William & Kate

This blog may serve many purposes--entertaining you during those critical last few minutes of work where you're done for the day but your boss hasn't left yet; providing crucial plot details of Lifetime movies that googlers missed the endings of; allowing me to tell my boyfriend that we have to watch Lifetime yet again "for my craft." But perhaps its most important purpose is to make you feel better about your guilty pop culture consumption, and when it comes to the Royal Wedding (which will henceforth be capitalized), I have failed--ALMOST! For here, finally, is my review of Lifetime's "William & Kate," which was "inspired by true events."

Just like William and Kate, this movie has it all. William and Kate giggling while running through the rain? Check. Kate's parents giggling while eating ice cream out of the container in their PJs? Check. William and Kate reading by fireplace, then professing their love? Check. Kate putting a red sock in the laundry with William's white shirts? Check. Kate's Mom helping her plot on how to get William back? Unfortunately, check.

The actors look just like the real
thing, only William doesn't have
a bald spot and Kate is 6 in. shorter.

It all begins with William's first day at St. Andrew's College. Everyone is all, omg, that guy's a prince! The girls throw themselves on him while the guys say things like, "Perhaps he'll drop his drawers and give us a royal moon," while those guy's girlfriends elbow them in the ribs for being so crass.

But Kate, William's "study partner," acts like a normal person around him. She isn't afraid to say when she's hungry, and asks him who his favorite artists are ("Monet and Cezanne," William smartly replies, "I like the way they play with light.") Kate has a boyfriend...but as soon as an Anglo prince starts flying your girlfriend around in his private jet, you might as well have a heart-to-heart in her dorm room, pack your bags, and be satisfied that your name will forever come up in a Google search when someone types in "Kate Middleton college boyfriend."

William's eye is captured; I realize
Jennifer Love Hewitt would have
won the Emmy for "Client List" if
it had a runway scene.

Soon, William discovers that Kate is hot when he sees her in a slutty dress, and is bringing her home with some other university buddies to meet his dad. Kate says intelligent things to Charles like "I believe that solar power is the key to our future," and damn, the girl can shoot! When both Charles and William miss a bird, she pops it right out of the sky, grinning like she's not even a commoner.

Once William and Kate start fucking, Kate insists that William meet her family, too. "Every Sunday we go to this fantastic pub, you're just going to love it!" she says to the American audience, who hasn't even noticed that in some scenes the cars are driving on the right side of the street. If you're wondering how Kate's family reacted to the prince, just envision a very special episode of 7th Heaven where royalty comes to stay at the Camden house: nervous laughter, wackiness, and luv.

William doesn't want anyone to know about their relationship, and Kate's insulted even though he was right--as soon as the public finds out about them, Kate immediately gets her crotch photographed while getting out of a car. While William's away being a fighter pilot, some old lady teaches Kate how to curtsy, and I really wished that the writers of this movie had taken the time to watch "The Princess Dairies" to see how this montage should've been done.

American audiences are content
to believe this movie was filmed
in London as long as there's
a double-decker bus.

But what good are her curtsy lessons if William refuses to come back from his piloting, which she encouraged him to do in the first place? Kate gets so pissed at William that she gets out of a car he is driving and, probably, goes and asks the security people in the car behind him for a ride home. Well, now she's done it. She and William are no longer an item, so she has to do something to get his attention! Her mom suggests she sluts it up one more time, and so she goes and dances with strange men at clubs. Sure enough, William is reading the tabloids in Iraq and sees her picture.

Once that happens, it's only a couple of Lifetime movie minutes before he's proposing to her on one knee in front of a dazzling Africa sunset.

Actors Nico Evers-Swindell and Camilla
Luddington do a creepy re-enactment of
W & K's engagement photo.

After forgetting to tape this movie when it premiered, then letting it sit on my DVR for three days before watching it, I'm happy to say that it allowed me to appreciate the pop culture frenzy that is and will be the Royal Wedding. Would I have been able to appreciate the Michael Jackson funeral if I hadn't watched "Jacksons: An American Dream" more than three dozen times with my college roommate? Well...probably. But I wouldn't have had so much fun grimacing disapprovingly at Joe Jackson the whole time. William & Kate is streaming on Lifetime while the frenzy continues, and I suggest you go watch it before you get up early to watch the shenanigans tomorrow.

The Wishing Well

As many of you know, I occasionally like to take a break from watching sleazy Lifetime movies by watching saccharine Hallmark movies. A couple of weekends ago, I got to take in the laugh-out-loud (not in the way they intended) "The Wishing Well," a Hallmark original film.

This inspiring tale of yet another city girl who realizes all she needs to be happy is to live in the country begins with some mythology: The picturesque wishing well underneath the opening credits may look like it's made out of plastic (with tufts of some mossy material you'd buy at Michael's glued to it), but it's actually hundreds of years old, and grants wishes if you believe in it. Or whatever. (I honestly can't believe Hallmark doesn't have a better well in their props department.)

The movie then cuts to a shot of someone making espresso, and if that iconic image of bourgie-ness isn't enough for you to realize they've switched locales, there's shot of Times Square, where all the coolest New Yorkers hang out. But back to the espresso--Cynthia Tamerline (played by Jordan Ladd, daughter of Cheryl) is hanging out in her high-rise apartment with her friend, because what girls don't like to get together at 9 a.m. to catch up and have an espresso? The city IS awfully fast-paced, after all. Her friend, a B-level Sandra Bullock, is chatting about her 10 a.m. event planning meeting when she busts out with, "Do you ever just stop and think how lucky we are? We have exciting careers, we live in great apartments, go to great parties, make a lot of money...." Yes, they're truly living the life.

Jordan Ladd does some
hard-nosed reporting

But there's a downside to drinking espresso in Times Square every morning while making "lots of money" as a celebrity gossip writer: Your boss might be mean to you. When Cynthia arrives at work, her boss says she doesn't have "it" anymore, and assigns her a story about the Wishing Well for Good Housekeeping magazine (Oh, sorry, I mean "Great Housekeeping"). The next thing you know, Cynthia is almost running Jason London over with her car in Smalltown, USA. (Oh, I'm sorry, that's "Slow Creek, Illinois"). She and Jason have an argument--oh my, they'll never get along! And it turns out that he runs the local paper.

You may remember Jason London
as the brown-eyed London brother
who's missing two toes.

I'll spare you all the boring plot points that happen before Cynthia makes a wish in the well and her dream of living in a small town comes true. I'll also spare you the many scenes where Cynthia, now transformed into a reporter for Jason London's paper, scoffs at the notion that no one remembers that she's actually a hard-nosed celebrity writer. (It's like "Groundhog's Day," but Bill Murray isn't in it, and that's really too bad.) And since this blog doesn't contain audio files, you'll also be mercifully spared from having to hear the Hallmark Channel soundtrack to this movie, which never ceases for a single second. Light-hearted pianos and humming clarinets are behind every scene, except for the "exciting" scenes, that sound like that one ringtone option on your phone that you hear and go "What the Fuck!?" and change it real quick.

I can't make fun of Ernest,
he's like 95 years old.

So let's just jump to when Cynthia is settling into her new life in this mystical land, where a black kid in a cap delivers the paper each morning and Ernest Borgnine (yes, that Ernest Borgnine) is her friendly landlord/the town's mayor. At the Fourth of July fireworks celebration (naturally), Cynthia snuggles up to Jason London, and the mischievous piano music that normally accompanies their interactions turns into soft violins. Jason London is not only ruggedly handsome, he's a single dad of a 12 year-old daughter. And yes, he was a big-city editor before his wife died tragically (I can't believe they didn't say in 9/11) and he came out to the country to raise his child. But unfortunately, the paper is going under, because of big, bad conglomerates.

Lest you forget this isn't Lifetime and worry about Jason and his kid having to go on welfare or Cynthia committing murder, don't fear. In the film's climatic scene, the Hallmark soundtrack goes crazy as Yeardley Smith busts into the newspaper's office and announces that some dead guy's money has been found and given to the paper, much to the chagrin of the big bad CEO-man who came to shut it down. Jason's kid literally yells, "We're saaaavvveed!", and I suddenly realized that Tempest Bledsoe was playing the secretary.

Cynthia's nightie is remi-
niscent of Bette's outfit in
Big Business, and yes, this
is a blatant excuse to put
a pic from BB on my blog.

But before Cynthia and Jason can share their Hallmark-mandated closed-mouth kiss, she wakes up on the plane on the way back to New York! And you can tell she's back to her old self in the morning, because she's wearing a horrible polka dot nightie rather than the flannel jammie-jams she had been wearing in the country.

Cynthia goes back to work to discover that her article had been published and was such a success that her boss has offered her an editor position! Since he had been berating her earlier in the movie for having worked at the magazine for 10 years, you can see why she's so excited. After a decade of work, she'll now be earning close to $45,000 a year, which can buy a HUNDRED espresso machines and Times Square apartments!

But wait! What if she feels that, in the immortal words of Eddie Albert, "Keep Manhattan, just give me that countryside!"? Well, hop in a cab and head to the airport, of course! She asks her cabbie what he thinks about living in the country, and his response isn't that he'd feel disconnected from his culture (and also have a hard time getting a mortgage), but that "trees make me noivus!" Those crazy city people! They hate trees, but they sure love their espresso!

So Cynthia ends up back in the country, where she runs into Jason and his daughter. Apparently in this revised real word she wasn't a bitch to him, and they happily head off to dinner. Let's hope things work out, because the dating pool in Small Creek, Illinois, ain't very big.