furiously hammering on my keyboard writing a holiday romcom screenplay based on paul mccartney’s insufferable ‘wonderful christmas time’
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why isnt there a fairytale of new york romantic comedy
like its their worst song but its an ok christmas song!!
per the lyrics, this should be pretty simple.
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OKAY, SEE , THE MOVIE ISN’T BAD BECAUSE THIS IS THE PLOT
THE MOVIE IS BAD BECAUSE IT DROPS THIS TWIST 10 MINUTES BEFORE IT ENDS
I LITERALLY WENT FROM “this movie is okay, why do people hate it” TO “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS BULLSHIT I HATE IT”
lol at 20,000 likes even registering on the engagement scale
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i love that you saw it
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I needed a filler movie that day, okay
gotta balance dumb action movies and dumb nerd movies with dumb normal adult movies
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I want to watch that one too!!! Worried I’m not enough of a true head to fully understand the depths of the Wham cosmology.
It’s not a romcom but there was also that Matthew McConaughey one this year someone told me about where the plot twist is that the entire movie took place in a fishing simulator all along. A good year for freakish plot synopses.
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watch this movie guys
A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding (2018) - In the first movie we were introduced to the distant yet strangely familiar country of Aldovia but didn’t really get to peek under the hood… YES there’s a castle and some horses and stuff but what about the economy? What about industrial relations? If this is your interest then I have terrific news, as the sequel’s main plotline involves the new king’s uncertain efforts to “modernize” his country’s snow-based economy. Our first hint that all is not well comes when his big speech gets some ambient heckling noises from a crowd of protesters who sort of behave like the interchangeable audience members in the background of a racing game. They forlornly wave some protest signs including the eternally appropriate “WHY?!” and the slightly less so “Bye, bye!”, which is a weird thing to wave at a king. I mean you can get rid of one but usually in those circumstances I imagine the placards are a little less polite. IIRC there is a “take back control” chant as well.
The situation escalates - the royal couple is forced to delay their picking out a christmas tree due to strikes in the city! and theatre workers also striking in solidarity interrupt the young princess’s school play!! As she sadly remarks, “At this rate, there won’t even BE a Christmas.” In fairness all this stuff is exaggerated enough to basically constitute high camp, though the movie does sort of sign off on a general thing where positive change is enacted through the beneficence of those above while strikes and unions and so forth just constitute a kind of ignorant, counterproductive truculence on the part of anonymous drably-dressed extras.
I think the weirdest part of this one is that the movie really doubles down that this is basically a transposed fantasy version of England – there’s the accents, the pubs are named things like The Rose & Crown, everybody’s called something like Steve Straw or Jack Twigg, I guess the wedding stuff has a lot of visual references to the recent real-world royal wedding although I did my best to avoid having any of that stuff register on my consciousness at the time. So it’s kind of offputting in that this is like the british version of Eagleland, but in a way I also respect it. If we already have years of movies and games taking place in “Urzikstan” or “Kijuju” then we might as well start treating western Europe the same way.
Anyway for the record the second weirdest part is that the little girl princess reveals 2/3rs through the movie with no forewarning that she’s also an expert hacker as she helps the main lady break into a government website. The third is maybe when the corrupt minister’s plot is finally revealed and he denies the accusations and the main lady suddenly grabs a bow off the wall and points it at him and then he’s grabbed by guards who were there the whole time.
I guess it’s outside the text, but the fourth weirdest part is that the dad is both recast and given a whole new personality as a raucous only-in-New-York type guy, and there are a few lines about how he “feels like a totally new person” and so forth, and then when I looked the movie up on IMDB it seemed like every review was complaining about this character!!! Everybody despises New Dad, everybody loves the more sedate and dignified Old Dad, even though obviously the only point of including this character in the movie is for the inevitable scene where he outrages a stuffy courtier by making the queen eat a hotdog or similar.
Other minor things I liked: the very mysterious Warhol-ish background assistant to the wedding designer. The part where the young princess disguises her hacking efforts by tabbing to a videogame that looks like a cross between Dark Souls and one of those browser games that you famously won’t last 10 seconds in, and has exactly two frames of animation.
Finally, it doesn’t come up much but on the back page of a plot-relevant newspaper we see in the beginning there’s an article about dubious cryptocurrency investments. The shady nobleman cousin from the first movie also talks about researching a new cryptocurrency but alas it never comes up again. Is this a discarded plot fragment or a carefully laid trail for the plot of the third movie?? I will do my best to find out.
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Sources say that Richard Curtis has just been sentenced to death. I am pro-life and take no pleasure in reporting this.
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This ad is perfectly crafted thecatamites bait
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Christmas Prince 3: The Crypto Prince
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apparently a christmas prince: royal baby reveals the physical geography of aldovia
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oh shit, I used to live there! back when the territory was known as ‘Slovenia’. no wonder these movies seemed so familiar.
think the most brutal part of the tory advert has just been realizing I now live in a country where Love Actually is both known and regarded well enough for a scene to be recreated beat for beat as part of a major election campaign.
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got an email from julia roberts in pretty woman
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remotely watched some more romcoms to keep me calm in this time of strife on earth.
Down To You (2000) - this one was weird because it felt like the late 90s equivalent of, like, Nick And Norah’s Infinite Playlist or something. One of those movies that tries to be a fast-paced romance for happening young people, but gets converted to a standard romcom somewhere along the studio production line, except is still stuck with this sort of collection of indie movie signifiers such as horrible characters, rambling structure, people talking directly to camera or saying “wait, back up” and then flashing back to an earlier part of the narrative, etc. Little bits of background quirkiness that slowly become more and more unreal and disconnected as they move from draft to draft. Like, there’s a background character called Jim Morrison played by Ashton Kutcher dressing as Jim Morrison, and it’s presented like it’s gonna be a joke character but then there are no actual jokes. And then later the main lady (Julia Stiles) sleeps with him, which ends up the impetus for the big dramatic break-up scene. Which causes the protagonist, Freddie Prinz Jr, to get so depressed he drinks a bottle of shampoo and has to go to hospital to have his stomach pumped. There’s a subplot about his best friend becoming a porn actor, which for some reason makes him become a pretentious ascot-wearing theatre guy who goes on tv talk shows and always speaks like someone from a renaissance faire. Henry Winkler plays a TV chef, but not like an especially zany one, just a regular non-zany TV chef.
One of the secondary characters is a short wiry guy who I guess is meant to be a poseur who starts wearing increasingly bizarre jock jam outfits in every scene and then I think the last we see of him is shrieking while he has his ears pierced by two goth girls on a couch at a party. I admired his journey and wished he’d been the center of the movie.
The Perfect Date (2019) - the netflix movie generation algorithm improves, this one was pretty light and breezy. A dumb teen guy starts an escort business where he uses his powers of “telling people whatever they want to hear” to give them each The Perfect Date. but does power corrupt, etc. it does a funny thing with the main girl where i guess we’re meant to infer certain things about her from minor tells (eg that she’s independent and feminist because she wears boots, goes to coffee shop), but then never really explains or demonstrates those things, so the signs remain these kind of non-sequitors. wow, you wear boots? guess you’re not like other girls…
veronica from riverdale is in it as an unattainable rich girl but mostly plays it like the same character? there are all these scenes where the main guy stares longingly at her from across the room, and i kept reading them as just him being distracted because wait, is that veronica from riverdale??
the best subplot is that the male romantic rival ends up revealing himself to be the in-universe equivalent of banksy, named “trashbug”, who draws big stencilled graffiti murals of like babies in gasmasks everywhere. and when anyone finds out they react with immediate horror and dismay.
the start of the movie has the main guy give a monologue about how he wants to be a disruptive innovator, naming elon musk as one of his examples, i wonder how many screenwriter types who decided to throw in a premature shout-out to elon musk as world historical genius circa like a script from four years ago are now regretting their decision. later in the movie we find out this character doesn’t know what reddit is, which may either explain things or just make them more confusing.
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Given your new quarantine situation I expect one of these a day, chop chop
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i mean being stuck in an apartment to watch meg ryan movies for 30 days sounds like the setup to a junji ito comic but on the other hand, how much longer can I keep outrunning my fate
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Being stuck in an apartment to watch meg ryan movies for 30 days sounds like the setup to a meg ryan movie
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