A Princess for Christmas - Holiday Movie Musings

It is easy to get all these Christmas + Prince/Princess movies mixed up. A Christmas Prince (and A Christmas Prince 2 and 3), A Christmas Princess, Christmas with a Prince, A Prince for Christmas, The Princess Switch, to name the ones I have reviewed so far. So I had to watch and review this one, which at this time is running on both Amazon Prime Video and Netflix.

From 2011, I hadn’t seen this title before. or if I did, see above commentary about mixing them all up. But turns out no, I hadn’t seen it. And the premise is a little more interesting in general—an woman takes guardianship over her niece and nephew after her sister and her royal husband die. We pick things up with the usual “Oh she’s SO in over her HEAD,” tropes, and jump right to an invitation from the royal grandfather for them to all visit at Christmas. The invitation is delivered by...Paisley Winterbottom. He is the royal butler, sent on an errand to fetch her back with the kids for the holiday. Given the name, I thought there’d be 100% more whimsy, or at least an elf or two, but no. They just named him that.

Grandpa is played by none other than 007, Roger Moore; the leading lady is nobody I know, but was quite good; and the entire cast of the staff that works at the castle are just the bee’s knees. I would say if they make a sequel, I hope they bring the entire cast back, but it was made in 2011 and a new installment never appeared, despite a big set up for one at the end. The shooting locations and costuming was fairly well done except one glaring misstep, IMO: the gown.

From this costumer’s perspective, her dress in the end looked like someone adapted an ice skating costume into a long gown. The weird side cut outs with flesh colored built-in-bra and weirdly gathered  tulle details made me avert my eyes. But ain’t nobody else gonna care about that.

Recommend.

Netflix and Amazon Prime