CROWN FOR CHRISTMAS
Sparks fly between a European King and the governess who cares for his daughter.
Doesn't this movie already exist? Haven't there been dozens of films made that follow this exact same plot? For the love of all things holy, Hallmark Channel made this movie last year, only it starred Lacey Chabert and it was called A Royal Christmas. Fucking King Ralph! Do you remember King fucking Ralph?! Even the goddamned Princess Diaries duology! What is the seemingly endless appeal of this well-worn cliché of a story? Is it the class warfare thing? The down-to-earth hoi polloi teach the stuffy aristocracy to pull those sticks out of their puckered assholes long enough to have a little fun in something like 10,000 movies and television shows every year, and we can't get enough of it. But it never works out like that in real life. No, in reality we're stuck with shit like this.
I am so tired of this story. I got no fucks left to give.
Danica McKellar plays Danica McKellar, a charming and funny young lady who lives with her younger brother and sister in some shoebox apartment in New York City, and they eat stew all the time and they can't stop smiling because despite the fact that they're always one small step away from abject poverty, they're rich in spirit and can't help but rub their smug "love conquers all" attitude in the faces of everybody they meet.
Danica McKellar works as a maid at some amazing fucking hotel in Manhattan, and she gets fired after running over some goofy king with her maid cart. Is that what it's called? Maid cart? That doesn't sound right. What the hell else do you call it? A housekeeping trolley? The goofy king's manservant sees this incident and decides that Danica McKellar is the perfect person to become the king's daughter's governess, since the last twelve governesses all disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and if Danica McKellar were to vanish in a similar manner, then the royal family of wherever the fuck they live wouldn't catch any heat from the local authorities because who's going to miss some random maid from the USA?
So Danica McKellar abandons her worthless family and flies off to this place in Europe that has a name the screenwriter made up but I didn't bother to remember it, and she quickly uses her peasant charms to delight literally everybody who lives and works in the royal palace, including the king's terror of a daughter, some ginger bint named Theodora. But the king's right-hand man, Chancellor That Guy From An Episode Of Black Books, hates Danica McKellar and wants to feed her an overabundance of laxatives, because he thinks somebody dying via literally shitting themselves to death is the single funniest thing he's ever heard.
Chancellor Black Books teams up with a truly awful sociopathic blueblood named Celia to get rid of Danica McKellar and trick the king into marrying Celia wearing a disturbingly realistic Danica McKellar mask instead. Then together they plan to murder the king and his unstable daughter though the magic of actual magic, which is real in this world, using the dark arts to transform Chancellor Black Books into an uncanny double of the king, and changing Celia's old, sick Vietnamese pot belly pig Prometheus into a double of Theodora, and because everybody is stupid, nobody will ever know the difference.
But their fiendish plot is foiled by the intervention of a helpful sparrow that overheard their villainous plan, who takes wing and finds Danica McKellar and the king, spilling all the beans. Using this knowledge, the king summons his royal sorcerer Malachi to the palace, and he sacrifices Chancellor Black Books and Celia to their dark god Ba'al, lord of storms and prince of the void. Pleased by this bounty of sin, Ba'al grants the dread king one boon, and the king chooses to make Danica McKellar his immortal bride, and in time they come to unite the entire world under their unholy banner.
That's what really happens. That's the plot of Crown For Christmas. It's also the plot of Maid In Manhattan and About Schmidt.
Can I be real with you for a moment? I believe that in a parallel universe, Danica McKellar is a major Hollywood star, standing alongside such luminaries as Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan and Reese Witherspoon as an American sweetheart and romantic comedy mainstay. She certainly has the charm. She has an infectious smile. And she's blessed with a natural, awkward comic sensibility that audiences find endearing. I genuinely feel that if she had taken a slightly different path, she would have become an A-list star.
I'm not sure why it never happened for her. She never really left acting as a profession, despite her passion for mathematics, which she certainly could have parlayed into a teaching career if she so wished. Danica McKellar has kept very busy since The Wonder Years as a working actor, primarily in TV and in animation, but aside from fucking Sidekicks back in 1992, she has never had a featured role in a major theatrical release. I have to imagine she's auditioned for more than a few bigger movies in her time, but she obviously never managed to break through, relegated to starring in dreck like Tasmanian Devils and... and Love At The Christmas Table. And she's never been the problem in any of the terrible projects in which she's featured.
I hate Heatstroke, but Danica McKellar was good in it! DB Sweeney wasn't good in Heatstroke, but she was! She actually committed to that dreadful material, giving a ridiculous movie about velociraptor-looking aliens orchestrating global warming to make the planet Earth more comfortable for their inevitable invasion far more respect than it deserved. And good lord, don't get me started on Path Of Destruction, the SyFy original movie so bad that Stephen Furst, fucking Flounder from Animal House, too embarrassed to attach his own name to the project, directed it under the pseudonym "Louie Myman". Would you believe she's actually good in that pile of shit?
Why does she try so hard in every terrible project in which she agrees to star? Professionalism, I suppose, but it still makes me sad. Danica McKellar deserves so much better. She certainly deserves better than a tired, boring story like Crown For Christmas.
So is Crown For Christmas a bad movie? No. Maddeningly enough, it isn't a bad movie. Not at all. The cast is quite good, for the most part. The director gets a lot of mileage out of the production's location shoot in Romania, capturing some lovely vistas in the process. The movie tells its story well enough. So why do I hate it? Why did I squirm through every agonizing moment of this movie? Because there's a fair amount of talent on display here, telling a story that's been told more times than there are stars in the sky, and it all feels like a useless effort, nothing more than a nihilistic exercise in futility. Why did anyone involved even bother? Surely they had better things to do.
One odd thing I noticed that I feel I must mention before I wrap this up, is that the script was clearly written for a younger cast. I say this because we're told that the two leads are in their early 30's, with Danica McKellar's character specifically being 31, and the king losing his wife before his 30th birthday, which occurred four years before the events of the story.
Danica McKellar is 40 years old, and co-star Rupert Penry-Jones is 45. Both actors are aging very gracefully to say the least, but neither can pass for being in their early 30's. It's an odd detail that I just couldn't forget, and I firmly believe that Danica McKellar was extremely flattered when she read the script and learned that the producers thought she could pass for a woman nine years younger. Or maybe nobody realized this error until it was too late to do anything about it. Whatever. The movie still sucks, and Danica McKellar deserves better.
VERDICT: NAUGHTY
Doesn't this movie already exist? Haven't there been dozens of films made that follow this exact same plot? For the love of all things holy, Hallmark Channel made this movie last year, only it starred Lacey Chabert and it was called A Royal Christmas. Fucking King Ralph! Do you remember King fucking Ralph?! Even the goddamned Princess Diaries duology! What is the seemingly endless appeal of this well-worn cliché of a story? Is it the class warfare thing? The down-to-earth hoi polloi teach the stuffy aristocracy to pull those sticks out of their puckered assholes long enough to have a little fun in something like 10,000 movies and television shows every year, and we can't get enough of it. But it never works out like that in real life. No, in reality we're stuck with shit like this.
I am so tired of this story. I got no fucks left to give.
Danica McKellar plays Danica McKellar, a charming and funny young lady who lives with her younger brother and sister in some shoebox apartment in New York City, and they eat stew all the time and they can't stop smiling because despite the fact that they're always one small step away from abject poverty, they're rich in spirit and can't help but rub their smug "love conquers all" attitude in the faces of everybody they meet.
Danica McKellar works as a maid at some amazing fucking hotel in Manhattan, and she gets fired after running over some goofy king with her maid cart. Is that what it's called? Maid cart? That doesn't sound right. What the hell else do you call it? A housekeeping trolley? The goofy king's manservant sees this incident and decides that Danica McKellar is the perfect person to become the king's daughter's governess, since the last twelve governesses all disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and if Danica McKellar were to vanish in a similar manner, then the royal family of wherever the fuck they live wouldn't catch any heat from the local authorities because who's going to miss some random maid from the USA?
So Danica McKellar abandons her worthless family and flies off to this place in Europe that has a name the screenwriter made up but I didn't bother to remember it, and she quickly uses her peasant charms to delight literally everybody who lives and works in the royal palace, including the king's terror of a daughter, some ginger bint named Theodora. But the king's right-hand man, Chancellor That Guy From An Episode Of Black Books, hates Danica McKellar and wants to feed her an overabundance of laxatives, because he thinks somebody dying via literally shitting themselves to death is the single funniest thing he's ever heard.
Chancellor Black Books teams up with a truly awful sociopathic blueblood named Celia to get rid of Danica McKellar and trick the king into marrying Celia wearing a disturbingly realistic Danica McKellar mask instead. Then together they plan to murder the king and his unstable daughter though the magic of actual magic, which is real in this world, using the dark arts to transform Chancellor Black Books into an uncanny double of the king, and changing Celia's old, sick Vietnamese pot belly pig Prometheus into a double of Theodora, and because everybody is stupid, nobody will ever know the difference.
But their fiendish plot is foiled by the intervention of a helpful sparrow that overheard their villainous plan, who takes wing and finds Danica McKellar and the king, spilling all the beans. Using this knowledge, the king summons his royal sorcerer Malachi to the palace, and he sacrifices Chancellor Black Books and Celia to their dark god Ba'al, lord of storms and prince of the void. Pleased by this bounty of sin, Ba'al grants the dread king one boon, and the king chooses to make Danica McKellar his immortal bride, and in time they come to unite the entire world under their unholy banner.
That's what really happens. That's the plot of Crown For Christmas. It's also the plot of Maid In Manhattan and About Schmidt.
Can I be real with you for a moment? I believe that in a parallel universe, Danica McKellar is a major Hollywood star, standing alongside such luminaries as Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan and Reese Witherspoon as an American sweetheart and romantic comedy mainstay. She certainly has the charm. She has an infectious smile. And she's blessed with a natural, awkward comic sensibility that audiences find endearing. I genuinely feel that if she had taken a slightly different path, she would have become an A-list star.
I'm not sure why it never happened for her. She never really left acting as a profession, despite her passion for mathematics, which she certainly could have parlayed into a teaching career if she so wished. Danica McKellar has kept very busy since The Wonder Years as a working actor, primarily in TV and in animation, but aside from fucking Sidekicks back in 1992, she has never had a featured role in a major theatrical release. I have to imagine she's auditioned for more than a few bigger movies in her time, but she obviously never managed to break through, relegated to starring in dreck like Tasmanian Devils and... and Love At The Christmas Table. And she's never been the problem in any of the terrible projects in which she's featured.
I hate Heatstroke, but Danica McKellar was good in it! DB Sweeney wasn't good in Heatstroke, but she was! She actually committed to that dreadful material, giving a ridiculous movie about velociraptor-looking aliens orchestrating global warming to make the planet Earth more comfortable for their inevitable invasion far more respect than it deserved. And good lord, don't get me started on Path Of Destruction, the SyFy original movie so bad that Stephen Furst, fucking Flounder from Animal House, too embarrassed to attach his own name to the project, directed it under the pseudonym "Louie Myman". Would you believe she's actually good in that pile of shit?
Why does she try so hard in every terrible project in which she agrees to star? Professionalism, I suppose, but it still makes me sad. Danica McKellar deserves so much better. She certainly deserves better than a tired, boring story like Crown For Christmas.
So is Crown For Christmas a bad movie? No. Maddeningly enough, it isn't a bad movie. Not at all. The cast is quite good, for the most part. The director gets a lot of mileage out of the production's location shoot in Romania, capturing some lovely vistas in the process. The movie tells its story well enough. So why do I hate it? Why did I squirm through every agonizing moment of this movie? Because there's a fair amount of talent on display here, telling a story that's been told more times than there are stars in the sky, and it all feels like a useless effort, nothing more than a nihilistic exercise in futility. Why did anyone involved even bother? Surely they had better things to do.
One odd thing I noticed that I feel I must mention before I wrap this up, is that the script was clearly written for a younger cast. I say this because we're told that the two leads are in their early 30's, with Danica McKellar's character specifically being 31, and the king losing his wife before his 30th birthday, which occurred four years before the events of the story.
Danica McKellar is 40 years old, and co-star Rupert Penry-Jones is 45. Both actors are aging very gracefully to say the least, but neither can pass for being in their early 30's. It's an odd detail that I just couldn't forget, and I firmly believe that Danica McKellar was extremely flattered when she read the script and learned that the producers thought she could pass for a woman nine years younger. Or maybe nobody realized this error until it was too late to do anything about it. Whatever. The movie still sucks, and Danica McKellar deserves better.
VERDICT: NAUGHTY
That's not the plot of the movie. There's no wizard in it.
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