25 days of Christmas | A Royal New Year's Eve

Caitlyn is an aspiring fashion designer who works as a magazine assistant to a nightmare of a boss. Just before Christmas, she's assigned to help plan a New Year's Eve ball of the utmost importance. Prince Jeffrey, the heir to the throne of a small country in Europe, is in town, along with Lady Isabelle, and there's an expectation that the prince will propose to Lady Isabelle during this ball, as is traditional in his country.  Caitlyn's big opportunity comes when Lady Isabelle becomes interested in one of her creations and asks her to design and prepare a dress for her to wear at the ceremony. Over the next several days Caitlyn works against the clock to get the dress ready, in spite of her boss's many attempts at sabotage by assigning her more and more responsibility in the planning of the ball.  These added responsibilities also have an added side-effect: Caitlyn gets to spend a lot of time with the prince. Not that she realizes that at first... Caitlyn meets the prince by accident and mistakes him for a model. It takes quite a while for her to realize who she's talking to, actually. And the prince delights on it, for there was nothing he wanted more during his time in NYC than to be just Jeff, instead of Prince Jeffrey. He marvels at the simplest things he sees, and even taking the subway is an adventure.

Once they get to know each other a bit more, Caitlyn and Jeffrey inevitably develop feelings for each other, which leads the Prince to search for more and more opportunities to spend time in her company and to start questioning the wisdom of the proposal he is expected to make on New year's Eve. They seem to fit together nicely. She loves the wonder in his eyes whenever he talks about something as simple as taking the subway. He loves that he can just be himself with her and that she never tells him his blabbing too much, or being "too" passionate about a cause that is obviously close to his heart. The only problem of course is that all of this happens long before Caitlyn eventually discovers the true identity of her new beau.

This isn't technically a Christmas movie, but it kind of is, since it starts shortly before Christmas and the trees and decorations are everywhere, even though the focus is actually on New Year's Day, which is a little twist, I suppose. It's also the reason this movie is missing some important elements, like the best Christmas song or a best decoration... The story isn't very original, but that's okay. The girl rejects her love on the basis of his title, as you would expect. She repeats again and again that "fairy tales don't happen for real", which gets a little tiresome after a while. It kind of makes you want to say "accept happiness and go to the ball, woman!", straight at the TV...

It's strange.. When I did a 25 days of Christmas blogathon in 2016 the theme was Old Holywood movies... It was then that I became really interested in classic films, and started counting Cary Grand and jimmy Stewart among my favourite actors. Many of those movies weren't really Christmas movies in the classic sense, but they usually ended on Christmas and the Spirit, the Magic of Christmas was there. Movies like "All that heaven allows" and "An affair to remember" for instance... Because of that, they felt more like Christmas movies than films like "A Royal New Year's Eve". That's also the reason why I wouldn't watch this one again... I don't mind that the plots are unoriginal, as long as the characters are engaging, the worldbuilding shows a little attention to detail, and most of all, the Magic of Christmas is there. This one doesn't really have that, sadly...

 

A small European country. That's all we get? Seriously? 

Prince Jeffrey

Aspiring fashion designer

 

This is a tough one because this movie isn't really a Christmas Movie most of the time. But I think that moment when Jeffrey's butler finds Caitlyn and talks to her is definitely a run-in with the Christmas Spirit. The butler is kind of like an angel, putting people back in their paths...

It was definitely not the pink Christmas tree at Caitlyn's apartment. Seriously, though, I liked the decorations for the Christmas thing at the beginning of the movie, even though there wasn't much to it

The dance at the end, of course... 

A Royal New Year's Eve | USA | 2017 | Direction: Monika Mitchell | Screenplay: Rick Garman | Cast: Jessy Schram, Sam Page