Next day's a rare Saturday where I have to work, so I’m grumpy. As my girls have a nice lie-in, I’m logging in to half-heartedly do some tasks that could totally have waited until Monday. I can’t be bothered, so I’m hoping today’s yuletide flick, A Cinderella Story: Christmas Wish (2019) will give me a lift. But, urgh – it turns out it’s a teeny-bopper musical.
In this one poor, aspiring teen singer Kat (Laura Marano) is held back on her journey to success by, you guessed it, her wicked stepmum and two bitchy stepsisters. Kat takes a job as a singing elf at her local Santa’s grotto and finds herself falling for the hunky new Santa. Don’t worry – it’s not as creepy as that sounds, as the new guy is only 17 years old.
Instantly, it feels implausible that anyone would employ a ‘Santa’ this young, though it turns out he’s actually Domic Wintergarden (Gregg Sulkin), the son of the millionaire who owns the Christmas Village where this all goes down. Naturally, he’s gorgeous and swoonsomely altruistic, but it’s still slightly suspect that he got this job at his own insistence because he just loves little children so much. Hmmmm.
Director and experienced choreographer Michelle Johnston’s film is the fifth in a series of direct-to-video teen efforts all loosely based round the Cinderella myth, but you really don’t need to have seen any of the others to get into this. It’s standard teen wish-fulfilment dramedy with much image-obsessed chatter about Instagram, blogging, ‘likes’ etc. As the father of a little girl growing up in this increasingly tech-saturated world, the amount of fretting about their online personae that these kids do makes me worry about the future.
Kat is mortified because she’s the star of a trending video where she falls over and makes an ass of herself. She’s worried this minor blip will totally ruin her dream of being a pop star. This is a film very much for the generation raised on stuff like The X-Factor, where dreams are never modest and where anything less than world domination is deemed a failure.
The songs are Taylor Swift-esque dancy pop fare, which clearly wasn’t written for my aged, wrinkly, indie-rock loving ears and, though it’s a musical, the tuneful interludes are mercifully kept to short dream sequences, basically a series of masterfully choreographed music videos.
Being a fairytale, it’s full of stuff that doesn’t make sense, such as when Kat accidentally finds herself on stage at the grand Christmas ball, so just starts singing her own, self-penned song. Naturally, the backing singers and dancers, who’ve never heard this song before, all magically know the words and the full dance routine.
It's slickly made but hard work for me, though I’m definitely not its target audience. The problem with constantly reworking the Cinderella story is that you pretty much know everything that will happen. Teens may enjoy this but, with more focus on angst and the fairytale aspects than the festive season, this leaves me cold.
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