"Something has happened to Netflix's Christmas movies this year. Historically, they've unfolded like lucid dreams one might have when waking up from general anesthesia in an Arizona strip mall. They're like Twin Peaks for people who have been locked out of their Facebook for too many incorrect password attempts. Their plots make little to no sense, they're lit like a Soviet prison, their characters speak to one another like they've been bonked on the head by falling pianos."
"They're almost always about journalists marrying princes, or fake European monarchies populated by identical strangers, or Lindsay Lohan having some sort of non-catastrophic brain injury, or Brooke Shields spontaneously buying a castle in Scotland and toasting to "women buying castles!" I huff them like paint thinner, with the exact same results. And I worry that by pointing out how insane these movies are, for years on end now, I have accidentally bullied Netflix into making them more normal."
"But at least two or three of these movies are not surreal in the way that their predecessors have always been. There's something eerily coherent about them. They're workmanlike, occasionally competent. They appear to have been directed. The dialogue is corny and dated and hyper-literal, to be sure, but it doesn't feel like it's been fed through a black hole. There's not a journalist to be found among its protagonists; nobody is identical to anyone else."
Netflix's Christmas movies historically presented surreal, nonsensical plots, bleak lighting, and odd character behavior with recurring tropes like journalists marrying princes, fake European monarchies, and amnesiac celebrities. Recent offerings—Champagne Problems, Jingle Bell Heist, A Merry Little Ex-Mas, and My Secret Santa—are not high-quality but register as less surreal and more coherent. Several films feel workmanlike and occasionally competent, with discernible direction, more literal dialogue, and realistic costumes. These films remove prior staples like mistaken identities and identical strangers, favoring clearer plotting and distinct protagonists while retaining corny, dated dialogue.
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