The League of Merry Gentlemen
"Let nothing you dismay" is it, well we'll see about that.
Previously on Part-Time Gas Bitch!
Okay, now for the next one.
While Hot Frosty does actually get some laughs in, I’m sad to say that The Merry Gentlemen absolutely does not. But — and I know this may come as a shock — Chad Michael Murray is hot, so at least there’s that.
Britt Robertson plays Ashley, she’s living her dream as a STAR in the BIG CITY. She’s a dancer with the Jingle Belles, who seem to be a very specifically festive dance troupe. Do they only perform at Christmas, or do they rebrand four times a year for each season? Questions!
We begin with the Jingle Belles in action on stage, and as I typed into my Notes app:
Oh okay she’s like a Rockette! If they were shite.
I’m sorry, but this dance production is like a local talent show, not a Broadway headliner. I watched the whole season of America’s Sweethearts, the Netflix doc about the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders1 and I follow the Radio City Rockettes on Instagram and girlies, this kick-line is fucking garbage.
Ashley appears to be the star of this seasonal revue, she’s centre stage and her face is on all the programmes which seems like a weird move for a large dance troupe but okay, sure. Ashley messes up some of her steps during the routine and then meets new girl Shelby backstage after the show. Shelby seems primed to Nomi Malone this bitch and keeps alluding to Ashley being old, which is pretty funny and in my opinion, is the movie this should have been. (So, Christmas Showgirls, basically. I am just FULL of great ideas lately!) Ashley is called into her dance boss’s office thinking she’s in trouble for fucking up onstage, only to discover it’s much worse than that, and she’s being let go altogether! Oh no! And no one seems to care that all the Christmas show programmes with Ashley’s face on them have already been printed!
Now that she has all this time on her hands, Ashley goes back to her hometown of Sycamore Creek for Christmas for the first time in ages. When she arrives, she runs into Luke, a perfectly nice and hot handyman who’s up a ladder and hanging a decorative garland outside the bar her parents own. Ashley gets all tangled up in the garland like a dickhead and is mean to Luke for absolutely no reason when he tries to help her get free, even though this is all her own stupid fault. She also falls over twice within the first twenty minutes of this film and it’s becoming clear to me that she was not fired from the Jingle Belles for getting old, but because she’s an uncoordinated dipshit.
Her parents (her mother is Aunt Zelda from Sabrina the Teenage Witch!) run the local music venue, The Rhythm Room, and also potentially live there in the bar, it’s not super clear. Ashley wanders around, fondly reading the framed articles about The Rhythm Room’s past glories, one of which is a news story about the Vanessa Hudgens character from The Princess Switch coming to visit.
So this film takes place in the same universe as The Princess Switch, but Ashley was watching A Christmas Prince in her apartment after getting sacked, so A Christmas Prince is simply an in-universe movie here. However, in Hot Frosty, there’s a moment when Kathy’s doctor friend comes to the conclusion that Hot Frosty is a snowman (yes, I’m afraid so), and Kathy says, “Yeah and I’m the queen of Aldovia.” Aldovia is the kingdom from A Christmas Prince, which would suggest that Hot Frosty takes place in the Christmas Prince universe, but not this one. These Netflix films like to throw in all these cheeky little references to each other but always manage to do so in a way that would lead one to go full Charlie Kelly Pepe Silvia conspiracy wall if you actually tried to work the whole thing out.
ANYWAY, business has gotten very quiet for the The Rhythm Room of late, and Ashley discovers that an evil juice bar is trying to take over the lease. The landlord keeps raising the rent, so the bar is in huge debt, in fact $30,000 of debt to be precise. Luke is helping out with repairs around the venue and the sight of him shirtless inspires Ashley to come up with a plan to save The Rhythm Room. An all-male dance revue, of course! We need to save this local institution, so pants off, sailor, it’s Mistletoe Mike time!
Luke is reluctantly roped into this endeavour, along with the conveniently jacked Rhythm Room bartender, Ashley’s brother in law and a local taxi driver. None of the lads really want to do this and it feels morally iffy at best but Ashley is undaunted by a little thing like a lack of enthusiasm to rip one’s shirt off in front of the whole town and leads them through the choreography rehearsals. Luke is having a hard time with the routines, so Ashley slow dances with him to help him stop overthinking it and the glaring lack of chemistry between the two leads is truly something to behold. Chad Michael Murray is very charming and doing all he can to make it work, god bless him, (he really is the only good thing in this film, well him and Ashley’s sister’s dog) but Britt was giving him absolutely nothing. The character of Ashley could have been played by a broom with a face drawn on it. Even though my husband was only half-watching it, he was still prompted to ask, “What’s the opposite of a triple threat?” Or as my notes put it:
This bitch is so utterly swagless. Sauceless. Devoid of any kind of juice. An empty bun case of a woman.
So the show opens and it’s a huge hit. Apparently they made $2,200 on the first night, and we later find out the tickets are $30 a pop but there’s no way there were 73.33333 people in that bar! (Thank u calculator app.) We saw the wide shots and it wasn’t even the population of Hope Springs in there!
It’s also the tamest thing possible, because at the end of the day this is apparently a family-friendly Christmas movie, so no one is about to get their arse out, but I have to say, if I’d paid $30 for that show I’d be fairly fuckin’ raging, lads.
After opening night finishes up, Luke and Ashley hang out together and meet a Santy in the town square who’s closing up shop, and I have to wonder what sort of hours this poor Santy is working if he’s only finishing up at this time. Is there some kind of Santy union he can join? Or was it a matinee strip show? Again, I have questions!
The non-stripping strip show gains momentum and it looks like this janky little revue is going to pull in 30 grand with absolutely no hassle at all, as there’s a queue out the door every night and the money is piling up. Luke and Ashley continue their bland romance, there’s a cake-making break for no reason where Ashley and Aunt Zelda make some sort of Christmas Swiss roll. Apparently Zelda used to make it all the time but now that business in the bar has slowed down so much there’s been no need lately. But why was there cake served at the bar at all? Who wanted that? I have yet more questions! Also when they were decorating the finished cake I really thought there was going to be a reveal to show they’d made it in a dick shape but no, it’s just a regular Yule log. Boo.
So the debt is well on the way to being cleared, but just as the big Christmas Eve show is upon them, Ashley gets a call from her old dance boss, asking her to come back because the new girl Shelby was useless. Ashley dithers but ultimately decides to go back, Luke is crushed and now terrible at dancing. He (very unprofessionally) stops the big Christmas Eve show mid-routine because he just can’t do it without Ashley, dammit. But good news! She came back! She changed her mind about her dream job that now came with a three-year contract and significant pay raise! Yay?
Now it’s Christmas Day and everyone is having a big Christmas dinner in the bar as they traditionally do every year because somehow The Rhythm Room doesn’t have a sticky floor or smell like stale beer which all seems very fuckin unlikely tbh. Also Ashley’s parents definitely live in the bar, I’ve decided to take this as confirmation. But everyone is paired up and happy, the venue is saved, and no one even had to get their arse out.
Both this film and Hot Frosty had a blooper reel over the credits, which is something I always appreciate in a film, and while the Hot Frosty one was good, because the cast as a whole were very charming, this one is a total fucking flop. Chad Michael Murray was once again doing his best, and I don’t know what the hell was going on with Britt Robertson but not even being funny in the bloopers is surely an achievement of its own. Everyone is funny in a blooper reel! That’s the whole point! And yet, here we are!! Get it together, Britt!
Parish notes:
If you’d like more silly festive recap reading, here’s a post I wrote a few years ago about the Sweet Valley Twins book Big For Christmas, which is essentially Big but with the Wakefield twins. And if the words Sweet Valley and Wakefield twins make you go ‘Oh my god! I used to love those!’ well I co-host a Sweet Valley High podcast callled Double Love, where we’re working our way through the series book by book and it’s very funny if I do say so myself.
I’m reading Jilly Cooper’s Riders at the moment, after loving the TV show version of Rivals so much (which I wrote about in a previous post here!) and I’m having such a blast with it. There are of course some iffy ‘of their time’ elements to it but my god it’s fun to hiss ‘Helen, no!’ because of a matching kilt and beret outfit or her literally thinking ‘I can change him’ about Rupert Campbell-Black.
Other things I’ve read recently and really enjoyed were Her Kind by Niamh Boyce, a gorgeous and atmospheric imagining of the events of the Kilkenny witch trial in 1324 where Alice Kyteler and her maid Petronelle were accused of witchcraft. And also a fun one-two in Grave Expectations and its follow-up Displeasure Island by Alice Bell. They’ve both got murder mysteries, ghosts and a tired millennial medium who never has a warm enough coat.
Sometimes I watch good films too! For example, I watched The Substance and… oh boy. It’s so visually stunning, I spent the first twenty minutes just agog at how fucking cool it is. Delicious typefaces and production design. Delicious acting. Demi is amazing. Margaret is amazing. It’s The Picture of Dorian Grey x that Eric Prydz video for Call On Me. It’s brutal and savage and I fully sobbed for the entire last half hour because I was not expecting a gory heightened reality body horror to absolutely break my heart into pieces in its final act. What a film. I think the potion from Death Becomes Her is definitely the one to go for in terms of supernatural anti-aging though. Much less faff and admin. Also it turns out The Substance is actually a New Year’s Eve movie, so there’s something you could do on the 31st, I guess!
Those women should a) unionise and b) get to do one murder each per calendar year.
The movie was so bad that I even critiqued the Brooms hair colour. Like with Netflix money couldnt they have got the girl better hair. Every time Aunt Zelda spoke more cigarettes died. It was just such a waste of my time!
The character of Ashley could have been played by a broom with a face drawn on it. Even though my husband was only half-watching it, he was still prompted to ask, “What’s the opposite of a triple threat?
This made me HOWL