Twofer Special | Holiday 2021 // A Castle for Christmas and Single All the Way

If you have, perchance, been reading, maybe semi-regularly, my blog posts, you might know I've been feeling especially pressed for time this. This is especially true when it comes to my holiday movie binge. I've fallen behind. What I really need is another computer or monitor set up to multi-task at the max, but one makes do nonetheless. In the last 24 hours I've watched 2 Netflix Christmas movies, A Castle for Christmas and Single All the Way. Both looked extremely cheesy and I was excited to see both. Moreover, both were somehow completely what I expected and not at all what I expected.

A Castle For Christmas

To escape a scandal, a bestselling author journeys to Scotland, where she falls in love with a castle -- and faces off with the grumpy duke who owns it.

This was the first movie I watched, finishing it sometime in the wee hours of the morn. Brooke Shields and Cary Elwes star as a world-renown American author and Scottish noble respectively. They have a most ridiculous love story that is less whirlwind romance and more two grown adults growing close while being super nice people. But it's easy to be super nice when you're relatively rich. Moving along, we get a super epic tie-in to the established Netflix Christmas Movie Universe (or I guess, per Netflix, the Netflix Holiday Movie Universe) when we see some characters physically show up at the inn. I screamed when I realized what was happening, and as I was telling my mother, side characters physically appear in another movie is a much stronger allusion to their interconnectivity than a meta allusion to a movie or a casual mention of a country. 

Now I have to binge a bunch of the movies I didn't want to (ones I hadn't yet watched because I don't care for a safari romance and I'd seen at least one over my mom's shoulder very passively already) if only for knowledge of the network. Back to A Castle For Christmas, was I supposed to feel some kind of way romantically when the leads got unbelievably close? It was just funny awkward. But there were tons of positives. We had like two non-White Characters with lines (the agent and the innkeeper, both Black women) and we had the established, albeit background, gay widower. Refreshingly diverse? I didn't buy the Scots accents myself, but I imagine how this movie watched is how it feels to read a Highlander Christmas romance. So what's my verdict? I screamed, I cackled, and I covered my head several times, so I guess I liked it. 

Single All the Way

Desperate to avoid his family's judgment about being single, Peter persuades best friend Nick to pose as his boyfriend on a trip home for the holidays.

Ever since I saw Michael Urie in the trailer, because I loved him in Ugly Betty, I knew I'd be watching this movie sometime this season. As the Pandemic Movie Watch Party gang got back together for the holiday season, this served as our inaugural reunion movie. There was (or maybe is, I'm not in that space) a conversation a while back about whether or not a romance novel can be a romance novel without a happy ending? There's a trope-filled pattern that some people expect and rely on. Similarly, holiday movies need either a happy romance or love-filled ending or a mystical, somewhat ambiguous ending. This was clearly a secular romance, so we were gonna get our romantic tropes. But this was a gay romance, so would it be different? Would it need to be? I wouldn't think. But I don't know, I'm not a part of that community. What I do know that part of diverse living is allowing the same for everyone no matter their difference. 

So that's what we got. Two close friends realizing they're meant for each other with the intervention of close family and friends, despite a hot romantic foil. The plant Instagram thing was a bit too on the money, but also the cutest. I'd called the plot turns super early on, but I enjoy being right. My biggest gripe would have to be that the dialogue was extremely awkward and cringe at times, specifically the dialogue between Peter's family. A star studded cast including Kathy Najimy and Jennifer Coolidge, there were some veritably cute moments, ignoring what regularly relapsed into very disjointed dialogue. I loved the Clue reference! Also, the Dan Finnerty songs slapped. Verdict? Thumbs up.