Just wanted to recommend Colossal which is like a kaiju movie crossed with a romantic comedy, then in the second half it starts to turn tropes of the latter around and becomes much more interesting/dark. Really enjoyed it.
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LAST CHRISTMAS (2019) - Festive greetings, traveller. Pull up a sleigh seat. Have some mulled wine. Don’t you enjoy the holiday season? What’s that? No, it’s not over yet. You see, this gun here in my hand is loaded. Don’t try to call for help. There’s still time for one last seasonal movie. There’s still time for one… LAST CHRISTMAS.
The two things everybody knows about Last Christmas are (1) it’s based on the Wham! song of the same name (2) it has a Big Twist, taken from the same song, in what is possibly the single most crazed way you could choose to adapt those lyrics. Everybody knows this - well and good. But even regular romcoms have all kind of weird incidental business in the background, and what made me always want to check this one out at last was, what in the world would that business look like for a movie where THAT was the twist?
Things begin promisingly with the words YUGOSLAVIA, 1999 thrown up onscreen in a menacing soviet-style font. Everyone is gathered solemnly in a church, before a children’s choir. As the organ plays some familiar chords, a lone girl singer launches into song: a plaintive rendition of George Michael’s “Heal The Pain.” FLASH FORWARD to a London bar in 2017, where the singer is now Emilia Clarke, talking to what can only be described as a Character Creation Guy - the person who comes up to you in the first minute of an RPG to start asking a series of broad yet non-invasive questions for you to describe your character and motivations to, while he stands there nodding and smiling with interest. I guess it’s meant to be a sign that she’s in a bad place that she ends up going home with the tutorial himbo.
Anyway from there we get a series of vignettes intended to show how her life is going nowhere, incl the very Hallmark detail that she works fulltime as an elf in a year-round Christmas store run by… Michelle Yeoh?! Doing a “stingy ethnic storeowner” character replete with exaggerated accent, which is kind of demoralising, although not as bad as when Emma Thompson (“Doctor”, Bridget Jones 2, and also this movie’s writer) appears as the protagonist’s mom and… there’s no easy way to say this. Dame Emma Thompson has been diagnosed with Borat Disease. 2-3 celebrities each year fall victim to this dreadful illness, which manifests as an unstoppable yearning to mutter broken english in a husky voice while acting like an unaccountably rude and humourless space alien. At the point where we’re watching her mournfully sing Croatian folk songs the effect gets truly weird - incidentally the movie does specify that everybody in this family is from Croatia, which to my knowledge was not part of Yugoslavia circa 1999. I don’t know, I don’t want to assume that was just a mix up - maybe the family moved back afterwards, maybe they still thought it was good.
Things pick up for the elf lady when she has a meet cute involving a mysterious yet handsome young man who keeps staring up into the sky outside the Christmas store - when she goes to see why it turns out that he’s looking at a falcon(!) in the middle of London. And that in fact looking up, and telling people to look up, is this guy’s whole thing.
SPOILER ZONE: If you know anything about this movie then you know what’s coming. The reason the main character is so sad is that Last Christmas she had to get a heart transplant, from a mysterious donor who was killed in a car accident the same day, and who turns out to bear the same name as the magical life-affirming young man who has been teaching her to enjoy life again. And it turns out the bench where they’d sit is his memorial bench, and inscribed on the bench is his favourite saying… “Look Up”. For the curious she does not have sex with the ghost of her heart donor before the big reveal, although she tries and they make out a bit.
Anyway he inspires her to start going to the homeless shelter where he used to volunteer and start singing christmas songs outside it to raise donations, and there’s a whole thing involving a begrudgingly-impressed crusty old organizer guy and the younger guy who urges him to give her a chance and various comical yet plucky homeless people, many of whom seem weirdly to have been pulled off of the 19th century stage, who start joining her in song even though, get this, some of them can’t sing very well, and then she organizes a big concert for them and sings, yes, Last Christmas, and everybody claps. Heart ghost nods approvingly and walks off into the night etc.
Honestly I would say the weirdest thing about this one is not even the twist per se as much as it is the writing in general, most of which feels like it wasn’t even first draft, more like a brainstorming Club Penguin rp session which was then filled out with “banter”, which is what english people call it when there’s no actual jokes, just a kind of deadened i-could-go-on-like-this-all-day style of wittering jocosity. The big joke in the movie comes from slav emma thompson learning “dick” is slang for “penis” and making a big deal about how their neighbour is also called dick and so his name is penis?? They don’t play a record scratch though, you’ll have to imagine that part.
I guess there is some mild strangeness from this world made up musically 100% of George Michael songs, where the heroine carries around a suitcase with I <3 George Michael sticker on it in comic sans and where her old bedroom turns out to have a very impressive, like, full wall-size 6ft glossy poster of the man himself in mint condition. But idk even then I feel like his stuff is not really noticeably distinct enough for the effect to be that odd. Maybe if they try making another one of these it can be someone who’s really into Slade, or Paul McCarthy but ONLY his solo christmas work, I think that would be a more interesting character detail to base a movie around without ever explaining.
Miscellaneous bits:
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there’s a romance between the michelle yeoh character and a mysterious man who stands outside her christmas store looking in, and when they first see each other they seem like they have some kind of history together but as it turn out no, he’s just some guy who walked in and acts like that and whose only personality traits are loving christmas and also sauerkraut. he was my favourite character of the movie. sample romantic dialogue: “this is my best thing… christmas.” to which she responds: “i, also, love it.”
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i also liked when the main character’s sister is attacking her for being high-maintenance by saying “you’re hungry, you’re not hungry… there’s always something.” women be getting hungry or not hungry.
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topical content alert: there’s about half a second where a character is watching tv and they say the word Brexit. and then later there’s a scene where a guy yells about immigrants on the bus, and emma thompson frets about being deported. fortunately the problem seems to be solved offscreen because none of those things ever come up again or interfere with a denouement which has nothing to do with them.
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when the main character starts to sing it cuts to a smiling homeless man giving a thumbs up at her and saying YEAH!. i would like to suggest that this becomes an established technique for whenever a movie wants to show us a character is doing something good.
Overall I would say this felt like one of the little bitty micro-romance themed sections from Love Actually was expanded back into a full length movie, through being padded out with either comic racism or waiting-for-the-meeting-to-start level session banter made like 50% worse than usual through being said in an english accent. The effect is really more enervating than I’ve been able to describe; I feel like this is one of the most brutal movies I’ve watched for the thread, maybe not as bad as The Clapper which made me feel like all the bones had been removed from my body but definitely up there with Me You Madness, Aloha, the Bo Derek one, etc. As my partner said in an equally sullen mood when we were most of the way through, “I wish they WOULD deport Emma Thompson.”
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i would watch a movie where paul mccartney’s wonderful christmastime is the only song that has ever been written, like humanity tried music once, produced that, and then just decided to quit while we were ahead
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thanks for suffering through this mess to remind me why i gave it the lowest possible score of 0.5 ☆s. It is one of the few movies where you can feel going dumber while watching it, and the best part about it was hating it (tbh, almost gave it that missing half of a star for making me feel anything, but that’s reserved for the special zone of 1-1.5 ☆s, the ultimate tier of making you feel nothing or being bored enough to not care at all what happens).
… and sorry to say so, but this movie did not manage to break even on that premise, like it was designed to avoid being a simple, drab copycat xmas movie, which wants at least to be hated for something, instead of being a sole snowflake in spring, falling on the ground and disappearing instantly because its environment is Not Welcoming At All.
tl;dr:
Keep this movie in mind for when you need to resuscitate someone by evoking hate in its purest form, it is as good as it gets for that reason.
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also i was thinking last night about why this happens and my conclusion is that it’s one of the few forms left of conspicuous ethnic caricature for big actors that nobody will get mad at them for.
for example, to imagine tom hanks playing a black or asian character… no, it’s not good to do this. the brain rejects it. we feel like we’ve glimpsed something we should never see.
however for tom hanks to play a british character - it’s no good, it’s almost too far within the realm of plausbility. it’s basically the same as just being in a period drama or something.
but if we were to create an extensive website database, listing every ethnicity on earth and ranking each by a score of how offensive it would be for tom hanks to depict them in a movie - - we may well end up discovering the outlines of the elusive “borat zone”, a xanadu-like territory where famous actors get to do a racist sounding cartoon accent without anyone getting mad at them for it.
i would make this project my life’s work if i were not sure that there was already a supercomputer at Langley devoted to performing the same calculations and that enroaching on this terrain may well earn me a CIA bullet. nevertheless i am tempted to try. how else can we achieve a better world, a world where for example emma thompson can play spend an entire romcom putting on a cajun voice. the very thought of such a thing gives me hope, in the darkness.
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Every Curse of Strahd campaign happens entirely in the Borat Zone
Strangely enough, Italy is also entirely comprehended by the Borat Zone, whose shadowy tendrils reach chillingly across the Mediterranean
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italians have a later curfew than the other tenants of the Borat Zone but have never officially left
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Still waiting for the star studded holiday romcom adaptation of Santa’s chocolate shop
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ironically, Borat itself is not part of the borat zone, as Sacha Baron Cohen is rightly loathed by Qazaqs
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BEAR CITY (2010) - I actually watched this fairly recently but forgot to post it - any other gay romcoms I’ve seen predated this thread, which I guess by now is such a storehouse of dark heterosexual energy that it’s easy to forget any other kind exists. Nevertheless this one is definitely a romcom and I would say the gay ones I’ve watched primarily differ from their straight counterparts in the following ways:
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Soundtracked pop songs which are obviously by some guy the director knows rather than being stock music, a pleasing effect
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More explicit about actual sex than your average eg Julia Roberts film
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All romcoms take place in a kind of utopia where the immediate problems of survival are treated as secondary to the more interesting problem of love and desire. And the depiction of that utopia feels a bit more selfconscious and charged when the utopia itself is “a world exclusively comprised of burly gay men who know and like each other” rather than “a world where it’s possible to live in NYC penthouse on the strength of a wordpress site called cookerytips dot com”.
For the third of these reasons most of the gay romcoms I’ve watched tend to shy away from dramatic coming out narratives. However!! They had to structure this movie somehow and the way they do so is quite interesting - “being into bears” is explicitly framed and described as a kind of coming out 2, or gay squared. Our POV character is a young, skinny, out guy who starts the movie wracked with anxiety that his tastes will be discovered by his roommate, another young, skinny, out guy except one who acts just like the oddly sexless and flamboyant gay friend from straight romantic comedies (a weird thing about gay squared is that at points it seems to wrap back around to regular homophobia…??). Anyway as soon as the roommate leaves he’s back on the (now sadly deceased?) “bearotic dot com”, account name boy4fur21. The camera gives us a good view of all the different options and features on this website incl the ability to filter by “Average Bear”/“Muscle Bear”/“Bear Cub”/“Chubby Bear”/“Daddy Bear” and more. Incidentally this website is one of the many bear-themed businesses listed as sponsors of the movie and so at times the movie itself sort of feels like a pitch for a whole extended universe of bear events and products.
Anyway after a while of standing mournfully across the street from a bear bar our hero eventually musters the courage to go in and get introduced to a bunch of characters who are I’m sorry to say universally more interesting than he is. My personal favourite was Michael, the biggest bear of all who has a storyline about potentially getting a stomach band to seem more employable… The others regard this as a form of self betrayal if it’s done for cosmetic rather than for health purposes… Did I tear up just a little when after fighting about this, Michael’s boyfriend giving him a bag of ice for his bad knee at a cookout was what convinced him not to get the surgery? Well, who can say… I would say that having this character and all the other husky guys in the movie portrayed as effortlessly both confident AND sexy was probably the best thing about the film, and also why it feels like such a weird own goal to have everything revolve around the far blander main character (who in turn has to explain it all to the roommate, whose job in the movie is to essentially be Twink Goofus).
The main love interest also feels sorta bland although in fairness they do introduce him whipping out a collection of custom metal sounding rods at the bear-only coffee shop. He bonds with the protagonist by giving him tips on how to bowl but the real turning point comes when the hero goes through an elaborate shopping sequence for, yes, bear-themed merchandise and comes out the other side looking like… well I guess the main way I’d describe it would be “grand theft auto npc”. This is enough to get the other guy’s attention but will it be enough to make him stop giving in to the bears-only peer pressure of his muscular friend group? You’ll have to watch the movie to find out, and to check out the sponsors at the end. Bob Mould is in there!
Finally, some videogame things:
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At one point we see someone playing one of those videogames that looks to have been made up just for somebody to pretend to play in a movie; but in fact, it’s 2007’s “Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia”, and just looks like that.
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Prior to the movie, “Bear City Dot Com” appears to have been the website of a Hong Kong lightgun company.
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if you haven’t seen it already, please seek out the early 2000’s gay rom com pioneer Adam and Steve, which iirc tries to exist in the same general zone as like “There’s Something About Mary” or “American Pie” and other like pre-Apatowvian jock jam rom coms
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The Lady Eve (1941) - is it unfair to talk about a Preston Sturges movie a few posts down from writing about Last Christmas - probably YES but i watched them both and so i’ll do it anyway. Henry Fonda plays a millionaire heir and snake expert of such obvious goodnatured dimness that it feels entirely reasonable that the Barbara Stanwyck character’s first reaction upon seeing him is to throw something at his head. She plays a card shark on the same cruise ship who immediately sets out on a plan to both fleece and possibly marry this person. For most romcoms with a similar con-based premise it’s mostly set dressing at the very start - an enjoyable thing about this movie is that it commits throughout to having the two genres run interference on each other. Rather than being saved for the end, Stanwyck’s realisation that she actually likes this oaf happens very matter of factly less than halfway in - and is treated as setup for one of those con movie scenes where two old hands have to out-cheat one another at cards. Similarly the part where he finds out who she really is and leaves her happens at the end of the second act, which then turns into an elaborate revenge scheme where she then seduces him AGAIN under a false name and accent (!) exclusively as a further way to torment him.
So in a way we could see this as a precursor to such modern classics of himbo humiliation as Strawberry Summer, where at least part of the fun is the venus-in-furs-for-PTA-moms way the female lead gets to effortlessly browbeat and push around her counterpart. But the most striking difference to me is how casually and gleefully amoral this one is by comparison. There’s no effort put into making the Henry Fonda character especially boorish or arrogant so that we feel that he deserves, or will learn from, the various casual miseries he falls into; there’s no tragic background for the Barbara Stanwyck character that explains how she became a card shark, implies her character has become particularly more tender as a result of falling in love, etc. This is maybe the only movie in this thread where professional thieves could steal $32,000 from somebody and NOT give it back, or away, or lose it or whatever by the end of the film. The only justification offered for anybody is how enjoyable they are to watch, which is grand. To this end there are also a lot of solidly gratuitous and goofy supporting parts, incl the wonderful Eugene Pallette as a toadlike brewing millionaire (“Pike’s Pale, the Ale that won for Yale”) and a very EC Segar character named Mugsy Murgatroyd. The 1940s were truly a golden age for types of guy.
In a way I felt a little bad for the situation of contemporary romcoms after watching this - after all, one reason this one felt so lean and sharp by comparison is that it had so much wonderful surrounding cultural padding to play off of, all those old romances and melodramas and lingering bits and bobs of the 19th century like secret twins and long-lost heirs. Later romcoms almost had to work around “romance” itself being an increasingly neglected genre category in itself - they had to build up themselves all the nourishing schmaltz that previous generations could take for granted. I think something would have to be much more explicitly camp now to have the same relish for a scene where the two leads are entwined romantically together on a divan, the music swells, and she asks: “Do you think you’ll always like snakes?” To which he mournfully replies, “Snakes are my life.”
Lastly let me say the one thing I always forget about this movie is that it has an animated cartoon title sequence featuring a charming dancing snake.
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This is way more interesting that being a psychonaut.
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new entry in the political scions as romcom protags / uk us transfer-of-empire as meet cute genre dropped but idk, i think this might be my limit… i already had to tap out of all those netflix ones bc their glossy startup culture dna was too much, i think combining that stuff with cw level toothy theatre kid energy would finish me off for real. whatever happened to the days where sandra bullock was intended to seem “dowdy” because she wore flannel for the first 15 minutes of the movie.
the book it’s based on also seems pretty grim like was everyone involved in this cursed by a witch or what
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I read that character’s name as Alex Cameron-Diaz at first, which honestly would have been a pretty funny joke
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just posting here for good measure
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I can’t believe this exists, who thought this was a good idea?
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good casting for the fella at least
the perfect pairing (2022) - halloween is ovah and it’s the season for movies about head injuries (romantic) again instead. in this one an overcritical by hallmark standards wine critic slips on some ice in her signifying business heels and gets AMNESIA for 3-5 working days. also she has no form of identification bc she left her purse on the train and loaded her luggage into the wrong van and then mistakenly got into a car belonging to a local vineyard employee instead, the very same vineyard now struggling to survive after one of her cruellest and most critical wine pans… all this stuff happens prior to the head injury which left me wondering if anyone could tell, but it makes more sense when you realise that writing mildly catty wine reviews in the hallmarkverse is a Sin that justifies any amount of meetcute-enforcing indignities. by the end of the film she’s almost in tears contemplating the heroism of those who put it all on the line to take a chance and bring to life a dream… truly a cry from the collective dtv spec writer heart!
the main guy looks like they ordered a lesser baldwin through some kind of catalog and his main thing is being obsessed with creating “ice wine”, a project initiated by his dead wife. so dedicated is he to the dream that this small winery has a whole room carved from ice inside it just so you can drink the ice wine in appropriate setting. between the ice stuff and the dead wife and the obsessive grudge holding over negative reviews he seems about one bad day from trying to hold gotham city to ransom, and that bad day comes when the true identity of the amnesiac lady is revealed, right after they had a bonding drive through the snow in his convertable. when he finds out he angrily storms off and gets back in the car, and then pushes the button that makes the hood slowly come out. dont talk to me or my precocious daughter who dresses like a member of kid creole and the coconuts ever again.
best exchange, when the main lady is breaking up with her phynance guy starter bf at the start:
- this is not the christina i know.
- it’s the christina i used to be… it just took getting amnesia to remember it.
- that’s pretty ironic.
ice wine stuff aside a surprising amount of time is spent on the main lady trying to cook random dishes from her cookery notebook in the hopes that some combination of food smells will make her memory come back, which makes me wonder if this movie was once pitched as a ds puzzle game
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game of love (2023) - it is with mixed emotions that i must report the all seeing eye of the hallmark consumer demographic panopticon has finally started to gaze back. here is a romcom for the geeks and gamers in the room. the big romantic kiss at the end happens in a boardgame store filled with copies of settlers of catan. it’s a whole new world.
the first thing we learn about the heroine of the movie is that her screen name is “gamergirl” on a competitive scrabble app - she also faces gamer related prejudice like being kicked out of a fancy restaurant for wearing a hoodie, converses and jeans. her dayjob is being the resident gamedesign auteur curmudgeon at a boardgame company, so imagine her bewilderment and disgust when the company announces the theme of their next game will be… LOVE?! and that she has to collaborate with the company’s peppy new marketing director to do it. as he helpfully announces “we have the marketing strategy - now you just have to make the game!” such a man could obviously never connect to her as much as acquaintances like FreeHugz her reliable online scrabble companion.
in order to research the concept of love they of course must go out together to fancy restaurants, get pulled up onstage by a relationship guru called Robbie Indigo who does the reddit direction of line leaning thing on them, reveal their pasts etc. they do play some boardgames - specifically to learn about team games they play a romantic session of the mind mgmt board game… i guess they also asked the same developer to be able to use their other titles as the fictional company’s games, which is why the movie offices are covered in posters for a licensed harrow county game. linked post confirms that it was shot in vancouver too… and this in spite of all the different establishing shots of the space needle etc… thats how they get you!!
hallmark movies are usually pretty anodyne but i did find this one a little more likeable and fun, less brutally mcmansion brained than most, an element which the imdb review community seemingly picked up on (the single tag on the movie’s page is “interracial romance”). there are some good shots, for example the boardgame testers sneeringly holding up a “not fun” placard in response to a muddled early draft, one of the main lady looking miserable at the gluten free bakery and one where she’s working at her desk seemingly by dragging around random stock pirate clipart.
at the end she has a sudden revelation about her new workmate… who says love can’t bloom on the scrabble fields
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