It's Christmas Eve
Oh bleeding hearts of the world UNITE.
Today’s Quote:
“And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling. ‘How could it be so? It came without ribbons! It came without tags! It came without packages, boxes, or bags!’ And he puzzled and puzzled, till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before! ‘Maybe Christmas,’ he thought, ‘doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas… perhaps… means a little bit more.”
Dr. Seuss, How The Grinch Stole Christmas!
Reviews:
The Princess Switch: Switched Again (2020, Netflix): It is time.
And now, the review that most of you have been sitting breathlessly waiting for, the sequel to a movie that re-defined body double plots, the movie that allows Vanessa Hudgens to try out more accents than Meryl Streep after several cocktails - THE PRINCESS SWITCH: SWITCHED AGAIN.
The original Princess Switch was so insane, so ludicrous, so delightfully absurd that the MOMENT it was released in the year of our lord 2018 I knew that it was speaking directly to my soul in a way few films ever have. A simpleton baker from the ant-sized city of Chicago competing in a global baking competition where she meets her exact double and SWITCHES so each can spend time with their respective loves? To me, Bob Dylan sums up this movie best:
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
We start the second film months/years after we left off, where Stacy De Novo (Hudgens, iconically) is now the Princess of Belgravia, married off to her true love Prince Edward (Prince RICHARD was in “A Christmas Prince”, very tricky). Her absolutely not-relative Duchess Margaret (Hudgens again!) of the neighboring country of Montenaro is smarting over her breakup to Stacy’s baker friend Kevin, who has retreated back to his tiny abode in the even smaller city of Chicago.
Stacy and Edward are happily married but Margaret is under enormous pressure as her father/uncle recently died (Christmas = death) and she is next in line for the throne. Stacy sees how stressed Margaret is and decides to invite Kevin and his daughter to Montenaro for the coronation so they can re-ignite their passionate love and get married. Obviously in order for Margaret and Kevin to re-connect they need time for themselves, which is pretty hard to do unless you could SWITCH THEM OUT!
But before we switch, we must be introduced to the reason for this second film, and that is a THIRD TWIN/DOUBLE/CLONE. That’s right, Duchess Margaret has an identical cousin Fiona (whose parentage is never once questioned) a party-girl who is back in town for the coronation and ready to cause some TROUBLE. Hudgens does something with an accent here that I will not remark on, suffice it to say that it is not good.
As Margaret and Stacy switch, we get a would-have-been-interesting side-plot of Prince Edward feeling like he and his wife aren’t as connected as they were (what, like 5 months ago when they met) and really just wants to talk to Stacy to get things straightened out. What a doll! Too bad that NO ONE has time for Prince Edward or his feelings, as Stacy and Margaret pull off another flawless switch and don’t tell anyone besides certain people (Edward is not included in this elite circle for reasons that probably have to do with his mental capacity).
But then, just as Margaret and Stacy are about to switch back Fiona realizes they are switched and decides to GASLIGHT the country into thinking SHE IS MARGARET. She reasonably decides to kidnap Stacy and then bursts into Margaret’s room and is basically like “I am you now, you are not you, you are me” and everyone just kind of accepts it? Because they are identical and there is obviously no other way to tell!
Fiona gets SO CLOSE to achieving her lofty yet achievable goal, which seems to be “get crowned Queen, steal all the royal money, escape to Capri” but is foiled in the end due to the power of love and easily identifiable tattoos. Margaret and Kevin get married in an airport, that’s all I’ll say about that.
What really made this movie pop is its place in the Netflix Christmas Cinematic Universe (NCCU for short), which is the universe linking all of their original films together. You can see the full breakdown as it existed in 2019 here, but suffice it to say that in each of Netflix’s original movies they either reference or show the movies on TV, so the characters either inhabit the same world as the other movie characters or those characters are actually movie characters to them. It’s quite clear, the diagram works.
But CRUCIALLY in 2019’s “A Knight Before Christmas”, which stars VANESSA HUDGENS as a simpleton from some place in America that is not Chicago, it references Alvodia, the country in “A Christmas Prince” movies as a real place that a character visited - so not a movie but an actual country. Which, as eagle-eyed readers can guess, means that since Amber and Richard from “A Christmas Prince” literally appear in the most recent “Princess Switch” movie, there is only one way it all works.
That’s right, a fourth clone.
The ONLY way it all makes sense is if Brooke (I had to google the name I’m sorry the movie was golden trash) from “A Knight Before Christmas” is the missing fourth clone/twin. Everything works perfectly if this is the case, because Brooke doesn’t yet realize she is the twin/clone of Stacy, Margaret, and Fiona because she doesn’t watch much TV and thus doesn’t keep up with the comings and goings of random royals in other countries. She is just living her small-town life, unaware of the enormous responsibility she has to travel abroad and participate in a record-shattering four-way-switch. This also confirms that time travel is real in the Christmas Prince AND Princess Switch movies, truly groundbreaking.
I can only pray that in 2021 we get confirmation of this theory in either “A Knight Before Christmas 2: The Royal Plague” or “A Princess Switch 3: Switchy Switch Baby Switch”. Godspeed.
Musings:
Delightful puppy Tiktok here, Christmas movie of the year I’d say (ty from Veronica from Brooklyn for the link, what an influencer).
