Unintentionally perfect short films

Depending on your definition of "perfect" and "short film."

This is The Snack Desk, a newsletter in which I’ll share personal essays, gems from different corners of the internet, and other bites for your snack break.

There is a beautiful thing about the trailers for Hallmark movies (or Hallmark-esque movies): they always, without fail, reveal the entire plot, including how the story ends. This means if you click on a few of these trailers on YouTube, you get to watch a handful of 3-minute short films. And because they fall into the Hallmark genre, you know you’re getting a predictable plot and a happy ending. These videos are the ultimate comfort snack.

These trailers are for movies with titles like The Love Issue (a real movie about a fashion editor who pretends to date a photographer to make her ex/boss jealous until they fall in love for real) or Food for the Heart (a real movie about a chef and a guy who says three times in the trailer alone that he’s a “project manager”).

Usually these trailers revolve around a hard-working woman living in a big city—typically New York, sometimes Chicago—who has to take on some kind of assignment. There may be an establishing scene with her boss that explicitly lays out what the stakes are (“If you write me an article about this small-town pumpkin patch, you’ll get a promotion!”). The main character sets off to reach this goal, but bumps into (wouldn’t you know it!) a cute guy. Sometimes she is intrigued, but most often she’s not interested at first, so her Best Friend Character might have to nudge her into going on a date. As these two lovebirds go through the motions of courting—cue the montage of dating scenes—they’ll wind up facing some sort of misunderstanding. Only at the last minute will they come together for True Love’s First Kiss.

The soothing repetitiveness of these storylines is especially satisfying when cut down to three minutes. The top YouTube comment on these trailers will invariably be some form of, “Thank you for showing me the whole movie in 3 minutes! What a time-saver.” 

Here are a few to get you started:

  The stiltedness of the "of course I am" in that last line is hilarious. 

For any three-minute break where you need to fully shut your brain off, the world of Hallmark-style movie trailers awaits.