How It All Works (Christmas 2020 ed.)

Well friends it’s that time of the year again and this time I’m going bigger and better than ever.

What I’ll Be Watching

For starters I’ve made a spreadsheet of every Christmas romance movie available on UK Netflix and Amazon Prime (that’s free with prime). It does seem that more movies get added to each service every couple of days so the spreadsheet is growing exponentially. A copy of this spreadsheet is available here.

I’m not made of money so any that you have to pay for on top of the Prime subscription I haven’t included (plus writing all of those up as well would melt my brain). BUT I am considering a Hallmark TV subscription for at least the holiday season so those are on there too. In fact a friend just directed me to frndlytv where I can watch this year’s Hallmark so they’ve been added in case I take a chance on watching them.

Will I watch all of these by Christmas? Doubtful, there’s a lot of them and though I’ve been on furlough I am job searching so I won’t have loads of time. Will I watch a lot of these? Probably, I have a few fearless friends who have allowed me to hijack our weekly (socially distanced) movie night.

What You’ll Be Getting

I will also provide, for your reading pleasure, a review of every one I watch. They might not all be full ‘live blog’, stream-of-consciousness type of reviews but I will provide some thoughts. If you’re lucky my friends might also chime in with their thoughts.

Mostly I don’t give star ratings, I give them points which I’ll go into later. The thoughts provided may not always be as straightforward as “do watch”/”don’t watch” but sometimes they will be.

What Do The Scores Mean?

The scoring system is one I came up with to measure how tropey/predictable a movie is plus its watchability. The score breakdown per movie is available on page 2 of the spreadsheet linked above but here is the list of criteria whereby movies get points:

Likeable heroine – 1
Likeable hero – 1
Destiny – 1
Situation to bring them together – 1-5 (5 being most ridiculous)
Character Growth – 1
Happy Ending – 1
Conflict of Interests – 1
Moment of misunderstanding – 1-5 (5 being most ridiculous) (points for each moment)
Declaration of never falling in love – 1
Dead/missing family members – 1 per person
Dead family members causing difficulty between protagonists – 1 per person per instance
Sassy child – 1 per child
Old-Timey traditions and values – 1 per each

So as you can see, the more points the more tropey a movie is, the lower the points hopefully means it’s not very tropey; but could also mean no one is likeable and nothing is interesting. That’s the reason I also have a little summation at the bottom so you can get a feel for each movie. I’ll also include the score-breakdown on the movie review page.

You can either look at the ‘Recent Posts’ widget on the sidebar to see my most recent review or click “Christmas Movies 2020” which will have all the Christmas movies I’ve watched so far.

I hope that makes everything clear. Even if I don’t watch all of them, hopefully I’ll have some good ones I can recommend so you don’t have to spend your Christmas period watching the truly awful movies. And I mean bad bad, we all love a trashy movie – heck that’s what I do on this blog! – but I shall endeavour to save you from the actual garbage.

Love,
Salixa x