The Prince & Me

There is no end to the love and respect I feel for Miranda Richardson. I think she is without question among the three or four finest actors working today. But why, why would she sign on to this film? Oh man, she had cred, she had class; she turned down Fatal Attraction because it was beneath her; she said she picked roles based on the challenge they posed her creatively. Here she doesn’t even have a large enough role to steal the show; it’s just demeaning.

And if I have to watch one more film in which she is the only actor who bothers to speak in a proper accent (cf. The Phantom of the Opera), I shall… well, complain about it a whole lot more here. Oh, even hers sounds vaguely German from time to time, but the rest of the Royal Family is decidedly and lazily British, and just, uggh, one or the other, all or nothing — this is quickly becoming a big pet peeve of mine.

Oh, I didn’t expect much from this movie, of course not. I realize I’ve long since past the point of being able to enjoy a mindless flick on its own terms. But this one really stands out among a tired, cliche genre…

I’m sure I’m going to tire of reliving this movie before I exhaust every possible way to mock it, but oh, just a few more:

All right, the Danish prince is so bored and desperate to see “girls gone wild” scenes live that he flies to America and enrolls at the University of Wisconsin. Okay. Let’s think for a moment which of the two cultures might be more sexually repressive. Wisconsin. Denmark. Wisconsin. Denmark. Paralyzing fear of a woman’s bare breast. Legal prostitution. Perhaps you’d have done better to stay at home, buddy.

Ugh, I lived in the Netherlands for five months, in an apartment with a Dane. I’m not asking a bubblegum Cinderella story to serve a dual function as a documentary on Danish culture, but dear lord, their monarchy doesn’t have that kind of power in government, people do not lack personal freedom… Fine, it’s a fantasy, but this is now all half the film’s audience know about Denmark. Nice.

The king is terminally ill with some unspoken malady, to the point where he must give up the crown, but he walks around, dances, conducts business &c like a spring chicken for the duration of the film. Hmm, and not really in defense of my argument, but learned in the course of writing this paragraph — James Fox completely does not look like he was born in 1939. Whatever.

And oh, oh, you know that horribly over-used device in which a couple first touches and gets flirty while one teaches the other how to properly wield a golf club or similar? Yeah, that’s in here, only with a meat slicer.

I can’t go on. Afraid I have exhausted all of Miranda’s agreeable AND accessible films. All that awaits me now is Snow White and The Evening Star. If anyone wanted proof of my deep capacity to love, they would need look no further.