I love a movie that knows its goals and meets them with skillful intention. The Knight Before Christmas is part of the Vanessa Hudgens Cinematic Christmas Universe. There’s only one version of this Vanessa Hudgens, and she falls head-over-heels for an adorable twinky knight-out-of-time when she hits him with her car. (He’s okay! Thanks to the knight armor!) Through a series of low-stakes events with no interest in dull nonsense like historicity, the knight gets to remain in modern day and serve Vanessa Hudgens forever or something.

I say “modern day” here loosely because this is the kind of small town which exists exclusively in snowglobes and Hallmark movies. A single dad working two jobs is still experiencing little greater hardship than a daughter without mittens. Everyone is very attractive with perfect dental care. The Christmas lights are perfectly arranged. The knits are coordinated. Etcetera.

The only thing really blowing the fantasy is the fact the cops manage to recruit Sir Cole, thus All Sir Coles Are Bastards. Apparently we *need* policing in this little community and it’s a uniformly positive influence. All right. I’ll believe the fantasy that all these people have fabulous teeth (in both time periods) and massive houses in this little small town, but that’s kinda pushing it.

I never get tired of the Netflix holiday movies appearing in one another’s movies.

I love that the old crone is maybe 55. She looks happy to be in the movie.

Image Source: Netflix

It’s fun to reflect on how many romcoms tackled issues we’ve recently begun to frame in different ways, like gender. I recently watched Kate & Leopold to find Kate had abandoned something “soft and feminine” about herself to become shielded in masculinity, which doesn’t actually do anything to protect her; Gracie Hart is dealing with a very similar dilemma, with a different outcome.

Either of these women might identify as nonbinary born a generation or two down. What once felt like stories about tomboys confronting what that means in their lives can currently be framed as conflicts with the very gender binaries that the movies otherwise fully reinforce.

In this case, Gracie Hart has become overtly hostile to her gender. She’s as quick to express sexist sentiments as the men in her FBI office, who gather around computers to howl over photo manipulations of coworkers in swimwear, eagerly watch surveillance footage for boobs, and make it clear that Actual Women are mostly meat.

No wonder Gracie doesn’t want to identify with women. Her career in law enforcement is contingent on getting along with these guys. But she found that men were always intimidated by her strong (arguably masculine) and aggressive personality, even as a kid; these butch elements are inherent to Gracie.

Hence she enters her Sexy Transformation Phase with full hostility, disgusted to be thrown into a world where she’s expected to eat nothing fun for vanity. She doesn’t love having her hamclam waxed. She mostly likes using her hotness to taunt the man who is weak enough to be attracted to her, which is so relatable. (Benjamin Bratt in the year 2000, please call me. Sooo cute.)

Forcible enfranchisement in feminine beauty rituals gives Gracie an “in” with other women at the pageant. As much as Gracie has come to hate her gender, her gender embraces her lovingly, joyfully, and brings her into the fold.

Before long, Gracie’s no longer faking it around her new cross-country friends from the pageant. It’s nice to see Gracie having fun with people who don’t toss insults about her looks every two seconds. And when her fellow women realize she’s clueless with makeup, they make sure Gracie is competition-ready, despite being competitors. That’s sisterhood, baby.

Gracie learns the gift of feminine strength. Meanwhile, a fabulous Candace Bergen acts as her villainous foil. Bergen’s character has been running the beauty pageant for her entire career, and now she’s going to get fired. She hates *everything*. But she decides to take it out on the women, planning to literally tear the crown from the winner’s head via incendiary device.

It’s a nice classic romantic suspense story that I would (as always) prefer ended with Absolute Lesbianism. There are a few good laughs, a lot of really good actors (a couple moments of “hey! that guy!”). Of course, All Gracie Lou Freebushes are Bastards, but we can’t fix every character flaw in a single movie.

Image credit: Castle Rock Pictures

I think we’ve all agreed at this point that Love Actually isn’t a good movie, but hopefully we can agree it’s kind of a great movie. If I were to edit it to suit specifically my preferences, these are the parts of each story I would chuck or keep:

Hans Gruber Cheats on His Wife
This whole story goes in the bin.

The Writer & The Housekeeper
The cheating ex-wife goes in the bin. After that, everything except the mean jokes about the woman’s sister can stay.

Liam Neeson & His (Step-)Kid
In the bin.

Rodrigo Santoro & The Adorable Office Lady
Everything stays up until the moment she picks up the phone the second time. We assume that her brother has sufficient care at his home, and that she has healthy boundaries, and that she nails Rodrigo Santoro. good for you, adorable office lady.

Teenage Kiera Knightley and Her Stalker
Everything the bin, except perhaps one quick shot of the breasts covered in tiny santa hats, as well as the “to me, you are perfect” sign, cropped to exclude the holder, and moved directly after the Prime Minister’s dance scene.

The Prime Minister & His Assistant
The Prime Minister’s dance scene – with zero other context included. Everything else in the bin.

The Actor Stand-Ins, Colin Frizzle, and Billy
Every second: no cuts, no comments.

Image credit: Universal Pictures

A hot couple with great chemistry can take you great distances in romcom. Add a sympathetic take on sex work, tastefully spicy intimacy, and gorgeous costumes, and you’ve got my favorite romcom from when I was growing up. Pretty Woman formed all my preferences in romance.

This movie is ripe for a class- and capitalism-first analysis that I can’t do because it feels too personal, but I love that this is yet another entry into movies about “success in capitalism is hollow and i must turn from its excesses to find myself.”

The older brooding guy and *gorgeous* leggy redhead were surely my first non-Disney bisexual crush.

Despite a socioeconomic chasm and almost two decades between them, Edward and Vivian are one of the most equal-feeling couples of my recent romcom watches. Linus baffled Sabrina with manipulations, Higgins had zero interest in Eliza’s agency, but Edward and Vivian always communicate to get on the same page.

These two have a more positive relationship than most employers and employees, but Pretty Woman also touches on the less-glossy aspects of sex work, like physical abuse, drug addiction, exploitation by pimps, and more – primarily through dialogue. They could have chosen to keep it shallower yet in support of the fairytale Vivian wants, but I think it’s a tasteful balance of reality versus romantic fantasy.

The original screenplay was far severer, and didn’t end with a happily ever after. I love breaking tropes. But we truly do not have enough gorgeous, vulnerable endings as we see in this movie, where our lovers (parted as friends) reunite at the cost of Edward braving his fear of heights. A little bit.

I’m genuinely happy to see these people come back together and ride off into the Sunset Boulevard. This movie is exactly as warm as it needs to be.

Image credit: Touchstone Pictures

In a nightmare of capitalistic gender binaried cisheteronormativity, the magazines Cosmopolitan and Maxim have taken on lives of their own, and they wear the faces of Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey. Cosmopolitan decides to mimic her awkward autistic friend to prove how even someone as hot as Kate Hudson can drive away any decent, rational, properly heterosexual, extremely masculine, sports- and cigar- and poker-loving man. She can’t wait for the opportunity to write about politics (vaguely, something about Tajikistan) but first she must manipulate a man into rejecting her for being bubbly, socially inappropriate, goofy, and demanding.

Meanwhile, Maxim has no leg to stand on, because he’s hoping to leverage his control over Cosmopolitan’s heart to make her actually fall in love and prove to his slimy boss that he deserves an ad account. He is competing with two incredibly hot women who should get anything they want and wield their sexuality to this effect. “MENNNN like you don’t know what WOMENNNN want,” they say, hotly, and I honestly don’t wanna criticize. I love them.

The movie rides a charming high on the frothing chemistry between McConaughey and Hudson, who are equally matched in being the whitest human beings, charmingly rich, and in absolutely no risk of actual violence when accidentally running away with priceless jewelry to fight in a parking lot. I genuinely cackle at the antics, even though you cannot regard these characters as actual human beings without suffocating on the weight of arbitrary gender expectations.

The extremely taupe-colored love story is not nearly as fun after the point where we go home to Maxim’s home to meet some cop holding a baby, and the premise of these magazines manipulating each other turns into yawn-worthy low drama that plucks out a couple standard tropes for the resolution and doesn’t even bother to customize them for the concept. He interrupts her on her journey to a job interview to make out on a bridge. The end.

PS, the love fern was nowhere near dying. Ferns die so much more than that.

Image source: Paramount Pictures

Next time you watch this, I challenge you to see it as a deliberate gay farce. Henry Higgins is clearly a drag queen teaching a lower class Eliza Doolittle, cis lesbian, how to femme it up for high society.

I’d like to argue this was entirely deliberate: the movie is entirely too funny to be unselfaware about the impact of Rex Harrison swanning through a song like “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?” when he’s been wearing crushed purple velvet and flapping his hands at the wrist like he’s swatting rainbow gnats.

This man dismisses beautiful young Eliza when he first sees her because he can’t wait to get home with Colonel Pickering, who Higgins seems to live with, and who is the target of this song pining for more masculinity in women.

Pickering and Higgins together are the bitchiest old queens. They are the arbiters of femininity. Though they are both obligate bachelors (expressed in the same coded language once used to describe aging gay men), Pickering knows the good dress shops. Why, Higgins asks? With different performances, we might think Pickering is treating his many lovers, but in this performance, it’s easy to think Pickering likes to dress up himself. Eliza even asks if Pickering will expect to have her dresses when she leaves (because he bought them, of course, but even so–)

This doesn’t substantially change the relationship between Higgins and Eliza! Queer relationships are complicated. There can be intense intimacy without following the linear treadmill of heterosexual relationship milestones (courting, engagement, marriage, children, MONOGAMY, lifelong, etc). When a fabulous, larger-than-life, legendary-in-society drag queen takes humble little dyke Eliza under her arm, who is to say Eliza can’t fall for Miss Higgins? and vice versa?

Indeed, Eliza expresses the opposite of desire for sex with Higgins. She says she doesn’t want to make love to him. She wants to be close to him. She sees the grand, fabulous, worldly beauty of Miss Higgins. Eliza is genuinely grateful for the embiggening of her life with this fancy fussy fellow who wears a *lot* of purple velvet. She has no use for Freddy. She’s not into *guys* like that.

Higgins is head over heels for Eliza too. It is this obsession that makes their relationship compelling in this performance: Eliza is a doll for Higgins and oh boy he needs to be able to act out his queer dress-up gender affirmative urges on her. Once he knows that she can read him as well as he can read her, that’s it. Miss Higgins cannot *breathe* without Eliza.

Hence, both of them are happy with the slipper situation at the end, uneven as it seems, because both of them have what the other wants, and they’re fine with the status quo (as long as Miss Higgins stops being such a bitch *sometimes*).

I’d also like to add that Eliza’s speech about her aunt’s straw hat while Higgins dances around, dying in the background, is actually the funniest speech in cinema ever.

Image credit: Warner Bros Studios