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TV Movie Review - 3 Bed, 2 Bath, 1 Ghost
October 09, 2023
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I’m sure you’re already judging me and this movie, just by the title. Yes, it's a Hallmark movie (available on Peacock), and yes it has a silly name. But before you write it off as nonsense, hear me out because 3 Bed, 2 Bath, 1 Ghost had me giggling like a white girl experiencing her first taste of pumpkin spice. Which is only appropriate (okay, me giggling is never appropriate, I admit) because this is Hallmark’s first ever Halloween movie.

Do we have a new holiday movie genre?

The film opens in the roaring 20’s with beautiful cars pulling up to a stately mansion. It’s Ruby’s (Madeleine Arthur) birthday party, and she’s Charlestoning it up in style with her friends. Unfortunately, the man she loves, Charlie (Thomas Darya), isn’t invited. Ruby is a socialite, who hangs out with F. Scott and Zelda, and Charlie is a chauffeur. Though they share a once-in-a-lifetime (and maybe more than that) love, they’re from different classes and her father forbids them from being together. She breaks his heart as gently as she can, but Charlie leaves dejected, casting aside a bouquet of roses.

100 years later, the roses have grown into a large bush. But the house sits empty.

Or does it?

In present day, Anna (Julie Gonzalo) is filling the trunk of her classic Mustang convertible with odds and ends from her office. She and her partner, Elliot (Chris McNally), have dissolved their business relationship and their engagement. Anna is going into real estate with her dad, Garrett (Xavier Sotelo), while Elliot plans to continue restoring old buildings. He can never give up on lost causes. Like his relationship with Anna? Anyway, he and his amazing collection of jackets keep showing up, much to her dad’s displeasure. 

To start her off, Garrett gives Anna the Baker House—Ruby’s house— to lightly renovate, stage, and sell. And as Anna quickly learns, Ruby is having none of it. Sometime shortly after her party Ruby died a tragic death and her spirit remains trapped within its walls, doomed to read Gatsby for all eternity. But Anna can inexplicably see Ruby and they don’t exactly hit it off. Ruby can’t touch people, but she can tear open a feather pillow over a freshly waxed floor. 

There’s nothing spooky about this ghost story.

In no time, the two become friends. And as they do so, the rules of Ruby’s world start to bend and break. It’s their relationship that’s at the heart of this story, but the canny Ruby can see Anna and Elliot belong together and starts coaxing her to rekindle the relationship. And maybe, just maybe, if Anna can find true love Ruby can finally rest in peace. This is a Hallmark movie, after all, and you can probably figure out what happens next. That said, there is a clever little twist that brought a manly tear to my eye.

Best of all? No politics.

There was an easy opportunity to get into women’s lib, and there is a joke about there not being a woman president yet, but the movie skillfully avoids pursuing any social commentary beyond making fun of emojis and the way Anna is glued to her phone. Miss Arthur, with her big eyes and bobbed hair, looks like a silent film starlet and carries herself like a Ziegfeld girl in a way that never feels affected. Elliot sometimes seems a little passive-aggressive (mostly to facilitate the exposition), but McNally and his jackets carry enough good-guy charm that it’s easy to forgive. And Gonzalo takes what could be a cookie-cutter character and makes Anna feminine and sympathetic, never annoying.

So why was I laughing out loud?

I imagined I was playing a drinking game. Take a sip of your pumpkin spice latte (wink, wink) every time there’s something autumnal on screen so we don’t forget, every time Elliot shows up in a new jacket (seriously, the guy must have a house full of them), and every time fancy coffee gets mentioned. These things happen with such regularity you’ll be doing the Charleston with ghosts in your living room in no time.  

Please drink responsibly. 

This movie could have gone so terribly wrong in so many ways, yet its main fault is the silly title. There’s no politics, nothing occult, and it doesn’t lean too hard into the Halloweeness of it all. But let me be clear: I think 3 Bed, 2 Bath, 1 Ghost more for what it is than what it isn’t. It’s a sincere story about relationships and second chances. I’ll gladly watch it again next year, and if it ever hits DVD it might be the first Hallmark movie on my shelf. So judge me if you must. I don’t care.

I’ll be out there upping my jacket game.

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F1 is Modern Western

As a nation, the United States is unique. We don’t share a genetic heritage, but a creed. Americans and our ideas come from all over the world. But we’re at our best when take those outside ideas and make them our own. Everything we have came from another culture, but there was a time when we could take things and collectively make them better.

Democracy? Check. Rock’n’roll? Check. Heck! Chinese food? Yes, we did.

Don’t hate. You know I’m right.

One of the greatest art forms we’ve given the world is the western genre. While rooted in courtly romances of King Arthur, we took the idea of the man on horseback who makes things right on his quest for something spiritual and made it distinctly American. Most of the time, these stories aren’t historically accurate, but that’s not the point. They’re soaked in the American ethos. For better or for worse, the western has become the American myth, even more so than 1776.

And the cool thing about myths is that you can take them and tell other stories. 

Star Trek (and later Firefly) took the western to space. 

A few weeks ago I was able to see F1: The Movie on IMAX, and I had high hopes. Director Joseph Krasinski had proved himself with Top Gun: Maverick, which is about as American as a modern movie can get. But mostly, I just wanted to see if he could do with racecars what he’d done with fighter jets. In that regard, I was everything I’d hoped it would be. The idea of Americanism didn’t even cross my mind, since F1 is primarily a European sport.

Boy, was I surprised.

Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes with all the careless cool of Paul Newman in his prime and a Steve McQueen swagger. While Pitt has never played a cowboy and isn’t a racecar driver in real life, Newman and McQueen played both, and did both. Hayes has been keeping himself busy with no-name races since an F1 crash nearly killed him some 30 years before. But when Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), an old friend and rival, needs some wins to save the team, he tracks down Sonny.

And the old dog knows a few tricks.

Naturally, his tactics put him at odds with his teammate, Joshua Pierce (Damson Idris), and his cocky attitude is a big red flag to the team’s engineer, Kate McKenna (Kerry Conden). So the movie all the tropes of a sports film, and I don’t think I need to summarize further. But it’s not a sports film. Or rather, it’s not just a sports a film. Surprise, surprise, it’s the western myth transposed into a racing a story.

It’s spelled out in the trailer, but it didn’t strike me until the very end.

Kate calls Sonny Hayes an “old school rough and tumble cowboy” in a line used in the marketing. When he arrives in the garage, only Ruben knows him. Sonny is the stranger in town. Like James Garner in Support Your Local Sheriff, his method of restoring order and winning is unorthodox and effective. Like Shane, in that Alan Ladd classic, he’s guarded about his past. And like John Wayne in The Searchers and so many other westerns, Sonny Hayes is the outsider who must leave civilization once he’s made it civilized for those who belong there.

But he doesn’t.


Perhaps the hardboiled crime story, another uniquely American genre, is also an outgrowth of the western. Philip Marlow is the man who must walk down mean streets, who is not himself mean. As Raymond Chandler said, “He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.” Basically, the man he’s describing is dangerous, but not cruel. Dispassionate in taking revenge, and restrained by a code of honor.

But destined to be lonely, nonetheless.

Why we’ve made that an essential part of the American is a topic for another time. But there it is. And it’s the story of Sonny Hayes. At the end of the movie [SPOILER], he rides off into the sunset as the credits roll. The western isn’t dead. It’s still there, in essence, speaking to our hearts in different ways.

Nothing more American than that. 

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Girl-Power Isn't the Problem: Stop Treating Movies Like TV Pilots

Last weekend I was able to sneak off the theater for a screening of From the World of John Wick: Ballerina. Did I feel silly, telling the high school girl at the ticket counter, “One for Ballerina, and a small drink”? Well, not in the moment. 

I probably drank a liter of cherry vanilla Coke Zero, and that didn’t feel so great.

Plenty of box office analysts and Hollywood types are wracking their brains, trying to figure out why movies like Furiosa and Ballerina aren’t drawing huge crowds. Mad Max and John Wick are popular franchises, but apparently telling the stories of the women in those worlds isn’t working. Even if the movies are pretty good.

I’ve seen both, and they’re pretty good.

Some are arguing that no one will go near a movie that looks like it’s feminist girl-bossing. Others counter that movies like Alien and Kill Bill are female-led action films that were successful. Now, I’m not going to say that Ballerina is on par with those modern day classics. But I will say that, as a man watching the movie, it didn’t offend me. The movie never challenged me to confront any internalized misogyny. The small girl doesn’t take down John Wick in hand-to-hand combat.

Honestly, if you like franchise, whether you’re male or female, you should watch Ballerina.

In short, from a purely cinematic experience perspective, neither Furiosa nor Ballerina would be any better or worse with a male lead. Maybe that’s a hot take. But that’s mine, for whatever it’s worth. Well, okay, I wouldn’t watch a movie called Ballerina if it stared a dude. Nevertheless, I think you get my point. Petite women warriors aside, the plots and action are exactly as expected.

So what’s the deal?

Well, what no one seems to have noticed is that Ripley and The Bride weren’t replacing anyone. As we were watching their movies for the first time, we weren’t thinking about other characters for whom we already had a preference. Movies are more like TV than TV right now, and replacement characters have always been a hard sell, regardless of gender. We all remember Sam and Diane. Who still talks about Sam and Rebecca (even though Kirstie Alley won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for the part)? I had to look up her name. 

No, they aren’t technically replacing them. It’s a spin-off, set in the same world.

Spin-offs tend to succeed when the characters are already well established (eg: Frasier). Furiosa and Ballerina are more like backdoor pilots, where new characters are dropped in for a single episode to sell us on the idea of a new show. This technique is very hit and miss on TV, and I can’t think of a single example of this working in a movie franchise. Film and television are very different mediums, and should be treated as such.

Still, if it doesn’t work on TV, it’s probably not gonna work at the movies. Not where new characters and spin-offs are concerned. 

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Maybe I’m just getting old, but it doesn’t feel like we had the thriving and distinct pop culture of past generations. Has there been a look or stye, or feeling, that defines this moment? Everything seems to have stagnated for the last twenty years. And it’s not as if I don’t pay attention. 

It’s making me nostalgic. 

Consequently, for the rest of the year, I’m prioritizing movies from 1995, the year I was twelve. At that time, my family didn’t really go to the theater, and when we did rent VHS tapes, more often than it is was older Disney movies or entirely forgettable Christian titles. Now that I’ve grown tired of trying to keep up with new releases, not there’s much worth watching anyway, it feels like a good time to catch up on those 30 year old movies that have become ingrained in what’s left of our pop culture.

So over on Criticless, I made a list.

Some of these are movies I’ve seen before, but not in a long time. Others will be first time watches for me. There’s really no rhyme or reason to what I put on my list. It’s just movies that either interest me, or are currently in my collection, sadly unwatched. As things become available on streaming, I may add to the list. And if I don’t get to everything before the end of the year, no big deal.

Hopefully, they aren’t going anywhere. 

I’ll be posting some reviews and analysis as I go, so be sure to follow me here. 

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