On the seventh day of Christmas...
...I accidentally sold my pants.
24 days of Christmas
Each day of Christmas, I'll be reviewing a Christmas movie and sharing a new Christmas outfit. We've been gaming this weekend (weekend having started on Thursday night for us) and, as the seasoned gamer I am, I managed to sell the pants I was wearing that I needed for my extra 10,000% damage. Needless to say, I was pretty useless for a while. In celebration, here is one of my pairs of Christmas pants.
I did, though, remember to change the number on the picture and got myself a cat-assist. So, win-win...?
Day seven has me dropping a few (potential) spoilers. Sorry, but this movie got my goat up.
A Christmas Prince: the Royal Wedding - 2.5/5 stars
What can I say except 'eh'? I feel like I spent more time complaining to hubby about the things I didn't like about it than I did watching it. The new dad? Yuck. The wedding planner? Needed a Jimmy Choo-choo up his hoo-hoo. Mrs Averil? Ugh.
This was, compared to the first one, a total mess. One perfectly decent - if not un-original -storyline in Amber adjusting to life as a member of the royal family (complete with strict protocol ma'am and inane wedding planner) wasn't enough, they needed to add in the strife surrounding the king's 'New Aldovia' plans.
I have to hope that the writers didn't personally have ANY experience with royal traditions, because for Mrs Averil to have considered Sahil's suggested dress appropriate is just mind-boggling. The mock-up illustration of it was something you'd expect to see on a stick-thin model at some uber modern fashion week, not being called 'classic' and 'traditional'. To think that Amber's request for something contemporary was ridiculed while that monstrosity was lauded? That is merely my first issue with this whole debacle.
This brings me to the wedding planner and new dad. Whoever thought that those characters added comedic value was wrong. I can understand re-casting, things happen and for whatever reason a previous actor doesn't come back for the sequel. That's a touch jarring to start with but you get over it eventually (unless you're a fan of The Prince & Me). I did not get over this one. I was about to get fully behind Amber's new dad after the joke about being a new person...until he picked up the queen of Aldovia and swung her around. No one - not even the biggest buffoon in history - picks up a freaking queen. Sorry, but that was the point at which the eye rolls began. And didn't stop. Sahil was a piece of unnecessary flotsam from the moment he stole Rudy's taxi at the airport. He was over the top, ridiculous, and I felt zero belief that the queen would have chosen him to plan the wedding. Add the fact that Mrs Averil became a cardboard cutout character for the sake of having six hundred bad guys, and this was too much for me.
The plot was predictable in the worst way, the characters lost so much of their magic, and it was just one cheap attempt at a laugh after another.
The only redeeming features were the gorgeous Rose McIver and Honor Kneafsey - she was sweet and her little plot thread was the most heartwarming thing about the whole movie. Now, if Amber's dress had been ironed before she met Richard down the aisle, I might have been a bit more forgiving about the whole thing. I'm still eagerly waiting installment three, though. Just sayin'...
If you've got a suggestion for a movie, leave it in the comments.
You can check out the trailer below (fingers crossed there isn't any regional bollocks that gets in the way).
