside in a Nantucket winter.
Dead Mother: Yes

The Wedding Cottage (2023): Vanessa runs a wedding...guide...website...thing? and has published a wedding guidebook. To promote her site/service/thing, her company has a contest for a free wedding; the winners want to have their wedding a cottage in Vermont that has hosted weddings for generations. Only problem is that it closed 5 years ago, and the current owner, Evan, a Fancy New York Artist Who's Hiding, has let it go to pot and has no interest in reopening. But naturally he does. The Vermont location was cute, the third-act conflict was annoying, and the vagueness of what Vanessa's business actually is was beyond frustrating. Too twee, all around.
Dead Mother: Unclear, but since Evan inherited the cottage from his grandparents, I can only assume his parents are dead

3 Bed, 2 Bath, 1 Ghost (2023): Anna and Elliot broke up and dissolved their business, so now Anna is trying to be a real estate agent in her dad's agency while Elliot works to get a local building designated as being historic. Anna's first listing is a 100-year-old house that's been uninhabited since the 1950s and is haunted by the owners' daughter, Ruby, who died in 1923. The relationship between Ruby and Anna was honestly fun, but Anna was frustrating to watch. It's clear she shouldn't be a real estate agent, but it isn't clear what she should be, and I get that's how life is for a lot of people, but I don't really feel the movie handled her journey well. Elliot was great, though.
Dead Mother:Again, I can only assume. Anna's mother isn't around and wasn't mentioned that I remember.

The Wish Swap (2025): Casey and Henry have the same birthday; at a restaurant, they wind up blowing out their birthday candles into each other's faces and then the other's birthday wish comes true...for them. So Casey, an executive recruiter, winds up inheriting a farm (with goats!), while Henry gets cast on a television dancing competition. Kudos for executing the set-up; they quickly realize what's happened and Casey having Henry run the inherited farm and Henry agrees to partner with Casey. The dancing contest premise doesn't really make sense, nor does the timeline, nor do some of the details of Casey's job (and the distances between places and also where is the dancing show filed?), but it was cute. I may have been swayed by the choreographed dances.
Dead Mother: Yes