Popcorn Kernels: A Christmas Double Feature

Merry Christmas, to all who celebrate it! In honor of the holiday, and the endless terrible movie options it provides, today I'm doling out some mini-reviews for two of Netflix's attempts to snatch the Hallmark Channel's weave.


A Christmas Prince

Year: 2017

Director: Alex Zamm

Cast: Rose McIver, Ben Lamb, Alice Krige

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

A plucky journalist masquerades as a tutor to gain access to the royal palace of Aldovia in the days leading to the coronation of its playboy prince. She wants a scoop, but she might just find a heaping helping of love.

There are certain films that inspire me to hop to it and start writing. My mixed-but-positive review of The Greatest Showman just poured out of me, because I had a lot to say as I parsed out what exactly my feelings were. It's even easier to write a negative review trashing a film like, say, any Saw movie. Then there's A Christmas Prince, which makes writing a review feel like squeezing molasses out of a pinhole.  It's so effortfully bland that it's no fun to talk about, and it's even less fun to watch.

Sure, there are some solid bad-good moments, like the poorly thought-out set design (a cover photo in the background of the magazine publishing office has a headline that just reads "Pop Singer") or the fact that this is set in the fictional land of Aldovia, which is presumably in Eastern Europe given its small size and disproportionate orphan population, but every character just has a British accent because we're not really pretending that this isn't Prince Harry fan fiction.

But otherwise, this is listlessly predictable drivel that even Jane Austen would judge as being too chaste for her liking. Does the girl get the Prince? I mean, yeah. Duh. Is the lead character clumsy in a way that's supposed to make her flawed enough to be believable, but also not enough that we will notice when it's totally dropped midway through act 2? Hell yes! Are there stakes present within a hundred mile radius? Unfortunately not. A Christmas Prince has been getting a lot of buzz due to this notorious Tweet from Netflix, but really those viral marketing geniuses should have turned their sights toward that other scrap of streaming holiday fare...

Rating: 3/10

Christmas Inheritance

Year: 2017

Director: Ernie Barbarash

Cast: Eliza Taylor, Jake Lacy, Andie MacDowell 

Run Time: 1 hour 44 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

The heiress of a Christmas gift company (?) must fulfill her father's annual tradition with his business partner, delivering him a Christmas letter incognito in the small town of Snow Falls, in order to prove her worthiness at taking over the company. While she's trapped by a snowstorm, she learns the true meaning of Christmas giving from the small town hicks she is forced to spend time with.

Do you feel that spray? That's the water A Christmas Prince is being blown out of. Christmas Inheritance is everything I was looking for from a terrible Hallmark Christmas spectacular. For one thing, the cast is infinitely better, featuring a couple people I've actually heard of. Jake Lacy for one, who was engineered in a lab to be the perfect bland white love interest and has actually been in real movies (Obvious Child, How to Be Single, Miss Sloane, Carol). The other being Andie MacDowell, who was last seen being a deliciously campy cougar in Magic Mike XXL, and who delivers what would be called an extended cameo if she wasn't in so damn much of the movie.

Toss them into a Canadian tax shelter helmed by the writer of Cube 2: Hypercube, and you've got yourself a recipe for something pretty special. This is exactly what I was imagining when we sat down to watch A Christmas Prince: a workplace that's weirdly specific and Christmas related, a non-threatening small town love interest with an ice sculpting habit and an ex-wife (proving he's marriage material and giving him a wounded, sensitive heart in one fell swoop), and an infinitely contrived plot (there's no reason for the main character to be incognito except to add a wrinkle right when it seems impossibly obvious that they should end up together, and the importance the entire town places on this Christmas Letter tradition is frankly mystifying).

There is such a plethora of bad-good fun to be had here, the best example being the magically elastic size of this small town (Snow Falls is so small they have no cell service and only one taxi, but it's big enough to need a taxi, but also that taxi is run by the guy who manages the hotel, and there's only one diner that's the central spot in town, except there's also a huge bar and grill where an important leg of the love triangle takes place, and there's only one cop and one homeless person, but there's also a huge Apple store, and I'm just so confused). But I also had a great time with the Mickey Mouse saxophone score that follows every emotion like a curious little brother, the constant bizarre dialogue about the true meaning of Christmas, and just every contrived scrap of this plot, which doesn't feel overlong somehow even though it lasts a good ten minutes longer than any TV movie has any right to be.

There's just one thing that sinks the movie like a stone. The main character has a rude, businessman fiancé who we're not supposed to be too terribly cut up about her leaving. This is all par for the course, but that fiancé is one of only two black men in the movie, and the theme of a city woman finding joy in the fundamentals of life does involve her leaving an interracial relationship to return to a Pillsbury Doughboy of a man in a small town filled with almost exclusively white people. I'm going to optimistically assume that this was a hideously misguided attempt at showcasing diversity in casting instead of a conscious political move, but that's pretty disgusting in today's political climate. So... that happened. For me, it was just another element of its campy, clueless fundamentalism, but I'm not really the right person to dig into exactly how damaging this is. It just needed to be mentioned before we close out.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun with Christmas Inheritance. It provided me exactly what I wanted: a glimpse into the fantasies of the type of people who watch and make these movies, and as a psychological portrait of a world I have no part of, it was extremely delightful.

Rating: 6/10

Now, just for fun, a list of things that both films have exactly in common:

• Opening credits featuring a jaunty Christmas tune over stock footage of New York City
• A meet-cute involving a taxi
• A Plucky Woman finding True Love while traveling for work
• The Plucky Woman masquerading as somebody else
• That same Plucky Woman proving how relatable she is by clumsily tripping into half a dozen priceless objects
• The Plucky Woman's mother has passed away, which she reveals to the Man at a key emotional moment
• A walk in the snow leads to the discovery of a secret about the Man's beautiful soul
• A hometown diner run by a family member
• The tabloids' reports on debauchery are just grotesquely exaggerated accounts of things like doing cartwheels or having snowball fights with orphans
• Fatherly advice from a dude who's acting really hard
• Stakes so low they're actually subterranean
• Exactly one kiss

Word Count: 1233

Reviews In This Series

A Christmas Prince (Zamm, 2017)

A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding (Schultz, 2018)

Let Them Eat Beefcake

Year: 2015

Director: Gregory Jacobs

Cast: Channing Tatum, Joe Manganiello, Matt Bomer

Run Time: 1 hour 55 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Typically it’s a fantastic thing if a sequel manages to recapture the spirit of the original film. So by those standards, Magic Mike XXL is a perfect movie. Unfortunately, the spirit of Magic Mike (a stripper film largely unconcerned with titillation that endeavors to tell a microcosmic story of the American economy) is pretty much the exact opposite of what the average audience member would want to see. It can be forgiven in the original, thanks to Steven Soderbergh’s sure hand, but director Gregory Jacobs (his longtime producer) is no Soderbergh*.The result is a film full of chiseled hunks in which the only thing that gets stripped off is the meaningful subtext. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

*Steven Soderbergh did shoot and edit this film, but it’s probably in his best interest to downplay his involvement. 

Boy, will we.

First, the plot. In Magic Mike XXL, Matthew McConaughey and Alex Pettyfer’s characters asked for too much money have started a show overseas, abandoning the gaggle of strapping strippers known as Big Dick Richie (Joe Manganiello) and that title refers to his personality, not his apparatus; Tarzan (Kevin Nash), an aging, goateed hunk whose lines have doubled now that a quarter of the cast is MIA; Ken (Matt Bomer), the only LGBT character so of course he’s now some kind of sexless vegan chakra worshipper; and Tito (Adam Rodriguez), who clearly doctored his IMDb page to say he as in the first movie because I have not a scrap of memory of him. As one last hurrah, they decide to put on a show at the 2015 Stripper Convention (which everyone they meet has totally heard of, yet still has an attendance of like 80 people) and invite Magic Mike (Channing Tatum) to come along with them on their road trip to scenic Myrtle Beach.

Mike has just broken up with his girlfriend Cody Horn because, actually, what is she even up to? Why couldn’t she do this movie? He decides to come on the trip to, I don’t know, learn about himself or some crap. After their MC, Tobias (Gabriel Iglesias, for some reason) crashes their car, they must scramble to find a new MC and transportation, though they mostly just sidle through some Road Trip vignettes starring the silky smooth stripper palace madame Rome (Jada Pinkett-Smith), the hospitable Southern divorcée Nancy (Andie MacDowell), and the most toxically obnoxious hipster trash abortive love interest this side of Dirty Grandpa, Zoe (Amber Heard).

My thoughts and prayers go out to her bracelet foley artist, because every time she moves those bohemian toothpicks she calls arms, it sounds like a f**king wind chime.

Magic Mike XXL has been described as a “hang-out movie,” which is actually pretty accurate. It exactly captures the feeling of hanging out with your older brother and his skater friends, who only tolerate each other because they all do the same thing and are too stoned to actually have anything interesting to say. Manganiello’s character is the biggest offender, because the movie seems convinced that he’s an asshole with a heart of gold when he’s really just a deranged, foul-mouthed property destroyer who should be medicated, if not actively incarcerated. Although, to be fair, he’s the only character in the film with a recognizable personality of any kind, so maybe I should lay off him.

However, Not all of the film is quite so aggravating as those early scenes where tensions rankle beneath the surface of the group for reasons nobody can quite identify. In fact, Magic Mike XXL is a fascinating study in just how empty a feature film can be despite a sprawling run time that tops two hours. All those things that typically define a work of cinema are but dust in the wind. Let’s run MMXXL through the basics, shall we, and see what we come up with.

PLOT: Although some might argue that Magic Mike XXL is the Ballad of a Soldier of Channing Tatum stripper movies, in which a charismatic young swain wanders the countryside improving the lives of people he meets along the way, those people would be fictional. Also wrong. Beyond the first act, there is not a whiff of drama or tension of any kind, and the two potentially romantic subplots are so low key that I’m fairly certain they don’t actually exist. They certainly aren’t resolved by the film’s abrupt ending, which is about as jarring as being hit by a freight train. On the moon.

DIALOGUE: You know that thing Judd Apatow does where he sets the camera down and just lets his actors riff for a bit? That seems to be how this script was written. Very scene is an endless kaleidoscope of mumbled nonsense and halfhearted improve, spiced up by such sterling clunkers as “It’s not bro time, it’s showtime.”

ACTING: It’s not like the script provides much to work with, but every performer seems to be on the verge of passing out. I genuinely admire Channing Tatum (especially in comedies), but he indiscriminately disappoints here, slurring every scene like he just ate a peanut butter sandwich and is trying to lick it off the roof of his mouth. Also, an allegedly comedic drug freak out scene is so underplayed that I was beginning to think I made up the whole thing.

STRIPPING: You know what I love about male strippers? How they never take their pants off. Now, look, I’ve made my peace with the fact that these actors are too successful in their careers to actually whip it out on camera, but in half the performances they don’t even take off their jeans! They must have taken their stripping cues from the movie Burlesque (which couldn’t even be bothered to look up “burlesque” in the dictionary), because nowhere in my universe does strip show  involve a man just taking off his shirt, maybe singing poorly, and then going home.

Oh, also the acts last about ten seconds each, are poorly lit, poorly staged, and very infrequently crop up in the first place. Also, certain performers who shall remain nameless are a tad rusty on their dance moves, and the movie’s keen avoidance of showing them perform only serves to highlight how little he’s actually doing. The producers should refund all the bachelorette parties that made the mistake of going to see this movie in the theaters.

CHARACTERS:

Eh, who needs ‘em?

What I have described thus far is a supremely drab movie. And that’s a very apt description, but there is a certain key factor I’ve neglected to share: When Magic Mike XXL gets going, it is a hilarious titan of crummy filmmaking. Somewhere around the halfway point, when the gang visits Jada Pinkett-Smith’s Pleasure Palace, the film adopts a supposedly reverential tone of female affirmation that goes so wildly awry that it’s magnificently captivating.

Let’s pause a moment and bask in the glory that is Jada’s Xanadu. Shirtless men give lap dances to teeming hordes of women in multiple lushly appointed rooms while they toss an infinite supply of dollar bills in the air like it’s a ticker tape parade. Rome the MC bounces through the rooms at her whim like a pinball, constantly interrupting performances to make loquacious pronouncements to her beaming bevy of “queens” and selecting one lucky, self-conscious lady to be reminded she is beautiful. This is always the skinniest girl in the room. 

They are then treated with some arrestingly bad shirtless improve rap from Childish Gambino himself (Donald Glover, who in all fairness is rather talented in real life and proves as much in a later musical number. …This movie has so many musical numbers, you guys.) after being asked the exquisitely inane question, “What is your favorite thing?” People apparently shell out the big bucks for this.

This overboiled, garish phantasmagoria so thoroughly misunderstands eroticism that it might just be a masterpiece of dream logic cinema. The otherworldly delights give way to Andie MacDowell’s delightful turn as a salty Southern belle with a preposterous drawl, in which she and her Sex and the City gang tell tales of ex-husbands and flirt with our dear strippers. This scene is unfortunately stolen by a reaction shot of a dialogue-free woman haphazardly mouthing along to a Bryan Adams musical number that goes on about two minutes too long, but MacDowell’s absurd, molasses-accented charisma makes this the best scene in the entire affair.

She’s like Scarlett O’Hara meets Gomer Pyle, and we’re all the better for it.

Now a film this dull can’t be totally saved by a healthy dose of diva mayhem, but it can certainly be elevated. Never forget Magic Mike XXL’s pornish editing in which conversations abruptly fade to the same conversation at a random, equally inconsequential point. Or its oddly profuse use of profanity, which is ever used to bust taboos, but rather as an oddly dark, angry lexicon that in no way fits the movie’s tone. And there’s always that infuriatingly shallow ending that resolves absolutely nothing. However, it’s still possible to have a good time watching this though, as with its predecessor, it’s never the way you’d expect from a movie about male strippers.

TL;DR: Magic Mike XXL is a boring, tremendously inane film that has next to nothing to with with anything, let alone stripping.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1578