Christmas Kiss II

Gather 'round sweet readers, and I'll tell you the story of the one gentle watch that we turned off halfway through: A Christmas Kiss II

The first A Christmas Kiss is about two people who share an exciting and mysterious kiss in an elevator and subsequently fall in love. The second Christmas Kiss is basically the same premise but with a different cast of characters. Did you know that "magical kiss in elevator" is a whole romance sub-genre? It definitely is. This one featured Jenna, the hardworking personal assistant to the editor of a fashion magazine.

The problem is that the guy she kisses is awful. He is her boss's brother who co-owns the magazine but has previously shown no interest. He is a self-absorbed, lazy, playboy. He is also already engaged to someone else.  But after this magical kiss, he immediately starts bothering Jenna. Since he is also technically her boss, he abuses that fact by asking her to show up at his house or come to the office on the weekend when he is the only other person there. Rattled and creeped out, she enlists her friend and next door neighbor Sebastian to play her fake boyfriend --because men who won't respect a woman telling them "no" may respect another man's previous "claim" on that woman.

Sebastian is played by Jonathan Bennett aka Aaron Samuels from Mean Girls. Pretty faced, dark-eyebrowed Aaron Samuels. He is charming and supportive, and more than happy to play the fake BF. When the awful dude first sees them together (having great chemistry and a genuinely good time together) he is like "oh crap, she really DOES have a boyfriend. She is never this happy and relaxed around me!"

For a brief moment, this movie seems like it is going to be really good. The elevator kiss guy is turning out to be garbage, whereas Aaron Samuels/Sebastian seems to respect and value Jenna as a person. The "best friend who has been there all along" is a common rom-com trope, but not when the main character has had a meet-cute with someone else. Maybe, just MAYBE a magical moment with someone doesn't excuse bad behavior.

But then...the awful guy keeps at it and Jenna starts to...be into it? And we start seeing less of Sebastian? HELL TO THE NO. Seeing I was getting increasingly agitated, Olivia did some googling and confirmed that the movie does end with Jenna getting together with the terrible guy.

THIS WATCH HAD CEASED TO BE GENTLE. We turned it off. I choose to believe that the movie ended with Jenna reporting the awful guy for workplace harassment and making out with Aaron Samuels.

(This image is from a different movie but you get the idea)

Look, I don't expect super enlightened gender politics from romantic comedies. But in this #MeToo era it hit a particular nerve to show a wealthy and inconsiderate white guy harass a subordinate at work and have it sold to us as a romance.

Rating: NONE. We choked on our cheese and wine while watching.

Hot Men: WHY would you 1) Hire Aaron Samuels 2) Give him a leading man name like Sebastian 3) NOT MAKE HIM THE ROMANTIC LEAD and then 4) Cast the smarmiest possible guy to be the actual romantic lead.

THIS IS THE FACE OF THE PATRIARCHY

The Spirit of Christmas

When we first started our Christmas gentle watching adventure, we set ourselves some standards, as all civilized people do. We did not want to watch any movies that included the following:

1. Ghosts or really any supernatural elements 
2. When there is a mysterious stranger and he turns out to be Santa (this is hard to avoid)
3. Family movies - romance has to be central, I really don't care that much about kids or dogs
 

This is the Netflix page for this movie: "As Christmas approaches, attorney Kate Jordan
travels to Vermont to oversee the sale of an inn, where she falls for a handsome but cursed ghost"

So as you can see from the aforementioned guidelines, The Spirit of Christmas was a risk, and it was a movie we'd avoided for a pretty long time. But here's the catch when watching so many gentle watches, but don't have actual cable television - you start to run out of options on Netflix. So there we were, settling in for 90 minutes of The Spirit of Christmas, and you know what? It wasn't awful. Confusing, kind of awkward, sure, but maybe kind of okay. We certainly talked about it for a long time afterwards, though part of this was due to the fact that the premise and the conclusion really made no sense whatsoever.

Summary: Kate is a high powered lawyer who is sent to the wilds of Vermont to facilitate the appraisal of an old inn before her firm can get it sold. Problem is, each appraiser has been scared off by the ghost that haunts the place. The ghost, Daniel, turns out to be the former owner of the inn who comes back for 21 days (the 21 days leading up to Christmas Eve) every year. Shockingly, they fall in love and maybe he becomes real? Or maybe they only see each other three weeks a year? It's unclear.

My face for a good portion of this film, and quite awhile afterwards

So, in the first five minutes, we get to see that Daniel was murdered. We don't see who did it, but he gets knocked in the head with a rock. He's also wearing circa-1910s clothing, as interpreted by a modern day costume designer, and basically just looks like a hipster old-timey.

Jumping ahead about 90 years, we find Daniel still wearing these clothes and not able to remember anything from the moments leading up to his murder. To give the movie some credit, it makes the right choice by making Daniel a corporeal being, so there's no walking through walls or weird vanishings into air. There also aren't any jokes about him not understanding modern day technology. He clearly has learned quite a bit in the three weeks he shows up each year, though how he has done this is unclear since he never interacts with anyone during these visits. Overall, the science of this ghost situation is pretty confusing.

Tell me you haven't seen this guy making craft cocktails at your local hipster bar

Daniel refuses to stop haunting his old haunt (ba dum bum), and Kate decides that, if she helps him figure out how he died, he'll be free to move on to wherever ghosts move on to. So of course there's a party, and it turns out Daniel DOES know a lot about cocktails because he used to be a rum runner in 1919. Transporting alcohol illegally does not mean he would know how to make craft cocktails (not exactly what was being ran during Prohibition), and thus begins the confusion of the timeline of Daniel's life.

He's been practicing making drinks during the three weeks he's in corporeal form

I'm going to pause here to let you all know that both Clara and I have undergrad history degrees, she is now a fashion historian, and I have been teaching U.S. History for the last eight years. We know a fair amount about American history, but despite that, both of us can deal with a certain amount of historical inaccuracies. It's par for the course with movies and particularly with gentle watches. But this timeline makes no sense. The Volstead Act went into effect in late October, 1919 and went into full effect on January 1st, 1920. But somehow Daniel gets all caught up in rum running in the two months between those two events? Bootlegging didn't become active until it was necessary and certainly someone who was so reticent about it, like Daniel says he was, wouldn't have gotten involved so early on. I realize that this is minor to the overall plot, but when it turns out that he gets murdered because of this involvement, it adds a little weight to the matter. Okay, history lesson over.

The Spirit of Christmas falls solidly into a classic gentle watch trope of the woman who works too much and needs to learn that there are more important things besides her job. And she does learn that lesson, as she and Daniel get to know one another by looking at old pictures, decorating a Christmas tree, talking while their faces are very close to one another, and finally dancing at what used to be the annual ball thrown at the inn during Daniel's actual life.

If you don't fall in love at the annual dance, did you even fall in love?

Let's rate this ghost, shall we?

The Cheese Rating: Very low. This movie takes itself pretty seriously; it's solidly in the drama category rather than the rom-com category. One reason is that it was on Lifetime rather than Hallmark, so really, this movie is pretty tame for that platform. My Stepson is My Cyber-Husband this is not.







The Wine Rating: This gets three wine glasses (though full disclosure, we watched this movie at 10 am while eating croissants). Part of the reason we're giving it three glasses is that the bar was SO low. We thought this movie was going to be total trash, and it was not total trash. The leads were fine and had some chemistry, nothing particularly special, but it definitely got points for sky-rocketing above our expectations.

Hot men: Daniel, or Thomas Beaudoin if you're feeling formal, looks better the more he looks like he is in the present. You decide:

Not terrible: 

I love a man in glasses, but these round, wire-spectacles are a tough sell

But isn't this better?

A Christmas Prince

Oh A Christmas Prince.

I had such high hopes. You seemed like you would be a great combination of cheesy premise, pretty locations, and ridiculous romance. You weren't produced by Hallmark but Netflix, a production company that might have a bit of a sense of humor about itself and the Christmas gentle watch it was producing. Maybe it would even poke a little fun at the genre, in a loving, affectionate way.

So we settled in to watch this potential Christmas classic. And low and behold...

Fifteen minutes into the movie we realized...

We struggled through the interminable 90 minutes of a A Christmas Prince, but every ten minutes or so, all I wanted to do was yell at the screen:

Quick synopsis: A journalist is given her big break to cover the potential crowning of the new king of a small European country. It's been a year since his father died and he's been partying ever since (or has he?!?!). She gets to the palace and somehow fakes her way in pretending to be the new nanny to his younger sister. The usual high jinks happen from there but the most disappointing part of this film is it's total and complete lack of joy. This movie is a drag, that's all there is to it.

This movie was such a drag that I'm not going to include any images or gifs from the movie. I don't want to besmirch this blog with that nonsense. 

Besides the total lack of fun or joy, here's a little bit of why this film is so bad:

• Ridiculous hidden identities
• The leading lady, Amber, literally follows the prince on a horse and then falls off and has a Beauty and the Beast moment where a wolf almost attacks her 
• Amber is the worst journalist ever. Her notes are literally a bullet pointed list saying things like "The prince is starting to trust me" and "I have to find out more!!!"
• Lots of unclear rules about royal lineage and the order succession. Monarchies have very clear rules and everyone in those countries know who's in line.
• A secret adoption (that throws said order of succession into chaos)
• The new king is supposed to get crowned at the annual Christmas ball. WHAT? It's basically the chillest coronation ever and coronations are never chill.
• The leads have no chemistry. She seems to like him because he's handsome and misunderstood, and he likes her because she charmed his little sister and is kind of a mess. Rather than being misunderstood, I think the prince is actually just grieving his father's death and hasn't dealt with those feelings. And she is a mess, but not a charming one, just sort of annoying and sad.
• After everything fall's apart, Amber goes home, decides to quit her job because the magazine doesn't want to publish her story about "the real prince". So she starts her own blog called something like "Amber's Blog" and it gets 1000 views and everyone is SO proud of her.  
• There is a ridiculous proposal at the end. It's New Year's Eve and her friends want her to go out with them but she's sad so she stays home. Then the prince shows up and proposes. WHAT? NO.

All of this sounds like pretty normal rom-com fare, so why the vitriol? This movie was just so sad. No one looked like they were having any fun and I certainly didn't have any fun watching it. Imagine all of those high jinks but cover them in a layer of anxiety and sorrow, and that is this movie.


You know what A Christmas Prince?

A begrudging rating:

Cheese Rating: This movie was super cheesy, but not in a fun or interesting way. Just in a bad way. Can I give half a piece of cheese? A whole wedge seems too generous.

Wine Rating: I don't even know. One glass? I certainly wanted to drink during this movie, hoping it would make the movie better, but, really, nothing was going to save A Christmas Prince.

Hot Men: Honestly, who cares. If this movie had a voice, this is what it would say:

Unleashing Mr. Darcy

Clara: [Looking at list of available Hallmark movies on the library website] Ok so this one appears to be like Pride and Prejudice...but with dogs.

Olivia: ....with dogs? Like with dogs as the characters?

#WishboneDidItFirst

Clara: Haha no. Like Elizabeth and Darcy both love dogs and they meet at a dog show.

Olivia: Ohhhhhh...Not sure if that is better or worse.

Yes, in the grand tradition of Pride and Prejudice with Mormons and Pride and Prejudice with zombies, it's Pride and Prejudice with dogs! Mr. Darcy is a dog show judge, and Elizabeth is someone who shows dogs at dog shows!

Ok, so dogs aside, this had the seeds of a not terrible idea. I actually like the Mormon Pride and Prejudice so I have no problem with a contemporary, silly version of P&P.  One clever piece of the premise is that Elizabeth's mother owns a bridal salon which then made it totally reasonable that she was intensely interested in her daughters' marital prospects. It also explained how Jane and Elizabeth were able to get fancy (but kind of bridesmaidy) gowns on short notice for an event at the end.

Elizabeth is played by Cindy Busby who we know as mean but sometimes good but still pretty mean lawyer Rebecca Jennings on Cedar Cove (there will definitely be a Cedar Cove post at some point). She also had a brief arc on When Calls the Heart as a woman who was really angry at a guy in town because he "killed" her sister (he was a doctor and she died during a risky surgery). So as Elizabeth Bennet she is...really mean and angry. It is a weird energy to bring to the story, because it makes Darcy sympathetic from the beginning. He is abrupt and cold to her AS A JUDGE at ONE dog show and she is vicious to him at every opportunity from then on.

HOW DARE YOU BE FORMAL DURING JUDGING

Look, this is the era of Trump and #TimesUp so I want to applaud women for refusing to take sh*t from men. But her dislike of Darcy seems totally out of proportion.  There is no Wickham subplot in this movie, so there isn't anything terrible she thinks he has done. He is a little stiff and formal, but he almost immediately tries to be friendly, welcoming, and encouraging to Elizabeth. But for 90% of the movie she is just like WE ARE SWORN ENEMIES HE HATES ME AND I HATE HIM EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE I WILL BURN IT ALL DOWN.

This is her "secretly in love" face

This movie had some charming moments and parts where they literally just hang out with some adorable puppies, but the whole effect is wrecked by Elizabeth being dialed up to 11 the whole time and you just want to shake her and be like CHILL OUT.

I REFUSE TO BE CHILL

Also, the movie's portrayal of regional dog shows was pretty ridiculous. For one, while all the other handlers stood with their dogs in the ring during the whole judging process, Elizabeth would be sitting in the audience and only enter the ring when her name was called and then go sit down again (so she could have drama with the Lady Catherine character or just complain about Darcy to her friends). Second, when it becomes clear that something is going on between these two, a question arises about Darcy being impartial as a judge. Both are adamant that nothing is going on and there is no conflict of interest. But then in the final scene they literally make out in the middle of the ring during a competition and instead of being like WTF the other contestants applaud.

Cheese rating: One out of five wedges of cheese. Puppy time aside, not very cheesy.

Wine rating: Two glasses of wine. Some residual spice from being based on a Jane Austen classic (or "Austin" as spelled on the back of the DVD) but nothing earthshaking.

Hot men: Unquestionably the actor playing Darcy has very nice face parts but Elizabeth comes on so strong that he ends up being kind of unmemorable.

Bridal Wave

So one of the most annoying parts of a gentle watch, and it's in almost every Hallmark movie yet it makes me angry every time, is that, at the very end, the two leads get engaged or married. They have often met at the beginning of the movie - a movie that spans two-four weeks of time (see Clara's A December Bride post). Maybe this is connected to my conflicted feelings about the institution of marriage or something like that, but really, why does the movie have to end in an engagement or wedding? There's always a big kiss and an exchange of affection, and that just seems like it should be enough. Why is it that audiences need a wedding? Let these people live!

But you know what friends, here is a movie that doesn't end with a ridiculously fast proposal and marriage after meeting four days earlier. The final scene makes you think it will, and seeing a bride and groom is meant to confuse, but then, low and behold, "One Year Later" pops up on the screen. Like sensible people, they waited a whole year! Shocking!

Clara and I found this movie while combing the shelves at the Northeast Branch Public Library and you know what, it's actually kind of a good movie. Definitely at the top of the Hallmark rankings. First of all, it takes place somewhere on the San Juan Islands, but there is an establishing shot of Seattle as the home of our leads. But it's not the normal establishing shot - skyline, Space Needle, red cranes - no, it's of the corner of 4th and Olive, or, the old Seattle Times building. Not a particularly strong establishing shot; not even a very Northwesty shot to set the scene. Clara's eagle eye spotted it and we had to rewind and confirm, but there it was, the building that now holds the Mariners store and the Mayflower Hotel.

This shot, except way closer so it was even harder to recognize

I love this, and the Pacific Northwest seems to be a hotspot for Hallmark romances, but seriously Hallmark? THIS is the establishing shot of your movie? Nobody knows this building. We've both lived here most of our lives and had to rewind and debate if it was Seattle or not.

Falling love while looking at the Pacific is ideal

But, back to the actual movie. Quick summary: our leading lady, Georgie, is engaged to a wealthy plastic surgeon (who she works for), and, while on her way to an unnamed San Juan Island for the wedding, she meets Luke in the ferry line. They banter, sparks fly, but then they part ways. Of course, they meet again at the resort where he lives next door in a beautiful house right on the water. He built the house himself after leaving behind the high power, high stress world of being a handsome architect.

Georgie and Luke get thrown together on multiple occasions and clearly they have chemistry, more chemistry than her doctor fiance. Also, this fiance's mother is terrifying and played by Jaclyn Smith, so, win-win.

Except you know, thirty years older. But still fabulous

What I liked about Bridal Wave is that it's actually kind of believable. It's refreshing that there's no big blowup, no madcap miscommunication, no one is left at the alter feeling spurned. There's an almost kiss and an appropriate reaction when Georgie realizes what she's doing. And then she and her fiance have an adult conversation about how neither of them are actually happy and they shouldn't get married. They've been dating because it's comfortable and it all paints a very pretty picture.

My face when adults act like adults in romantic comedies

There are, of course, some fake outs, and love is declared after only a few days, but, after they get a big kiss, Georgie and Luke DON'T IMMEDIATELY get married! The movie cuts to a year later, where they are getting married, but still, A WHOLE YEAR! Semi-realistic!

There's also a B-story line about how big hotel chains are ruining small towns and beautiful views, but the growing coastal development and destruction of the environment are not what gentle watches are all about.

Alright, ratings.

Cheese Rating: Actually pretty low. This has the typical cheese of a romantic comedy, but what was enjoyable about it was that it wasn't super cheesy.

Wine Rating: This gets a lot of wine glasses. Good chemistry between the leads, pretty locations, and was one of our first gentle watches. It made us want to watch other movies like this, and it's quite possible that no gentle watch (movies, not TV) has lived up to this one.

Hot Men: Handsome, slightly generic, but also kind of Northwesty, which is nice and fitting for the location. I can't find any pictures of any serious plaid, but, still not to shabby.