You get the sense that there were some pretty decent ingredients here to make what could have potentially been a classic, but while the snow maybe came down, I think the film got a little snow blind.
There are some really nice moments in this film - Pops dancing to the Rolling Stones, playing Whole of the Moon on the church organ, the tin foil woman (which was nearly a brilliant character). I didn't really mind the typical teenager cliche stuff. It's all about execution...
Like the snow, this film just seemed to drift a bit too much. The characters and their narratives become reasonably engaging before we're suddenly then on to something else and you don't really know why.
A Love Actually with teenagers is a good way of putting it, but what makes LA a classic is the way it all blends together so well. We have a strong unifying theme running through LA: the romance surrounding the buzz of the festive season and the feeling that it's all building somewhere (as the festive season naturally does), plus the satisfying way it all ties together in the end. Let It Snow is maybe more a sign of the times in that the characters are more self absorbed and disconnected... It's like it needed a unifying goal to the whole thing, which was kind of there but just didn't come out. Christmas often seemed somewhat incidental in that the characters were more caught up in their personal dramas to be able to relate to the bigger picture of the festive season. An example: by the time the girl who meets the pop singer gets back home I'd COMPLETELY forgotten she'd initially set out to get a specific Christmas present for her mother. Why did that goal get so buried? With a title like Let It Snow, it seems it wants to be considered a Christmas film, right? Was it though? I don't know.
I think this sense of drift had a lot to do with pacing - some characters go on a string of incidents: going on a car chase, skidding off the road, running off to a church etc etc... and meanwhile you have a bunch of other characters who, all the while, are at the Waffle House eating waffles. This kind of thing just pegs the film back.
Buuuut, ya know, overall it's okay. The cast do a good job, it's filmed well, the setting is decent. Like I say, the ingredients were there. Maybe a case of too many cooks spoilt the eggnog.
