After the death of his estranged mother, a young Wall Street executive is haunted by the ghost of his father until he mourns her properly.

Clever, Richiev.? A better title, perhaps would be "A Christmas Carole".

The backstory of the logline is that mother and son became estranged.? What is the wedge issue that drove them apart?? That's what the story is about, what all the haunting must drive him to resolve?

But it has to be about more than mending the past.? It must be an issue he needs to resolve in order to live his life going forward.? If he fails to resolve the issue, his life is doomed to an unhappy ending. (As was the case for Scrooge.)

The fundamental problem I see with this logline is that it sets up a "rear view mirror" plot; that, is a story line where the focus is on the past.? But plots are -- or should be -- about how people are to live looking forward in time.? Just as you cannot drive a car forward by looking solely through the rear view mirror, a plot cannot advance satisfactorily with a protagonist whose gaze is fixated on the past.? Ultimately, what matters is where the protagonist must go in the future, not where he failed to go in the past.

fwiw

Clever, Richiev.? A better title, perhaps would be "A Christmas Carole".

The backstory of the logline is that mother and son became estranged.? What is the wedge issue that drove them apart?? That's what the story is about, what all the haunting must drive him to resolve?

But it has to be about more than mending the past.? It must be an issue he needs to resolve in order to live his life going forward.? If he fails to resolve the issue, his life is doomed to an unhappy ending. (As was the case for Scrooge.)

The fundamental problem I see with this logline is that it sets up a "rear view mirror" plot; that, is a story line where the focus is on the past.? But plots are -- or should be -- about how people are to live looking forward in time.? Just as you cannot drive a car forward by looking solely through the rear view mirror, a plot cannot advance satisfactorily with a protagonist whose gaze is fixated on the past.? Ultimately, what matters is where the protagonist must go in the future, not where he failed to go in the past.

fwiw

Sometimes you need that little twist to get a story sold

A Christmas?Carol

The lead character's mother was named Carol
She died on Christmas
His father's ghost shows him visions of the past, how they got together, their love story what went wrong, all leading up to the mother leaving.

The movie ends with the lead putting flowers on his mothers grave with a better understanding of who his mother was.