REVIEW: As I'm sure you've all seen, Netflix threw some serious Twitter shade at its newest festive fun movie released last month.
They're such savvy little suckers. Of course everyone has rushed to watch A Christmas Prince; the movie the streaming service holds as a bar of bad taste.
I was one of those people, ready to add a new banger to my collection of go-to holiday flicks -The Holiday, Love Actually, Charlie's Angels Full Throttle, all the classics.
Picture everything you think this movie is going to be when you look at this promo poster.
That is exactly what this movie is. And that's all it needs to be.
I have so much love for this movie, I genuinely don't know where to begin.
Rose McIver is a Kiwi actress and this is some of her finest work. I genuinely think this is going to go down in history as her real 'on the map' piece, the 'Royals' to her Lorde.
Side note - out of interest, I went to look at what year McIver starred in The Lovely Bones (2009, in case you were wondering - doesn't time fly!?). I found this on her Wikipedia page, which makes me think I probably don't want to hang out with Rose McIver any time soon (sorry).
But anyway, back to the A Christmas Prince.
McIver plays Amber Moore, an up-and-coming journalist. Her magazine, (the pretty sexually named IMO) Now Beat, is a clear rip-off of every publication you've ever seen in a movie, apart from maybe Spotlight.
She gets sent on on a highly expensive location job to Aldovia (not a real country and sounds very similar to the equally fake Genovia from Princess Diaries) to look for dirt on Prince Richard, due to take the throne after his father's recent death.
Clearly their magazine has a limitless budget when it comes to celebrity gossip, which I can assure you is not usually the case.
I don't want to spoil anything for those of you saving it for some Saturday night viewing with a brown UberEats bag next to you - my recommended watching method for this film.
But I'm not giving too much away when I reveal that Amber makes her way actually INSIDE this castle, which has absolutely no firm security measures, going undercover as tutor to the young princess.
I'm really trying hard to picture this phone call back to my editor; "I'm posing as someone else to uncover deep family secrets of a royal family, and I'm planning to reside here indefinitely without identifying myself as a journalist and being generally deceptive about my reasons".
It would be a fairly short conversation.
Then, of course, as happens with most assignments reporters go on, the journalist falls in love with her subject, seeing the real him, away from the fake image usually portrayed through the pesky media and lying journalists...
Wait.
Anyway, because she happens to be beautiful and intelligent, and wears Chuck Taylors with her ball dresses, because she's a definition 'Cool Girl'™, he falls equally in love with her.
She probably eats burgers three times a day, but stays a size 6, and plays video games and is up for a threesome.
Ah, the 'Cool Girl'™.
My friends often think my job is fairly glamorous, but now I feel sad, because this scenario literally never happens. At least, to me.
Nobody I've ever interviewed has ever fallen in love with me, especially none of the royalty.
Once, I interviewed a television personality I thought was hot, then got drunk at a PR event and gave his publicity manager my number for him to call me.
He didn't. Our next interview was uncomfortable.
Anyway, despite its glaring inaccuracies and encouragement of a well-circulated myth about the female spirit, the songs are Christmasy and super fun.
There are a lot of panoramas of snow-capped mountains and castles, which got me feeling very festive, sitting on my couch with all the doors open in Auckland's oppressive mugginess, while mosquitos tore me to shreds.
The snow setting was quite obviously a homage to the massively underrated seminal classic Chalet Girl. If you haven't seen Chalet Girl, I highly recommend you do it as soon as possible.
It's a children's movie, but with binge drinking and snowboarding and sex - it's fantastic.
A Christmas Prince, though, just about edges it out, especially as it includes the instant classic of a line: "Where there's a tiara, there's dirt!", which I think I'm going to get tattooed on my lower back in cursive font.
A solid 3.5/5 for me, but 4.5/5 if you're day-drunk off a bottle of rosé and comparing Prince Richard to every other asshole who's ever scorned you, especially that guy you made eye contact with for three seconds at the train station yesterday.
Newshub.
