Champagne Problems Review – Netflix’s Latest Romantic Christmas Movies Lacks Excitement | Romantic movies

AAt the risk of sounding like a Grinch, I must once again bemoan the release of Christmas movies before Thanksgiving; Temperatures may be dropping at long last, but they’re still too close to daylight saving time gloom and too far away from loosening your belt on actual holidays to fully indulge in Netflix’s now-annual buffet of cheap Christmas sweets. However, their content conveyor belt is working, offering substantial, permanent rewards like cotton candy starting in mid-November.

Like American Chocolate which, in fact, no longer contains real chocolate but sells like gangbusters on Halloween anyway, Netflix’s Christmas movie, like the master of rival Hallmark holiday movies, is relied upon, even beloved, for its bad branding, for its rote familiarity (its nostalgic cast, basement-dealing budgets, Styrofoam snow, the deliberately ridiculous premise) and its bizarrely artificial filler, for its ability to deliver strokes of saccharine pleasure while still somehow being so. Failure to meet expectations. At worst, these films are forgettable trainwrecks (last week’s A Merry Little Ex-Mas); At best, it’s unforgettable fun, like the Lindsay Lohan comeback vehicle Falling For Christmas, which I remember nothing about except chatting with my girlfriend on her couch. (Indeed, at best, these films are memorably ridiculous, like last year’s not-so-serious Hot Frosty.)

Champagne Trouble, Netflix’s latest Christmas invention, disappears into the vast middle of the forgotten spectrum. Written and directed by Mark Steven Johnson, the former studio writer whose last Netflix rom-com, Love in the Villa, is so disposable that I forgot I even reviewed it, it goes down like cheap champagne, suitably flat and situational.

It starts, of course, with what an AI-generated ad for drugstore-brand champagne might look like if U.S. pharmacies were legally allowed to market their own champagne. It turns out that the commercial is actually a pitch from Sidney Price (Minka Kelly) to her colleagues at The Roth Group, a private equity fund (without saying the word private equity, of course) looking to acquire an old champagne brand. With her perpetual curls on TV and an endless supply of fancy coats, Sydney is something of a building block for the working woman – underappreciated, obsessed with her phone, ambitious at the expense of her personal life, and, in fact, any personality at all. So much so that when her ogre boss (Mitchell Mullen) chooses her to travel to France and close the deal over Christmas, her sister Skyler (Maeve Courtier-Lily) makes her a pinky promise: She gets to spend one night in Paris to actually make a living for herself.

Of course, there’s no place like Paris to grab one from Google Maps, even when the city is laden with below-grade CGI snow. In a ridiculously nice bookstore, Sydney meets Henry Cassel (Tom Wozniczka), who edits her beloved Google Maps. As the genre demands, Sydney initially resists this ridiculous idealistic man for ridiculous reasons (work, and the briefly mentioned divorce, just because).

Predictably, the film’s mechanics go in sudden quarter cycles, just as one spins old champagne bottles in the cellars of Chateau Cassel, the Champagne vineyard that Sydney hopes to acquire. hunting? Henri is the heir to Chateau Cassel, as reluctant to run it as he is resentful of his father Hugo (Thibault de Montalembert) selling it — and in perhaps the film’s most notable contribution to the genre, its keen judgment on private equity. Conflict? Sidney sincerely believes she’s not stripping this family-owned business of its parts, and competes for the takeover with three caricatures: a stern French grand dame (Astrid Whitnall), a tough blond German gentleman (Flula Borg), and a deeply delusional gay billionaire (Sean Amsing, admirably if annoyingly unhinged). development? Sidney’s co-worker Ryan (Xavier Samuel, who has more chemistry with Kelly in one scene than Woznieczka does in the entire film), shows up unannounced. Flour? Henry and Sidney look longingly at each other in their holiday pajamas, across a wide gulf in economic worldview.

The gift and curse, of course, is that none of this lasts longer than buzzing champagne on an empty stomach. And there’s no real absorbent padding here — Kelly, still famous for playing the deviously edgy cheerleader on Friday Night Lights, leans toward stern service, all suave surfaces and caring gestures, a motherly presence more than a romantic lead. Wozniczka also offers a touch of French charm with light self-torture and nothing more. The tricks are unfunny, the romance is harmless, and the happily ever after is obvious. For all the waxing poetic about the luxury of Champagne, no one pretends that this is anything other than a mass-market product; The things you hate are also the things you love. One might call the critic’s feelings about it the Champagne problem.