End of 2020: Bill Pullman is hot, and other things about Christmas romcoms
Just two pals, standing in front of our readers, saying that once again we ran too long for Gmail. If you’re reading this in gmail, at the very bottom you’ll see a note that says “[Message clipped] View entire message” and by clicking that link you’ll be able to see the whole thing, and you can also always access the newsletter on the Pop Culture Pen Pals Substack website by clicking on the title. Thanks for reading!
Dear Kelsey,
I have always been a lover of all things Christmas, but being stuck at home for Christmas in the midst of a global pandemic has only fueled the fires of my passion for all things cozy and festive during the holiday season. It’s raining in Texas this afternoon, so the candles are lit, the Christmas lights are on, Christmas music is playing, and ‘tis the damn season indeed.
For our special holiday newsletter, we chose three truly random Christmas movies to discuss: The Knight Before Christmas (which….may be the worst Christmas movie I have ever seen?), The Holiday, and While You Were Sleeping (which might be more of a mainstream romcom than a holiday movie, but it is one of my all-time favorite movies so we’re jamming that squarish peg into that roundish hole!). While I plan to touch on all three movies, I’m warning you now, I have the most thoughts about The Holiday, and most of my thoughts in this newsletter will focus on this film. Not to show my whole hand this early, but TL;DR, I’m pretty ambivalent about it!
First, The Knight Before Christmas. The entire premise of this movie is that a 14th century knight from the Middle Ages is teleported forward in time to 2019 to fulfill his quest given to him by a mysterious and magical old lady (I’m assuming she’s a witch but they never actually clarify this?), who has decided the knight needs to “open his heart”. He’s not a particularly cruel or unkind knight, just a guy who’s going on a Christmas hunt and gets teleported through time, so I’m not entirely sure why he has to open his heart in the first place? How were we supposed to know his heart was “closed” in the first place?
Also, I feel bad saying this, but….he’s not even that hot! If you’re going to give me a trash Christmas movie, at least make it KIND of steamy! Give him a sexy haircut or something! Vanessa Hudgens looks amazing but this guy is literally wearing a red mop on his head. I think they were trying to pull off an Outlander type of thing but it did not work.
So anyways, Red Mop Knight and Vanessa Hudgens get to know each other because she and some random police officer determined that he must have some kind of amnesia, and she lets him stay at her place, where she lives alone(!). No sane woman would ever agree to this, no matter how hot the guy was, but alas we are not in the realm of sanity with this film. Only insanity abounds.
I think he’s supposed to be winning over the audience with his old-fashioned chivalry and the way he rescues Vanessa’s niece and helps out at the soup kitchen Christmas dinner, but I felt really underwhelmed! His entire journey is so convoluted that even watching him slice snowmen with a sword wasn’t even funny! This movie is just pure chaos. They basically achieved nothing with this movie. Sorry Netflix, not your best.
I’m sure you will talk about this more Kelsey, but one brainworm I’ve had the last few days has been....is this movie copaganda? At the end of the movie, the knight becomes a police officer! And everyone is just fine and cool with that! Very upsetting to consider. All in all, a terrible Christmas movie, and not even the campy, “so bad it’s almost good” kind.
I cannot think of a movie that is more opposite to my feelings about The Knight Before Christmas than While You Were Sleeping. This became one of my favorite movies when I was in high school and going full throttle through my 90s romcom phase (the golden era of romcoms, in my humble opinion). Along with the god-tier Meg Ryan romcoms of this era sits Sandra Bullock and this absolute treasure of a movie, featuring the dreamiest Bill Pullman (SWOON) and an incredibly handsome young Peter Gallagher, who I have enjoyed so much in his recent roles on Grace and Frankie and Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist.
This movie manages to play with several classic romcom tropes (living a lie and not telling anyone until the end, along with a few friends who help you keep your secret) without feeling cliche at all, and the CHEMISTRY BETWEEN SANDRA AND BILL, MY GOD. It is a crime that we do not have more Bill Pullman Looking Lovingly at Women content, because I need more of it, dammit. He is the perfect combination of grounded yet moody/grouchy that was designed in a factory to attack me personally.
I have a lot of feelings about movies that take place in Chicago, since so many of them are not really filmed in Chicago and it shows, but this movie really gets Chicago in such a specific way, and the fact that they actually filmed there really shows. It brings me so much joy to watch this movie and see the opening credit sequences with places I’ve actually been to and recognize. I associate Christmas with going downtown to the Christkindlmarket (an annual Chicago Christmas tradition), so just seeing the city in the winter makes it feel like Christmas. So much affection in my heart for this movie. This movie can do no wrong.
And I guess this final movie leaves us….somewhere in the middle? The Holiday has its own sweetness—Kate Winslet charms the pants off of everyone in this movie for good reason—but overall I remain sort of ambivalent about this movie. The discourse on this movie has been revived in recent weeks to discuss the charisma and charm of Jack Black, who is also charming in this movie, and how the Kate-Jack subplot of the film deserves more appreciation.
I first watched this movie sometime in high school, and I remember feeling somewhat underwhelmed, and it’s been a few years since I’ve watched it again, so I went into it wanting so badly to feel something about Kate and Jack. I’ll be honest—I still didn’t really see it! But this time I think I know why.
Here’s my hot take: Kate Winslet’s subplot of The Holiday isn’t a love story between her and Jack Black, it’s a love story between her and boundaries. Who Jack is is sort of irrelevant, but the difference is that he’s a guy who actually sees her and respects her boundaries, rather than someone who continues to steamroll her thoughts and feelings, even flying around the world to get her to do something he wanted. Kate doesn’t really come to love Jack, she comes to love herself. Which, don’t get me wrong, I ADORE that, but I don’t really feel any chemistry between Kate and Jack as a pair that makes me root for them specifically. Am I rooting for Kate? Absolutely. Am I rooting for her to end up with Jack? Meh. But Jack is totally charming in this role and I would love to see him in more future romcoms. I know we disagree strongly on this, and I’m looking forward to reading your take!
You once referred to Cameron Diaz as the weak link of this movie, and on another rewatch….I fully agree. HOWEVER, Cameron and Jude Law have actual chemistry (or maybe it’s just Jude Law’s ability to have on-screen chemistry with a brick), and that’s more than I can say for Kate and Jack. Oops.
Well, that’s all I have to say about Christmas movies this month. BRB, going to go google thirst traps of Bill Pullman. But before I go, I have a bit of an announcement:
I’m having a baby! So the PenPals will be on sabbatical for January as we both adjust to some new life changes. (Kelsey would want you to know at this point that she is not pregnant, I just wanted to keep it vague so I don’t spoil her announcement later in this letter.)
Have a very merry holiday season, and see you in February!
Hannah
Dear Hannah,
I knew I should have avoided all Vanessa Hudgens Christmas movies on principle, dammit!!
My dark secret is that I’m not a Hallmark/Hallmark-adjacent Christmas movie….person. And I’m hesitant to admit this because I never want to come off as looking down my nose at them, or people who enjoy them. God knows I do NOT pride myself on having an ~elevated~ media palate. Every “reason” I come up with to explain to myself or others as to why I don’t really enjoy them just ends up feeling like accidental snobbery, so I won’t even try, really. I’ll just lean into the bitterness I carry with me always (probably the REAL reason) and say:
What in the fuck was The Knight Before Christmas
I live-texted you throughout my watch, during which it’s honestly surprising that my brain didn’t short-circuit. I swear, I have tried to leave the most pedantic parts of my brain behind, but can we just start out by saying THEY WERE SPEAKING AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT LANGUAGE IN THE 1300S OF ENGLAND THAN WE SPEAK NOW!!!! Also how did the crone transport him through time and space??? I guess “how” is a less important question when we’re dealing with time travel than why. Why to Ohio???????? Wouldn’t it have been more interesting narratively for him to have to navigate the same geography radically altered by modernity???????? What EXACTLY does Vanessa Hudgens’ contract with Netflix look like by the way?
The element of this movie that really tore my brain into shreds, other than the copaganda you mentioned (and that I FULLY agree with), is that he was simultaneously too confused and too un-confused???? Like it reallllllllly threw me for a loop how fast he adjusted to women wearing pants and 21st century food [how did high fructose corn-syrup not send his body into an instant coma????] and yet at the same time he kept looking at cars and being like “this, to me, is comparable to a horse” RATHER THAN A FUCKING WAGON OR CART OR SOMETHING ELSE WITH FUCKING WHEELS ON IT!!!!
You know what’s a GREAT time-travel Christmas story? (Well, YOU do, but maybe some of our dear readers don’t.) Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis. (Though readers should be advised, a significant portion of the book is about……..the literal plague.) It even deals with the fact that people in the 14th century
DID
NOT
SPEAK
“ENGLISH”
AS
WE
KNOW
IT
TODAY
I need to get off this soapbox before I collapse off of it, and before I sheepishly admit that on my solo-Christmas Eve I will be watching Christmas on the Square, as it stars Dolly Parton (my QUEEN) and Christine Baranski (my WIFE).
As is my time-honored tradition, I’ll be leaving the topic I feel most vulnerable towards the end, so time for some thoughts about While You Were Sleeping!
This movie holds such a warm spot in my heart. It’s one of the first movies my mom introduced me to when she deemed me old enough for “grown-up” rom-coms, and I’ve only grown to love it more as I’ve grown, from the subtle class politics in the movie to the comedic timing of every cast member, to the way Bill Pullman’s look and energy in this movie makes me absolutely DESPERATE to date someone exactly like him.
First though, the premise of this movie. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, and not just because it was one of our topics. The Happiest Season, which came out this year on Hulu and has been a hot Discourse topic this year, is a movie I am NOT going to get into here, but it’s gotten me thinking a lot about the common romcom trope: the lie so big that in any rational dimension it would be an absolute dealbreaker. Why do some movies, like WYWS and one of my other favorites, My Best Friend’s Wedding, pull this off, while others buckle under it?
And the weirdest thing to me is that I couldn’t necessarily find a common thread between those two, aside from, I guess “good writing.” While You Were Sleeping and My Best Friend’s Wedding are verrrrry different movies, with nearly opposite protagonists. MBFW works because it has no illusions about the protagonist’s bad behavior, and [spoiler?] she doesn’t get what she wants. Most romcoms (understandably) end with the protagonists getting either what they wanted or something better, which is lovely and escapist but not necessarily relatable. Not getting what you want? Fucking up? Getting hurt? Yeah that shit resonates. There’s a catharsis in watching Julia Roberts’ character be selfish, try everything, and be defeated not as a punishment but because sometimes the things we try just simply...don’t work. And at the end of it all, there is still joy and connection post humiliating heartbreak (hmmmm something I’ll also get into in the The Holiday section i n t e r e s t i n g………)
Meanwhile, in WYWS, Sandra Bullock’s character makes all the wrong choices (aside from, you know, saving a LIFE) for all the right reasons. She taps into the loneliest parts of all of us, but she’s also not pathetic. She’s in a situation she genuinely feels selflessly compelled to stay in (not wanting to hurt the family/kill grandma from shock), but it’s also all too easy for her to stay because of how warmly the Callaghans accept her, how much they’re exactly what she’s been longing for.
And also, of course, Bill Pullman, being hot.
I truly can’t say enough what a travesty it is that I’m not currently dating someone with this EXACT haircut??? Where have all the floppy-haired gods, goddesses, and deities gone?????? And the chemistry between him and Lucy made my HEART ACHE. The LEAN! The EYE CONTACT! The BANTER!!! I think part of what makes it so potent is that it feels so natural; aside from the unusual circumstances they met under, the movie makes the dynamic feel so….possible (ANOTHER thing I’ll get into in the The Holiday section).
I don’t feel quite qualified to write at length about the class dynamics in this movie (especially considering it takes place during a time when I was an infant) but every time I watch it I’m more and more struck by the way the Callaghan’s blue collar roots (and Lucy’s working-class job and community) are framed as a source of warmth and support, whereas Peter’s distance from them is (silently) implied to be the isolation and thoughtlessness of his upper-class high-rise lifestyle. He’s not a bad guy (though the squirrels may disagree), but he’s ultimately much less desirable than craftsman Jack and the rest of the Callaghans.
Also Peter Gallagher! National treasure! He had to spend half this movie comatose or he’d be stealing nearly every scene with his perfect delivery!! I’m currently revisiting him in a rewatch of The O.C. and HIS HAIR TOO IS UNMATCHED IN LUSCIOUSNESS.
Alright, moving on finally to The Holiday…….
I was honestly a little afraid to revisit this movie. I hadn’t actually watched it in about five years, at which point I was in a deep hole of longing not too dissimilar from Iris’, so as you can imagine it hit quite hard at the time. I think I was simultaneously afraid that either the movie would plunge me back into that pit (unlikely but the cinema is very powerful!!!!) OR that, being clear of that pit, I’d find it lacking the emotional impact I once found in it.
Thankfully, the power of The Holiday turns out not to revolve around my own emotions (wild!) and I continue to find it both delightful and very moving. (P.S. Rachel Handler at Vulture put out a lot of great stuff last week about this movie and other Nancy Meyers treasures and it’s well worth checking out!)
What I’ll say first is that I’ve actually come around a bit on Cameron Diaz after having seen her in, of all things, Charlie’s Angels, in which she is bubbly, kicking people in the head, and in love with Lucy Liu and Drew Barrymore (all of the Angels are deeply in love with each other; this is a fact, and also possibly a projection on my part). I’m still not really able to tap into her and Jude Law’s storyline, maybe because by the end of the movie I’m still like, “okay but what are you guys going to do still????”
And I think I find their whirlwind-romance-that-will-totally-last-don’t-worry-about-it!!! chemistry less convincing than the Kate and Jack storyline. I really like your take that Kate’s love story is between her and boundaries rather than between her and Jack, and I think that’s actually why I find it so compelling.
I think I’d actually define her plot as a love story between her and hope, though I think the hope and boundaries go together. One of my favorite parts of the movie is her speech to Jack about healing from heartbreak, and she says it much better than I can, so I’ll let her go first:
“And after all that, however long all that may be, you’ll go somewhere new, and you’ll meet people who make you feel worthwhile again, and little pieces of your soul will finally come back.”
Something this movie captures really well, and something a close friend and I have talked about a lot, is that the rut of pining for someone you can’t be with is, as painful as it is, is hard to get out of partly because it’s relatively safe. There’s a security in the unchangingness of pining. You don’t have to risk anything by trusting someone, there are no limbs to go out on, no rug to be pulled out from under you.
Part of what Kate lets go of in this movie is that acidic form of security that’s wasting her time, and part of that is opening herself not necessarily to a lasting relationship with Jack Black (though I personally would like to!!!!) but to truly believing that fun, possibilities, flirtation, and feeling good when you’re around someone are all things she deserves. Of course, her friendship with Arthur is part of that too, and one of my favorite scenes in the movie is when Jack comes over in the middle of the Hanukkah meal she’s hosting for Arthur and his friends. This may be the 10th or 11th I’ve used the word ‘warmth’ in this letter — I’m writing it in the middle of a snow-storm, so! — but the warmth, humor, and affection in that scene, the combination of old and new friends, feels like just as much of a tonic as the Blockbuster scene that made me truly fall in love with Jack Black. (P.S. Another great piece of writing recently is Kayleigh Donaldson’s tribute to Jack Black on Pajiba.)
Deeply rude that movie rental stores have mostly gone out of business, robbing me of this experience?????
In this holiday season and the new year may you have warmth in every way,
Kelsey
P.S. Oh yeah my news!!! My news is that I got a new job that I’ll be starting January 4th! I’ll be leaving academia for a position at Mercer, which is very exciting and will also be a big adjustment (I’m also moving apartments and drowning in plastic tubs, send prayers and Reese’s Cups) so I’ll be joining you in figuring out some new life rhythms as we take a little break. I can’t wait to see a thousand pictures of your bebe and help you teach them the ways of pop culture yelling. Cheers!