Another year, another onslaught of cheesy Netflix Christmas films – now this is a tradition I could get used to. Anyone who thinks November is too early to start watching Christmas movies can fight me personally – and yes, that is my professional opinion. But all that aside, let’s get on to the films.
The Holiday Calendar
The Holiday Calendar was a solid start for Netflix’s Christmas season, with a good balance of cheesy-goodness, mixed with a heart-warming story that makes for a genuinely decent film.
The film tells the story of a struggling photographer who’s lost her spark, journeying towards finding love and passion once more. Her dissatisfaction with life is clear from the start of the film when a friend of hers returns to town after travelling the world and taking photos. Such a thing Is a distant dream for Abby, who takes photos of children meeting Santa throughout the holiday season. She dreams of opening up her own studio in a building that she can’t afford to lease, and her discussions with her friend about his success only remind her frustrations with her own career.
However, things start to change when Abby’s grandfather, played by This is Us’s Ron Cephas Jones, gives her a Christmas calendar that had once belonged to Abby’s grandmother. Each day leading up to Christmas, a new door of the calendar opens, revealing a toy that somehow predicts Abby’s day.
On the first day, the calendar opens to a pair of toy boot. Later in the day, Abby’s photography friend, Josh, gives her a pair of boots from Italy. Whilst Abby originally chalks this up to a coincidence, she starts to suspect there is something else going on when a similar thing happens on the second day. She finds a Christmas tree toy in the calendar on this second day, and she later gets into a road accident in which a Christmas tree falls of the roof of a car driving by. The car’s driver is immediately likeable and the two share an undeniable chemistry. The guy seemingly falls in love with her after she insults him a couple of times – now that’s the dream. Abby runs into dream-guy again on the third day, on which she finds out he has a daughter (who’s dressed in a nutcracker costume similar to the nutcracker toy she received from the calendar that day). Once again, Abby and dream-guy have a chemistry-laden conversation.
It quickly becomes clear that Abby’s boot-gifting photography friend is secretly in love with her, and a full-fledged love triangle begins to unfold. The fourth day predicts a near-fatal candy cade incident that once again puts her in the path of dream-guy, (no I don’t remember his name) who just happens to be a doctor. He asks her out for dinner, and two continue to go on more and more elaborate dates planned by dream-guy, with the calendar continuing to predict details about each one. She starts to wish she and dream-guy could have a deeper connection, and her attention begins to stray towards her friend instead.
Dream-guy turns out to be not such a dream, making this the most realistic Christmas film I’ve seen in a while. The film gets a little confusing after that. It loses its rhythm a bit and struggles to balance its prioritisation of Abby’s career aspirations with her love life. Abby and her photography friend grow closer, but they lack the chemistry that the film spent so much time developing between Abby and dream-guy. Still, dream-guy is enough of an asshole to make me root for Abby’s friend. The friend at least is a total sweetheart who really cares about her – he just doesn’t have the kind of chemistry with Abby that makes for a great rom-com. Instead, we end up with a good movie, but a fairly mediocre rom-com.
As a whole, this movie is actually pretty decent. Both the acting and the story itself (although cheesy) are surprisingly good, and it’s definitely worth a watch, but I’ll admit it didn’t fill me with the same sense of joy that this next film did…
The Princess Switch
If you’re looking for quality filmmaking you’d be better off watching The Holiday Calendar, but if you’re looking for the pinnacle of cheesy romance clichés, then this is the film for you. Basically, a baker and a dutchess – who happen to be identical – run into each other and decide to switch lives, and the two both start to fall in love with someone in the other person’s life. The Princess Switch is silly as you would imagine, but it’s relentlessly sweet and wonderfully rewatchable. Last years A Christmas Prince still holds the top spot in my heart for so-bad-its-good Christmas films, but this one came pretty close.
The premise is that a baker travels to Belgravia with her sous chef and his daughter, to enter an elite Christmas baking competition. This, of course, is where the baker, Stacy, runs into the Duchess of Montenaro, Margaret. Upon realising how similar they look, Margaret pitches the idea of switching places for a few days whilst her fiancé, Prince Edward, is away on a business trip. Stacy agrees because she’s sick of people telling her she needs to be more spontaneous.
During the two days in which they are switched, Stacy starts to fall in love with the prince, Edward, who cancels the business trip he had planned because he wants to get to know the duchess better before they get married. Edward is sweet and charming and he shares Stacy’s love of order and responsibility. Stacy gets herself into many a hilarious situation – most notably where she vaults over a horse in an attempt to mount it. She somehow gets away with blaming most of her suspicious behaviours on cultural differences between Belgravia and Montenaro, which becomes increasingly funny throughout the film. For some reason, the prince buys her act, and the two become closer over discussions about palace politics, in which Edward finds Stacy to be refreshingly opinionated.
While Stacy spends time with the prince, Margaret has a few days of freedom with Stacy’s friend and sous chef, Kevin, and his daughter, Olivia. Olivia quickly detects their ruse when Margaret bluffs her way through their secret handshake. She keeps their secret when she discovers Stacy had asked Margaret to help Olivia get into an elite ballet summer program, jumping at the chance to spend time with royalty. Kevin, on the other hand, remains oblivious to the switch. He is pleasantly surprised to see his close friend throw out Stacy’s tightly-packed itinerary in favour of having some spontaneous fun. Margaret’s laid-back attitude confuses him, and he starts to think that there may be potential for romance between them that he hadn’t seen before.
It’s not hard to imagine how the film plays out from there. Vanessa Hudgens has incredible chemistry with both of her characters’ love interests, elevating the film from your average rom-com into the perfect romantic cliché. The awkward situations Margaret and Stacy find themselves in throughout the film are genuinely funny, and Kevin and Edward’s adorably confused reactions are even better. The Princess Switch is by no means a cinematic masterpiece, but it’s relentless sweet, full of Christmas spirit and must-watch for fans of romantic comedy.
The Christmas Chronicles
The other two films were probably best suited for a girl’s night, but The Christmas Chronicles is more of a classic Christmas film for all the family. It’s definitely the best quality film out of the three, but that doesn’t change the fact it’s my least favourite – but I’m a total sucker for rom-coms so I suppose that makes me biased.
The film focused on a pair of siblings whose family is suffering from the recent loss of their father. The youngest is a girl called Kate, a firm believer in Santa, who records her older brother, Teddy, driving a stolen car with his friends. She uses this as blackmail to convince her brother to help her capture footage of Santa – who the brother decidedly doesn’t believe in. The plan turns out to be a success, with the two observing both Santa and his reindeer on Christmas Eve, to the brother’s complete surprise. They hide in Santa’s sleigh whilst he delivers presents to the street, and he drives off without noticing them.
This leads to a pretty bumpy landing when Santa receives the shock of his life mid-flight, losing his hat and reindeer in the process. The children persuade him to let them help him find his hat and reindeer, (and hence ‘save Christmas’) with the hat apparently being the source of all of Santa’s powers.
The Christmas Chronicles’s version of Santa is notably snarky and generally edgier than your average depiction. He takes the children into a bar where he meets Wendy, played by Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s Vella Lovell, and he demonstrates his ability to recall details from just about anyone’s childhood. He attempts to use this ability to convince the people in the bar to help him, to which they are all refuse (and are sufficiently freaked out). This starts a bit of a brawl. Someone calls the police, which prompts Teddy to suggest they steal a car and get out of there. Santa agrees, partially because the car had already been stolen by a guy at the bar, but mostly because it was a very nice car – which paints a pretty good picture of this Santa’s priorities.
The three begin tracking down the reindeer, and Kate gets separated from the others when the police start chasing after them. She works on winning over the reindeer’s trust, whilst Teddy and Santa distract the officers. Santa attempts to win over the officers to no avail and is saved by the horde of reindeer running towards them, at Kate’s instruction. Kate manages to rescue Teddy, but Santa gets left behind with the police. The two fly away on the backs of the reindeer, whilst Santa gets thrown in jail.
The rest of the film descends into an enjoyable enough action comedy, featuring a jazzy cellblock musical number with Santa at its forefront. (Yes, you heard me). The siblings become closer throughout the film, giving their poor mother the fright of her life when she sees them hugging towards the end of the film. It’s a solid Christmas movie, but it’s nothing revolutionary. They try to switch up the usual clichés by making Santa a little more laidback, but when it comes down to it, this is still just another movie about saving Christmas and the importance of family. If you’re just looking for a cute film to get you in the mood for Christmas, then this is a pretty good one.
To wrap this all up, I’d say Netflix has done a good job overall getting me into the mood for Christmas. These are three solid films, all with an array of strengths and weaknesses that may or may not make them worth watching, depending on what you’re looking for in a Christmas movie. There’s still more to come from Netflix’s bout of seasonal offerings. A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding is set to come out on November 30th, and I for one can’t wait to see the wonderful disaster this film is bound to be.
TheScreenReview 