Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophes, where one man sifts through the sea of food facts, culture, and recipes, to bring back the sparkling gold nuggets of nonsense. I’m your palatable…fuck, I forgot the word I was going for…someone who pans for gold, starts with a P…”panhandler”? No, that’s a beggar. “Panner”? Shit, what are they- PROSPECTOR. Palatable Prospector, Jon O’Guin. Oof. That wasn’t my finest moment. But then again, most of this post isn’t going to be, so at least we’re prepared. You read the title, we’re talking about the Netflix original movie: The Princess Switch. 

Why?

Look, I thought it was going to be more relevant than it was, okay? And it’s even LESS relevant now: I was supposed to be uploaded on Boxing Day, as another cute little “Here’s a holiday movie review so I don’t have to work that hard around Christmas”, but then I got sick, and things broke, and I ended up taking that post off, and I didn’t even start watching the movie until last night, when I discovered a LOT LESS OF THE RUN TIME OF THIS FILM is devoted to the baking portion of the plot than the Wikipedia entry led me to believe.

This two-second shot of a woman setting down a tray of cookies is like, the second most baking-focused scene in the film. And I’m only exaggerating by one or two positions.

So now we’re all here, and I’ve got egg on my face. Eggs, interestingly enough, NOT SOMETHING SHOWN in this movie ostensibly about a baking competition. They have MULTIPLE breakfasts in this movie, AND a cake baking contest, and I don’t think I saw a SINGLE GODDAMN EGG.

I suppose I should explain what’s going on: The Princess Switch is a Netflix original movie whose basic premise you already know very well, probably from the instant you read the title. Two women, one of high society and one common-born, discover they look identical, and decide to switch places for a couple days. The film caught my attention for 3 reasons: firstly, Vanessa Hudgens.

“Gabriella” if you’re trapped in the past and unable to move on.

What? I’m not going to LIE. Vanessa Hudgens is an attractive woman of basically my age, so her film career has been roughly aligned with my interests. The High School Musical films bracketed my final year of High Schol (which meant they were far too childish for the era, but hey, an effort was made) and I’ve kept an eye mostly on her more independent work: I watched Beastly (if only because it seemed like SUCH A BAD IDEA. “Beauty and the Beast, except, instead actually being a BEAST, the guy was cursed to have like, Rad Tattoos, a shaved head, and scars? And the guy we cast to play him was handsome enough to be in fucking MAGIC MIKE next year?”)

my god. what a repulsive monstrosity. truly his hideous physique exposes the ugliness of his soul

I also watched Spring Breakers and Sucker Punch, films of…well, you can’t say those movies weren’t trying to say SOMETHING. God only knows what it WAS, but they were certainly experiences.

Anyway, we appear to be in the early stages of what I have already registered and trade-marked as the Vanessassaince, with Ms Hudgens appearing in Bad Boys for Life next week, her second appearance in one of the “MUSICAL X LIVE” TV events last fall, and no less than 3 Netflix original Christmas movies: The Princess Switch, The Knight Before Christmas, and next year’s The Princess Switch 2.

That was the other primary reason I picked it: I just Googled Netflix Christmas movie, and if you ignore the Christmas Prince trilogy, this was the next biggest one that I felt I could connect with. Which is because of the THIRD reason: in The Princess Switch, the common-born character is actually a baker from Chicago, who had been entered without her knowledge into an annual baking contest in a remote fictional European nation. So a Christmas movie about Baking, with Vanessa Hudgens? Sign me up!

What follows will be my thoughts of the movie, as it progresses, so if you want to avoid spoilers: There’s not enough actual damn baking in this, Vanessa does the “acting as two people” fine. The script is often AMAZINGLY blunt, at least two characters have kind of weird arcs, but overall, I’d say it’s fine. Solid B+ Hallmark movie fare. Check it out if that sounds interesting.

THE MOVIE AS IT MOVES

We start out with a series of shots of Chicago skyline, the Chicago river, just a series of images intended to tell you “this movie is set in Chicago”, while one of the many generic quasi-Christmas carols plays over the credits.  I myself am not super familiar with the layout of Chicago, but I have friends who live there, so I like, barely recognize the skyline. Not that it matters, because the second line of dialogue in the entire movie is there to help those of you less informed.

Not “the Northside”. Not “the neighborhood”. ALL OF CHICAGO.

We’re in Stacey’s Sweets and Treats, a small boutique bakery that seems to only have 3 employees, and is…making a cake for City Hall due at 5 PM. Slightly overplaying your hand there, movie. I do have a weird sort of distaste/respect for the kind of twee bakeries you always see in these kinds of movies: I actually WORKED at a bakery for several weeks in my early 20’s, so I know for a fact that the pristine storefront is something of a façade over the chaos and madness of the kitchen, where the staff tends to start coming in at 2 AM, to get everything cooked for the breakfast rush. (That’s where the stereotype of cops loving donuts comes from, by the way: Bakeries and donut shops were one of the few places OPEN late at night where a cop could get out of their car and grab a bite/do some paperwork without going back to the station.)  So like, on the one hand, the pristine storefront is just papering over the actual WORK, but on the other hand, if you actually do both sides well, it’s even more impressive. I just often find that places that go whole-hog on the front-end are more skilled pastry designers than great BAKERS, if you appreciate the distinction.

None of this is related to the start of the film, which is really just a lot of kind of bland exposition, like:

“That’s why Kevin Richards is the best sous-chef in the business!”
“Got any cookies for your favorite god-daughter?” “You’re my only god-daughter”
“Hey, we secretly entered you in a globally televised cooking event that happens in like, a week without your knowledge because we felt you were sad when your boyfriend dumped you.”
“Could you be spontaneous for once in your life?” “You know I’m not good at spontaneous”

One of those didn’t feel like it fit.

She shuts it down after an argument about being too rigid since the break-up, with her sous-chef noting that, it’s important that she get out and do things, since she’s spent 3 Christmases with her exe, so she can’t just sit at home doing nothing just because he’s not with her. She says she’d need to plan something like this, and he says, according to John Lennon, “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans” (Which is a phrase NOT invented by John Lennon, he just used it in a song, but whatever.) We then cut to the first “real” scene of the film, and I’m not going to lie, it got me pretty excited about the movie.

Maybe the Best Scene

Stacey’s walking home from work, and gives some cash to a Salvation Army bell-ringer. Or, rather, a man ringing a bell next to a red pot, since you don’t have to pay for licensing that way. And spoilers, but the fellow manning the pot is going to be our “Secret Santa” for the evening.

Looks a little too…New York-y, to be Santa, Jon.

By which I mean, from the whimsical music that underscores his first appearance, and his weighty lines here, you know, IMMEDIATELY, that this is the “everything’s going to work out” magic guy who tends to show up in these kinds of movies. He plays like, 6 different people over the course of the film, gets called out at least once for being the same guy but brushes it off, always gives people the exact pointed-but-still-potentially-vague comments that will nudge them along the path to making the right choices, and so on. Maybe he’s Santa, maybe he’s a guardian angel, we don’t know.

After his pointed comment above, Stacey sees her exe leaving a restaurant, and decides to try and strike up a conversation with him. It doesn’t go well, as his new girlfriend comes out of the restaurant a moment later, Stacey learns that her exe has not mentioned her, and immediately downplays both how long they dated and how recently, so Stacey, in the need to show up her exe and his new girl, states that HER Christmas plan is to participate in an international baking competition in Belgravia. Meaning our entire plot is founded on her need to prove she’s winning the break-up. Amazing.

The Rest of the Film, I guess

So she flies off to Belgravia, which is honestly just the European version of Leavenworth in December, meets a vendor who looks EXACTLY LIKE THE GUY FROM CHICAGO, wink wink, and after allowing 5 minutes in her rigidly planned schedule for the dance-loving god-daughter to check out the local ballet conservatory, is told AGAIN, that “Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.” Because HAVE YOU GUESSED OUR THEME YET?

“Don’t worry, I’m going to repeat the phrase “Looks like a princess” a couple times later for the uppity sons-of-bitches, so EVERYONE is getting repetition.”

She almost gets hit by a car, which has the prince and his stuck up valet/butler driving so they can snark about American tourists in their city. (That’s 100% on brand, I’ll give them that.)  She goes to the baking competition set-up, where we learn NOTHING about baking, and instead learn that Stacey has a rival, a nemesis from Le Cordon Bleu who won the competition last year, and supposedly slept with one of the professors in culinary school. (Slut-shaming, Netflix? Tsk tsk.) She pulls the iconic mean girl move and ‘accidentally’ slips her coffee on Stacey’s apron. And by “accidentally”, I mean “Makes no effort to pretend to trip or stumble, but instead takes two steps, and then makes a hard 90 degree turn to dump her coffee on our heroine.”

Which is one of the great things about this movie that I mentioned in my summary: it is stupendously blunt at times. Like, the response to this blatant (and silly) act of sabotage is for the sous-chef and daughter to do the set-up pay-off line of “She seemed…” “Meeeaan?” Which…it’s kind of breathtaking. They didn’t try for any euphemism or sarcasm. They just called her mean. Later, the daughter opens a conversation with her father “I really  wish you and Stacey were a thing.” That’s it. No subtext, no leading. It’s kind of beautiful.  (side note: the dad’s response is a pretty reasonable and solid response as far as Christmas romantic comedies go.)  

Anyway, while trying to find a clean apron, Stacey bumps into the Duchess of Montenaro, the fiancée of the Prince, and they discover…

A MIRROR!
Oh, and they both look alike. That’s weird.

This is explained that the Duchess’s great-grandmother’s cousin fled to America after shacking up with a scandalous American divorcee three generations ago, with his daughter marrying someone named D’nofrio. Stacey’s last name of DeNovo suggests maybe they’re long lost…fourth cousins, if I’m doing my math right.  

Anywho, from here the plot does typical “switched identity” plot things, much to my chagrin. Despite this being centered on a baker, and the inciting incident being a baking competition, we spend only about 5 minutes in the first 55 in either the bakery or the baking competition area. By the way, we never go back to Chicago, which we also spent about 5 minutes in. The next hour of this movie is classic swapped lives drama: people not having the right skills for their history, screwing up phrases and relationships, slow bonding and the discovery that maybe the life they’ve found is better than the one they’ve set aside, someone knows something is suspicious so they’re snooping around, etc. The “learning to act like the other person sequence” is pretty cute, as most of them are, since it’s an actor acting badly like their own acting, and V Hudge pulls it off nicely.

It’s all done fairly well, and there’s a kind of funny/kind of silly “no one is in the wrong here” motif, where every time they start to show that maybe person X has been selfish or cruel, they then back-pedal with it. The King notices the Duchess is acting weird, so he has the Prince’s valet ‘keep an eye on her’, only to decide he doesn’t care the second after the queen points out that the Prince is falling in love with her like, two scenes later. The valet is the closest thing the movie HAS to a villain, because he’s…doing what he was told to do by his king, and is a little snooty. Even he comes around by the end, doing an excited arm-pump of victory when it all works out.

If you watch, you can actually see him do it AGAIN in a later shot as they keep kissing. And he was against this thing until like, 4 minutes ago.

I’m not going to get into the romance/character growth of the film, because that’s, you know, what the movie’s REALLY about. The baking competition is like, another 6 minutes of activity at the climax, where the mean girl rival gets away with like, a child’s idea of sabotage. (She comes in the night before, and cuts the wire on a stand mixer. Like, cuts the plug off. Are there NO CREWS for this internationally televised event? Did the Cordon Bleu- Trained chef NOT check her tools when she came in, and neither did her sous chef? This would have been caught at least an hour before the actual contest started, not in the last half of it, like the film pretends. )

But yeah, overall, it’s fine as far as sentimental Christmas rom-coms go. Except for ONE part. Which is where the sous-chef and the duchess-in-disguise decide to bond over the baker’s favorite Christmas movie…

I’m not even going to credit this picture, because they INCLUDED THEIR OWN LOGO.

I mean, cunning of you to avoid having to pay anyone rights, Netflix, but you PREVIOUSLY ESTABLISHED that she spent last Christmas in a cottage, with Paul, in Vermont. And A Christmas Prince  is ONE YEAR OLD at the time of the movie. So unless you’re saying she spent last Christmas bundled up with Paul watching A Christmas Prince, and CONTINUED to consider it her “favorite Christmas movie” despite the clear associations that would entail after the break-up, you’re talking bullshit.

You wanna see some REAL baking artistry? Some technical prowess? It ain’t in this film. No no, you gotta tune in next week, when I get Fancy Schmancy with some holiday party baked goods. BOOM, brought it back. Movie wasn’t relevant, but at least it’s a set-up.

MONDAY: JON MAKES CABBAGE PASTRIES. NO CABBAGE INVOLVED. (LOOK, IT’S JUST A CHEESY JOKE YOU’LL UNDERSTAND NEXT WEEK, ROLL WITH IT)

THURSDAY: TECHNICALLY, IT SHOULD BE TIME FOR A STATE OF CATASTROPHE