Now that I’ve entered the world of the Netflix Christmas Cinematic Universe, there’s no point extracting meaning from narrative paucity. If you watched this lady switch with herself once, and you want to watch her switch with herself again (and again, and again), then you’ve signed on to get what you get, and may Hathor have mercy on your soul.

What you get here is a playful extrapolation of the original concept. Literally, it’s like someone sat in a room with some other guy and said, “The numbers on this lady switching were good. Let’s see how many switches we can do before we reach diminishing returns on viewership.”

Within the rigid framework of putting many Vanessa Hudgens into a single room and finding excuses to pretend they are flip-flopping between one another’s lives, there is plenty of silly fun to be had, but not a lot of development for characters who seem important.

Somehow none of Vanessa Hudgens personalities feel like realized humans. They are all Vanessa Hudgens doing a voice with a costume change. The Third Personality for Hudgens is my favorite because she’s a Disney villain who basically asks to escape a prison sentence on account of being “cuzzies” with the queen.

Meanwhile, our Baker has been married to King Edward since the end of movie 1, yet I hardly know the guy. In both outings, he mostly shows up to look earnest and perform the trope where a commoner helps make a king better by connecting him to his people. I can’t tell if the Daddy Friend hero is better developed or if I just find him a lot more attractive. I do appreciate every opportunity TPS:SA gives me to look at him.

The fact that a whole regent abduction plot can be played so lightly seems entirely appropriate given the givens.

Like maybe the problem with the first movie was that it didn’t go far enough. This movie is going, and going, and going. Maybe the executives stopped caring once an appropriate level of Switches were met. “How many switches? And it’s a good ninety minutes long? Send it to the website!”

Image credit: Netflix

When Buddha says, “There is suffering,” it’s meant to be a neutral statement to which anyone can relate regardless of class or caste. Certain experiences are integral to existence as a human being. Standing in opposition to and in service of suffering is love, another near-universal condition that people will experience similarly whether they are born a cute Chicago baker or a cute Maldonadan Duchess.

Stories like Prince and the Pauper keep bringing us back because of this universality of human experience. We’ve often used reversing the roles of people born in disparate circumstances to remind ourselves there’s nothing special about being rich or especially failing about being poor.

Netflix’s The Princess Switch deprives us of any such class commentary; in the style of many holiday romances, nobody here is visibly struggling to make ends meet. Everyone has the hallmarks of wealth.

Our baker is a small businesswoman who has done quite well for herself, lacking in nothing but love. There’s no shock to receiving the finery of a duchess. She’s not exactly coming out of the gutter to a palace. There’s also no culture shock visiting Belgravia, which is on the map next to Aldovia (from A Christmas Prince), and wherein people appear to have posh English accents. These are very Western nations.

What we leave behind, then, isn’t so much a Prince and the Pauper story (despite the appearance of it). We’re also not getting glimpses of what an alternate life might have been for these women in different situations. This isn’t Sliding Doors. Heck, they weren’t even aiming for The Parent Trap.

No, Netflix doesn’t want there to be any metaphor. Netflix wants to put Vanessa Hudgens in a bunch of opportunities to look very cute opposite two men. I would like to say, Vanessa Hudgens, nice job, ding dong. It took me a minute to figure out who one love interest was because he looked like My First Generic English Ken Doll, but the other one? Nice, Vanessa Hudgens. Nice.

When you see something polished so shiny and so devoid of meaning, it’s hard to think it isn’t deliberate. Electing to only show upper class circumstances in an adaptation of a story specifically about class commentary is, perversely, the exact kind of political statement the studio means to avoid.

“You’re overthinking a Hallmark-style romcom Sara,” sayeth you, and that’s absolutely true.

In my defense, all movies take a lot of people to make. Many of those people genuinely care about cinema and the movies they make, even when it’s a commercial product. I hold the work of the unseen crew in esteem highly enough to offer the exact same degree of criticism I offer movies by auteurs.

Besides, Barbie as The Princess and the Pauper (2004) is probably equal in commercialism level and it was *way* more thematically substantial.

I’d be more likely to shrug off the Choice to flatten the Prince and the Pauper (Mark Twain’s mustache would quiver) if such light froth didn’t feel like work to get through. There’s no music to the editing–neither rhythm nor flow. Vanessa Hudgens is lovely, but not so lovely to keep me entertained for a full movie. Her multiple personality act feels like an act, which means the put-on gets tiring.

At one point they started watching A Christmas Prince (yes, really) and I wished that I could go back to that one. It felt faster.

Image credit: Netflix

I had zero expectations going into Four Christmases. I don’t seek out Reese Witherspoon or Vince Vaughn movies. But I’m going through a whole Christmas movie/romcom thing, I don’t have any pressing movies on the queue, and I’m picking a lot of flicks nigh randomly at the moment. Four Christmases was advertised as a Christmas romcom on the page of some streaming service. Hence, I clicked.

In this movie, we attend the titular Four Christmases because the protagonists have gotten fogged out of a flight to Fiji. Bear in mind that I wanted these two to go to Fiji instead of family holidays. By the time they ring the first doorbell, we’ve established that this passionate couple has kept busy having fun for three years, and they’re super disinterested in the heteronormative relationship treadmill. Good for you, Reese and Vince*! (*Actor names used to protect my brain from trying to juggle character names. I am talking about the characters though.)

Yet exposure to one another’s families starts to change Reese’s heart. It’s charming to see how authentic the portrayals of families are in Four Christmases. While the humor can get a little slapsticky, it’s grounded through the unfiltered honesty of your weird gross brother, breastfeeding women talking about their nipples, and parents who never grew past their own flaws.

Seeing this family nonsense makes Reese begin to imagine Vince in a fatherly, husbandly context, which is a problem because the two of them have established they are *not* doing that.

It’s the best part of the movie, in fact. Reese and Vince are adults who talk things out. They have agreed explicitly that their free-wheeling life is what they want right now. And when Reese realizes she feels collared by an inability to discuss swaths of their lives together, much less the potential of a future beyond another snorkeling vacation on that lawyer money, she tells Vince immediately.

Their breakup is undramatic and sweet and heartbreaking. They just want different things.

But Vince, whose character can be a dingbat, realizes that he’s made a mistake pretty quickly. It’s affirmed when his father approves of Vince’s decision to break up. “That’s my boy,” says Dad in the ultimate “oh shit” moment. Reese found Vince’s family lovable, but Vince sees his family as a cautionary tale. He wants better. He wants to imagine a future with Reese.

Of course, these two weirdos imagine a future together that is still not quite normal; they have silly ideas about what they might do with children. This is the couple we met by seeing them faking a meet-cute at a bar as foreplay. There’s nothing they won’t do in a cute fun way. That’s just who they are.

The ending almost made me cry because it was so sweet. On one hand, the two of them kinda got stuck on the treadmill of heteronormativity anyway, because biology sometimes has opinions about that too. On the other hand, getting caught on the news a second time had me cackling.

I’m sure there’s a lot to analyze in the movie beyond an enthusiastic recap, but having watched this for the first time tonight, I’m still stuck on my initial reaction–which is glowingly happy, like the two of them together, usually, when they can have healthy boundaries with their weirdo families. Four Christmases got everything right. This is absolutely going into my rotation of holiday movies.

Image credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

When I give a movie like this four stars, it’s somewhat different than the four stars I give a movie I regard as near-perfect but not-for-me (like Halloween 1978) or as really wonderful cinema that deserves respect for its craft (like The Holiday 2006). Four stars for A Christmas Prince is four stars for a movie that set realistic goals and expectations, then met them solidly.

From Roger Ebert, I learned to judge movies mostly by what they hope to accomplish. A Christmas Prince is an uncomplicated transference of the innocent princess fantasy many girls had in the Disney Renaissance. There are touches to A Christmas Prince that suggest homage, even (is the rescue from a wolf in the snowy forest from Beauty and the Beast?).

To help you disconnect your fantasy of becoming a princess from the irl baggage of monarchy, A Christmas Prince occurs in fantasy country Aldovia. It kinda looks like a nice little German castle in the middle of Disneyland’s Fantasyland. The movie asks you, nicely, to surrender yourself to believing this is real enough, but not so real as to get icky. I appreciate it. I would have loved Red White & Royal Blue a lot more if only they had made up fake countries for it. (The USA presidency and English royal family aren’t sexy. I’m sorry.)

Now that we’ve established there’s no relationship with reality, we can enjoy a story about a journalist who accidentally falls in love with the royal family she’s covering. I personally enjoy the kind of romcoms where love unfolds between the protagonists and the whole family (see: My Big Fat Greek Wedding).

Here, our heroine’s entry is fake-tutoring the prince’s adorable younger sister. We also get a respectful relationship built between our heroine and intimidatingly sexy Queen Alice Krige. All these trappings take up enough time that they almost feel more significant than the pleasantly lukewarm exchanges between reporter and prince. The chemistry isn’t exactly burning down the fairytale cottage, but…does it need to?

A cartoonishly villainous couple give us a little bit of potentially high-stakes but low-temperature succession drama, in brief, before getting out of the way of everything going right again. Don’t you love it when everything goes right? Wouldn’t it actually be so nice if you got an opportunity at work that led you to fall into love with a facially symmetric guy who comes packaged with tolerable in-laws and economic security in a picturesque castle?

A Christmas Prince knows that we kinda wanna turn off the world/brain once in a while. A doctor’s office could safely play this on VHS in the lobby on repeat and offend nobody. Don’t we kinda *need* that?

Image credit: Netflix

What an absolute delight of working class rage. I can’t get over the elegance of the plot, nor how well the wish fulfillment is supported narratively and visually throughout the film. Total classic.

From the beginning, our trio of heroines are characterized by smart costuming. I could never say enough about the self-assured beauty of our Boundaries-Loving Queen Dolly Parton, who knows a beautiful woman is going to Just Have to Deal With Some Crap, but won’t let it make her any less beautiful. Jane Fonda’s expressive professionalism gives us a quick sense of a woman who is pulling herself “in” to try to get along. Lily Tomlin begins wearing the most masculine suits, having long survived in a toxic environment.

The environment itself begins costumed in brutalist gray-blue. Cramped desks allow no individuality. Schedules are micromanaged without concern for the workers’ needs. Mistakes are punished severely with verbal abuse.

And the boss—oh boy, the boss. I hope you’ve never had to deal with a boss as openly misogynistic as this one, but most of us have probably known someone similar who hid it better. My first male boss tried to have me handle the department holiday cards because i had “nice handwriting” (I do not) (my job was computer tech). But this boss has every bad experience you could have, and then some, played to such comic levels that you want all the worst things to happen to him.

Our heroines’ fantasies about various ways to kill and dominate the boss are a laugh riot. Would you expect any different from such enormous talents?

As they scheme against their boss in the most hysterical ways (I too wish I could dangle Some People from my ceiling in BDSM gear when they’re jerks), the trio reform themselves and their workplace. Their joy is expressed in expressive, freeing costuming, while the office itself becomes gowned in warmer colors, an open floor design highlighting accessibility for a worker using a wheelchair, the opportunity to have family-friendly flexible schedules, and even a daycare.

Of course the boss deserves the worst to happen to him, but poetic justice ensures something better than the worst happens: He is praised for turning the department’s productivity around and promoted to a job he doesn’t want in Brazil. Bye!

If only these three characters could take charge of the United States for a few years.

Image credit: 20th Century Fox

What if I took this dainty pair of embroidery scissors and trimmed around Tom Hanks’s character to remove him? We would end up with something that feels more like women’s fiction, and something I wouldn’t want to rip up with my teeth like my dog eating socks.

The short summary is: A small businesswoman is trying to make her mother’s bookstore survive the opening of Barnes & Noble*. Not only does she fail and lose the bookstore, but she ends up with the guy responsible for the changing economic circumstances (literally, this guy is bourgeoisie, a boss, a wage-thief, the kind of guy whose whole family goes to the guillotine in the revolution) that spent the last few months actively lying to her gd face in an incredibly personal way.

Thing is, I think the bitter ending is totally right for Meg Ryan as a creator. She’s obviously a Nerd For Story. Her new non-romcom with David Duchovny also doesn’t have an HEA. Ryan knows her career is shaped around the fantasy of love and hope healing, but she wants to know where the boundaries on that exist in reality.

And the beauty of Meg Ryan’s performance is what keeps me coming back to this movie. She *is* overloaded with hope. She *hopes* she will give her mother’s gift to her own daughter, who doesn’t exist yet. She *hopes* people will continue coming to her bookstore because they care about children’s books the way Fox Books* doesn’t. She hopes to remain the center of a community. She hopes to do this the rest of her life.

So this movie takes away all of Meg Ryan’s hopes and says, “What now?” Still, this woman picks herself up and says, “I have lost everything. It is time for something new.” She becomes an editor. The legacy of her mother turns out (subtextually) to be one of resilience.

And that’s not how the story frames it.

Rather, this movie is the story of capitalism bulldozing small business hopes, and it has *nothing* encouraging to say about it.

Meg Ryan’s mom didn’t want to pass an empire of capital onto her daughter; she wanted to pass hope on. And the Fox family, who HAS built an empire of capital, stealing wages, destroying businesses and culture, gets everything they could possibly want. Including the son of the family getting the enchanting Meg Ryan.

You can talk about how Joe Fox isn’t entirely happy with this situation. We see his discontent. To that, I would like to say, so fn what? He doesn’t lose anything. The rewards of plot and economy are showered on him no matter how badly he behaves so persistently. He even continues lying to and manipulating our heroine after her business has fallen. We’re supposed to think this is when they *really* fall in love.

Nora Ephron, are you okay? Do you need a lesbian strike team to remove you from your life?

~

FWIW, if I wanted this to work as a romcom, I’d tweak the script so that Meg Ryan’s character feels burdened by her mom’s legacy and *wants* something new, so that it’s an unexpected gift when capitalism-wearing-Tom-Hanks-face bulldozes her life. It wouldn’t be a massive change to take this ending from feeling like spit in her eye to being like “Ok, I guess she’s happier anyway.”

Image credit: Warner Bros.