Last Christmas (2019)

November 9, 2019 10:51 PM

Kate (Emilia Clarke) is a young woman who works as Santa (Michelle Yeoh)'s elf at a year-round Christmas shop. There she meets Tom (Henry Golding), and they strike up a romance.
posted by storytam (6 comments total)

I just watched this and enjoyed it more than I thought I would. I liked that all the major characters were immigrants, and the family dynamics were genuinely entertaining. Henry Golding and Emilia Clarke ooze charm. I'm pretty amused that, even with the super obvious twist, Henry Golding is essentially just a manic pixie dream boy who does not pass the Sexy Lamp test. It basically only works because he's charming and handsome and she's charming and cute. Michelle Yeoh's part is small, but she honestly stole the whole movie.

Much of the movie's effort at social themes feels kind of underbaked (the homeless plotline especially is ehhhh the kind of thing I'd expect from a feel-good 90s special, and in one scene a character kinda-sorta outs another, though nobody really understands the outing) but I'm a sucker for immigrant themes. There's a lovely bit in the movie where Kate, who spends most of the movie insisting on being completely assimilated, reaches out in solidarity to other immigrants with Eastern European heritage and it Got Me.
posted by storytam at 10:59 PM on November 9, 2019 [2 favorites]

I watched this the other day at the movies and I was so, so mad at it and still am that I actually paid money for this. It feels like its creators wanted to make another classic British Christmas romantic movie but in my eyes they failed miserably. The trailer presented it as such, as a probably somewhat formulaic romantic movie and I would have been happy with that! But it wasn't that.

Here's what I liked about it: Michelle Yeoh is always great and her side-story was cute.

Now for the rest... Emilia Clarke's character just felt off until The Big Twist, and not in a good way. Like, it was clear that she was after a major trauma but I felt like that was somewhat downplayed and that left them with this weird in-between something. I have a hard time articulating it (as you can see.) She feels aimless, but the way she was aimless just didn't make a whole lot of sense.

I didn't feel a lot of chemistry between her and Henry Golding and their love story was also off and I'll be honest, I didn't see that twist coming, I just felt like, where is this going? What's up with the guy?

Learning that he was dead the whole time and the whole thing was her way of coping felt like a cop-out and it made me feel duped, even though I wasn't enjoying most of the movie before the twist.

The immigrant angle felt half-assed; I just never really felt the weight of it, it got buried under the rest of what's happening in the movie.

It takes a lot for a movie to piss me off as much as this one did but I guess congratulations?
posted by KTamas at 6:09 AM on November 10, 2019

This movie should have been marketed as the Christmas Carol variant it is instead of the romantic comedy it is not. I really liked it but I knew going in that Tom was a ghost/angel. My cousin didn't but she still enjoyed the movie.

Hopefully, someday we will get an actual Henry Golding and Emilia Clark romantic comedy.
posted by Constance Mirabella at 10:06 AM on November 10, 2019 [1 favorite]

I got free tickets for this and -- I enjoyed it, I guess, but it was Very Bad (and I don't find "killed a friend's pet" funny). I called Henry Golding being dead from the beginning, the transplant when it was clear she had had heart trouble. It also dragged a little bit, and I'm not sure why we had to have that setup of Another Boy Who Likes her when it was never going anywhere.
posted by jeather at 7:51 AM on November 11, 2019

I was rolling my eyes about a third of the way through the movie as it seemed overly cliche, even for a rom-com. The twist made it sort of better in a way because of course an imaginary friend will be way more perfect than a real relationship. It seemed like the transplant was a lot longer than one year ago when she was first telling people about it.
posted by soelo at 12:43 PM on November 11, 2019

This movie opens with Yugoslavia 1999 and Yugoslavia didn't exist anymore in 1999. Later in the movie she calls it 'former Yugoslavia', but, still, it was weird. There were lots of bits that I disliked, but I liked the premise and the actors; it just could have been so much better. It didn't cross into maudlin, which is such a trap. Really, the cast was so good, a lot of the filming was lovely. I want that park to be near by, and un-housed Dora slayed. But the movie is a disappointment.

It was always going to be yours one way or another was a nice line.

Also, krempita.
posted by theora55 at 8:12 AM on December 25, 2021