Welcome to Flopcorn, where Reader writers and contributors pay tribute to our very favorite bad movies. In this installment, social media editor Brianna Wellen and staff writer Leor Galil discuss the bizarre appeal of the Netflix holiday extravaganza The Princess Switch.
LG: Can we actually describe what Vanessa Hudgens did as “playing multiple characters”? I realize she was given two roles, and one role required her to speak with an accent that suggests she’d spent a weekend in the UK, but she didn’t have much to work with, really, for either character. One is a princess and has shorter hair, the other is a baker who’s allegedly from Chicago, which we can only confirm because she wears a baseball hat that says “Chicago.” (Editor’s note: Technically she is a duchess and won’t become a princess until she marries the prince, even though the movie is called The Princess Switch. This is not confusing at all!)
BW: Maybe we should briefly describe the plot for anyone we’ve lost so far.
Stakes are introduced in the baking competition, however, which could have been one of the most dramatic scenes in the movie! A too-shortly-onscreen baking rival cuts the cord to our heroine’s mixer, but it ends up being not a big deal at all.
LG: Chicago, famous for its glistening bakeries and Christmas Store!
LG: Which is what I found both frustrating and fascinating in this movie. Netflix, which throws an unknown but large amount of money at a finite but large number of projects, invested in a holiday rom-com that wasn’t romantic or all that funny, made by people who don’t appear to understand how societies and humans function.
