25 Days of Christmas | Picture Perfect Royal Christmas (2020)

 Beatrice receives an invitation from the king of Pantrea to photograph the "5 days of Christmas festivities", a traditional event in the kingdom. Beatrice sneers at the invitation, but when Amanda's best friend, Sunny, hears about it she quickly concocts an elaborate scheme to help Amanda further her career.

Sunny replies to the king's invitation. She tells him Beatrice will be photographing the event, however, she will be travelling incognito, under the pseudonym Amanda Eastman. Sunny doesn't tell Amanda any of that. Instead, she tells her Beatrice asked Amanda to represent her in this festival. Amanda is ecstatic, it's her big chance to finally further her career.

It's only when she arrives at the kingdom that the confusion becomes clear.

She also discovers that the king hired Beatrice in the first place because he hopes her pictures to help boost tourism to the country. There's a lot hanging on the success of the photographs, which only serves to boost the pressure over the young photographer's shoulders.

The festival is a lot of fun, but awfully small for something that is supposed to boost the countries' tourism, I mean, each event has four or five contestants at the most. The competitions are cool... A baking competition (pretty standard), but there are also a few more imaginative ones like the Christmas Card competition and present wrapping contest (mostly for children). There is also a raffle, and the prize is a dance with the prince (I guess we all see where this is going...)

There is a prince in the kingdom, Prince Leopold, and things happen in a way that Amanda is caught in a love triangle along with the prince and his "better-match", a duchess.

This movie was not my favourite movie of the blogathon, and it probably shouldn't be feature in such an excellent week, but I didn't want to left it out because it is a 2020 piece...

The prince wasn't very captivating, I think. He was too passive, and in the end, a lot of the things that were happening, even the things that seemed like they might have been the prince's idea (like giving her a raffle ticket) were actually engendered by someone else. That made the movie a little unsatisfying... I also could have done without the transition shots of photographs piling over a desk in between some scenes.

Be that as it may it's still a nice little movie, and the originality of some of the competitions in the festival are enough of a contribution to the cannon of elements in royal Christmas movies.

Pantrea, a kingdom so small that even their fancy Christmas competition doesn't have more than four or five contestants on each event. (And the baking competition had such weak contestants that the winner made hot chocolate!!!)

Prince Leopold (second Leopold we have here)

An assistant to a world-renowned photographer and aspiring photographer on her own right. 

Nothing really stood out. Interesting that there wasn't a single musical category in their competition though. 

The Christmas cards the kids made in the contest, especially the one with the snowman were kinda cute.

The festival itself was a good idea

 That moment on the bridge, when the Prince confesses to be nervous about the dance raffle and has a practice dance with Amanda.  

The conversation between the king and queen when he reminds her how they met in the hopes of softening her stance regarding what constitutes a good match for their son. 

Picture Perfect Royal Christmas | USA | 2020 | Direction: Todor Chapkanov | Screenplay: Rolfe Kanefsky, Regina Luvitt | Cast: Roxanne McKee, David Witts, Sophie Ward