2023, Jim O'Hanlon (Your Christmas or Mine?) -- Amazon
We watched the first one last year, and .... well, I didn't have much to say. I can say is that I have a fondness in hindsight for it, which meant we would watch this quite soon after the run of Hallmarkies.
Recap of first. James and Hayley are two kids in love. James is posh (British for rich or from nobility or both) and Hayley is ... not. Due to Xmas Hijinx they both end up trapped at each other's family places while dealing with misunderstandings and tension. But it ends with both families smooshed together for a holly jolly Xmas!
A year later and an Xmas Family Vacation is under way. The Earl (James' dad) is flying the whole bunch to the Austrian Alps for a ski holiday during Xmas. Well, not exactly. Hayley's parents are intent on paying their own way so Geoff, Hayley's dad, worked out a great "deal" through a seedy friend of his. An initial mixup at the airport puts Hayley and family into the Earl's hotel shuttle bus, and James and family in.... what Geoff booked. The former end up at a resort ski chalet where all the red carpet is rolled out for whom they believe to be English Royalty. The latter are relegated to a shack behind some crotchety old guy's place. Shack is too nice a word. Its a shamble of wooden slats tied together hanging over a precipice.
BUT the misunderstanding is not the crux of the film and is somewhat quickly dealt with, and everyone ends up at the luxury ski resort, where the real focus of the movie begins: Hayley realizing how different their two worlds are. Its kind of a big downer of a plot focus, to be honest. I would have assumed the preceding year would have dealt with all that, as The Earl couldn't have been galivanting around the world, finding a new American girlfriend all that time, right? Then again, how many "in-law" families actually interact on a regular basis. Despite how well they got on that first Xmas, maybe there wasn't really any opportunity to deal with how they all really felt about each other. Cuz its not just Hayley feeling out of sorts about how different the two families are, its also her mother. And it colours the rest of the movie. Meanwhile, the boys all just get drunk together and they're alright.
The movie travels down a typical romcom path culminating with the Ultimate Misunderstanding and Hayley dumps James right when he is desperately trying to do a drunken proposal. With her mom supporting her, they all pile on a plane to head back to England for a proper family Xmas season... what's left of it. But James is getting the shit kicked out of him by love, so he does a proper Grand Romantic Gesture and stops the plane. Problem solved.
Except its not. The issues her mom and her were dealing with are still there. Nobody's being honest about it, so they aren't resolving it. If they do a third movie, I imagine it will be on a full-family honeymoon to a tropical place where things will go wrong again. And they will still be dealing with their Two Different Worlds bullshit. I get it. The wealthy, the privileged live in a different world than us, and it leads to feelings of inadequacy. Hell, I just have to struggle through a work conversation with a C Level, where they discuss their second house, to know my world is nothing like theirs. I cannot imagine adding the Royalty level to it. The best way to deal with it? Don't connect the families, and just deal with the Awkward Family Events as they come up, but leave the families in two separate worlds as much as possible. You know, avoid dealing with it.
I thinks you ended up talking about shit that was only a bit of the movie, dude. Got some internalized feelings on the Two Worlds paradigm?
Shaddup you.
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