'Tis the season for not too demanding blog posts. Last year, I admitted to the guilty pleasure of watching Christmas romcoms on Netflix; this year, I've indulged even more heavily, and might as well give a few tips to those who share my taste for this particular kind of brain rot. Always remembering that we're not talking The Seventh Seal here (fortunately).
The ones to watch while you're wrapping presents (or not at all): The award for the most plotless Christmas rom-coms available on Netflix this year (at least as watched by me) goes to Haul out the Holly and Haul out the Holly: Lit Up. Their main attraction is Lacey Chabert, of Mean Girls and Hot Frosty fame. Emily, a stressed-out woman with Christmas-mad parents, returns home to her small town (of course) after a bad breakup. Only, her parents are disappearing to Florida and the duty of keeping up the over-the-top decorating and Christmas jollities now falls, at least partly, to her. She only wants to have a nice, quiet Christmas but is somehow won over by the collective hysteria.
In the follow-up, Emily and the other townsfolk feel threatened by a family of influencers (gasp!) who want to take over the festivities completely. I actually somewhat preferred Haul out the Holly: Lit Up to the first film – the dialogue is a bit sharper, and the quirky neighbours have their moments – but there's no denying both films are very thin indeed; Chabert, pro though she is, has her work cut out. Also, the message is confusing. At some point, I'd have liked someone to remind the small-town busybodies that Christmas isn't about the tallness of your nutcracker (that's not a euphemism: this is a thing). Nevertheless, you won't miss much while struggling to wrap up that cosy sweater, which is a plus.
The stilted ones: Sometimes you just want a Christmas romance that actually is a bit stiff and unconvincing, simply to get into the right frivolous spirit. Paris Christmas Waltz and A Cinderella Christmas Ball are good alternatives for watching while present-wrapping, if you can't face the Haul out the Holly films. The romantic leads struggle to produce any chemistry, the romantic entanglements feel cut and pasted from other Christmas romances, and there's a certain air of cutting corners when it comes to costs. But the surroundings are nice, and there are some surprisingly good performances from side characters. In Paris Christmas Waltz, Paul Freeman nails the wise mentor role (even the Frenchness), and A Cinderella Christmas Ball has a solid supporting cast all round. I especially appreciated the surly guard, the crusty butler and the disgraced Duke who spouted none-too-brilliant words of wisdom with full-on sincerity.
The actually quite good ones: If I'm not mistaken, all the films I've mentioned so far are imported fare, shown but not produced by Netflix. The homegrown crop this year is a cut above: it feels like Netflix is getting the hang of this. True, the best Netflix romcom I've watched this year was not a Christmas one (The Wrong Paris – yep, I'm as surprised as you are). But Champagne Problems isn't half bad either.
If you opt for only one Christmas romcom set in Paris, please let it be this one and not Paris Christmas Waltz. In Champagne Problems, glamorous business woman Sydney goes to Paris to win a bidding war for a French winery on behalf of her company. She accidentally falls for the owner's estranged son, and complications ensue as she ends up spending the weekend at the vineyard with an assortment of national stereotypes while trying to show her mettle.
Call me easily pleased, but having the French characters talk to each other in actual, correct French, and the German pronounce each obscure German Christmas phenomenon impeccably (because the actors actually are French/German, duh) already gives the project a certain classiness for me. To add to this, the dialogue is pretty fizzy, and the hero, instead of only hanging around gazing longingly at the heroine, actually has his own drama to resolve. Pas mal du tout.
A Merry Little X-Mas was also good fun. Personally, I found the environmentalist female lead character (a yummy mummy played by Alicia Silverstone – man, I'm old) hard to take, but the rival love interests (a toy-boy himbo and an English model really trying not to lose it) of the couple supposedly breaking up kind of stole the show, and there were some solid chuckles along the way. If you need small-town American cosiness, this is better than Haul out the Holly.
The absolutely bonkers one: I had to find one with a premise almost as out there as Hot Frosty, and My Secret Santa fits the bill. Get this: a single mother, who's lost her uninspiring job because of cut-backs, is desperate to find money to send her daughter to... snow-boarding school. A nearby resort offers a 50% discount on the school fees, but their only opening is for an inhouse Santa. So our intrepid heroine disguises herself as a jovial old man and lands the job, while falling for the resort owner's son.
Really, one suspects that someone came up with the idea while drunk. But you have to give Netflix credit: once committed to it, they do their best to make it work, and I had a good time. Not the worst Christmas film Netflix has to offer, but (among the newcomers) undoubtedly the craziest.
