The Prince and Me (2004)

Short: Eddie's (Luke Mably) the crown prince of Denmark, and Paige (Julia Stiles) is a simple country girl. They meet at a university where Eddie has mistakenly gone because he thinks it will be like the video "Girls gone wild", and Paige is working her way to medical school. She's studious, and he's not.

Can you guess where all this is going?

I confess - I am stuck in the land of perpetually crap movies. I watch them, and I think, "who are you kidding?"

1) While I have never been to either England or Denmark, I believe I can recognize the differences in their accents. Unfortunately, the movie industry panders to Americans, who, from what I have observed, can not only not tell the difference, but they also cannot understand any accents outside of their own. See, I've noticed that even English speakers now come with English subtitles on American television and in American movies, and that disappoints/confuses me.

2) The more movies Julia Stiles makes the worse they are. The mainstream is bad for people like Stiles. I don't know why, but I haven't seen anything worthwhile from her in nearly four years. Now that I think about it, even when she was in stuff I liked, it was never that she was particularly that good. She was just surrounded by people who didn't make her look worse by comparison, which is more of a credit to them than to her.

3) After you break up with someone, then go find them, you can leave them again at their coronation to pursue your own interests, and this action is forgivable because, of course, you two cannot possibly work these things out together. Jack Amiel, Michael Begler, and Katherine Fugate ("writers") don't seem to understand that you can't have the narrative take a turn for the sole purpose of having the narrative take a turn. If you aren't going to use this opportunity to develop the characters or push the storyline, then you might as well leave that scene on the cutting room floor.

This movie, if you can call it that, was written by two people who have worked together before and one person who had never worked with either one of them. And that's how the movie feels. There is the formulaic first, second, and third acts, all of which the audience is willing to suffer through to get the happy ending. But, for some unknown reason, a cheap fourth act is tacked on the end that just doesn't vibe with the rest of it.

Put that together with an inept director who can't tell the difference between what is and it not worthwhile, and you've got this pathetic excuse.

It's enough to drive a person to drink, as my mom would put it.