As a girl, I should like Romantic Comedies, also known as the dreaded Rom-Com. Now, for as long as I can remember my teens were spent being the anti-girl. A tomboy. I avoided them like the plague and to this day am skeptical of them to this day. Sitting in film class in college and listening to everyone's favourite films and listening to the girls name anything from "Mean Girls" to "House Bunny" was enough to make me cringe. But that doesn't mean I can't like a good film.
Flashback to Xmas time 2005. Young teen me feeling down, a tad bit of teenage depression (waiting for the moment where my friend Simon mentions my "little emo phase" I love hearing about so much) and my dad asks if I want to watch a film. After years of being shown epics such as Shawshank Redemption and The Crow I was expecting something along the same lines. My dad puts on Love Actually. I fell in love with this romantic comedy. It had everything that made me love a good British film. Perfect cast, amazing jokes and brilliant storylines. And most importantly, it was all about love. Instead of following some dumbstruck girl falling for the guy she shouldn't do and a long agonizing hour and half of "will they won't they but they definitely will because its a girls film" cliche, we had different stories of love, loss and rejection. And most importantly of all. Family. And it was the best. My dad and I still watch it nearly every year and I do find myself crying with not just laughter but with happiness.
Flash back to the present day. A screenwriter came to my University and talked about a film he had written the screenplay for. He explained how he had a vision of the story and how it would look on screen only for it to go through tons of rewrites and changes, both in writing and on screen. He said this was normal for a screenwriter getting their story on screen. It made me realize a lot more about the process that goes into each film and the hard work it gets to make it just right that everyone can agree on one final piece.
The film he wrote was Chalet Girl. I looked at it thinking "oh god another one of those boy meets girl cliches" but decided to put my trust in it, like I did with Love Actually, and gave it a watch. First looked at the cast. If it was not for a few tweeks *cough* Ed Westwick *cough* it was almost perfect. Main girl was a girl who I didn't know the name of instead of another Jennifer Aniston role, and the two dads were Bill Nighy and Bill Bailey. Even Brooke Shields as the disproving mother made the cast one of the best in a rom-com I had seen for a long time. Everyone suited their roles perfectly, even the Ed Westwick nice rich boy but slightly douchebag role fitted him well. In a nice way, I don't think anyone else would have pulled it off.
The plot seemed less cliche than most, gave the characters more of a background to go with. Made them seem a lot more human and you could really connect more because of that. The exciting atmosphere of a snowy landscape was a better and more interesting change to possibly the scene of sunny LA or sunny anywhere or the big inner city. The plot went well up until I started guessing everything, as I do with most rom-coms, but there were enough comedy twists involving the ensemble cast that it kept it fun and more interesting as the film went on. I did not like the ending, cliche girl and boy get what they want and everyone is happy, blah blah blah. But overall the film itself was more enjoyable than most, and was definitely one of the better rom-coms out there. I don't know why, but I have a sneaky suspicious this is due to it being a British rom-com. American rom-coms seem to stick to the same boring template, whereas British writing always seems to expand and create something within the template and make it something original on its own.
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