#118 - Smoke Show Reviews | Red, White, & Royal Blue

God, I love a good romcom.

There’s just something so lovely about watching people fall in love, ya know?

At a friend’s suggestion, I read Red, White, & Royal Blue a few weeks ago. (In one eight-hour sitting staying up until three in the morning because once I get started I can’t really stop reading—I almost managed to put it down before the Shields Up/Break Up plot points and honestly once you’ve hurt me as a reader I have to get to the fix-it part.) I love fluffy romance and I’m bad with angst. But I do like when a book makes me cry—and this one did! And it was way hornier than I expected and was very clearly intended for an adult audience, which I appreciated!

Tumblr history sidebar time y’all!

I had heard of the book when it came out but hadn’t read it beeeeecauuuuse I used to follow the author on Tumblr way back before her name was Casey McQuinston. She was a good writer then too! She wrote the first fanfic I ever read before I actually had any real clue of what fanfic really even was!

It was the height of The Social Network fandom frenzy, and she wrote an RPF about Jesse Eisenberg/Andrew Garfield falling in love on the set. I didn’t really have an awareness of…any morality discussions around RPF (Real People Fanfiction) and I read it—and it was good! And while it’s the thing everyone online seems desperate to compare her debut novel to—which, as someone who has actually read both and not just speculated or derogatorily referred to her actual novel as “published wattpad bullshit”, it’s simply not true.

There’s some overlap of ideas in terms of romantic gestures but like—duh. Why wouldn’t she use her best ideas? It’s not like The Fantastiks record pops up in RW&RB (this reference is for maybe 2 other people in the whole world)! The actual only clear echo I came away with was the characterizations of her British characters. And it’s not even like “oh she wrote Henry as a pseudo-Andrew Garfield type” it’s more like “This author has developed several voices for American characters and her Brits sound slightly similar in tone/word choice”. Which again, is not unexpected and totally fine because the LIVEJOURNAL FANFIC has been deadlinked for years. Those of us who read it did so over a decade ago. It, quite literally, does not matter.

But just in case you’re poking around the internet and happen to see some comments about it, now you have the entire fandom wank context.

People found her “annoying” on Tumblr because she knew she was talented, people hated “big accounts” on there at the time, and many—including myself, now—find RPF a bit over-the-line in terms of fanfic especially when their movie characters are right there. But also, people read the fuck outta that fic, and sometimes quotes from it are still used under black-and-white photos of hands clutching cigarettes because Tumblr never dies babeeey!

Anyway, it’s mostly bitter fellow (wannabe) authors who disparaged her debut novel by bringing up her fanfic past. Which like, we have legit just published fanfic floating around there now, and this book is NOT that. It’s an actual book. It’s not a “oh they clearly searched the word Kylo and replaced it with Jake” type of deal. And I think fanfic is great and I know there are tons of successful writers who write it, but this author didn’t just sell her fanfic is what I’m getting at. Also, this week we all found out that Richard Siken is into Supernatural fic?? Like, okay!

I was officially excited for the movie after watching the trailer.

They even had my favorite pre-romance scene of them sharing Cornetto’s in the kitchen at midnight! (I love a kitchen as a romantic location in general tbh.)

Anyway—here’s the spoiler-filled (of both book and movie because I’m an animal) review of Red, White, & Royal Blue.

I think this movie is fucking adorable. Despite some of my misgivings with pacing, it totally worked for me.

The mark of a good romance is whether or not I’m literally yelling at my TV and I did! Often! It was a fun watch!!

So, the plot: Alex is the son of the American President (played by Uma Thurman) who has long-term resentments of Prince Henry for reasons that aren’t entirely clear but are definitely more pigtail-pully than Alex is aware of. Through a series of circumstances, they wind up becoming friends, falling for each other while documenting this via texts and emails, and then have to deal with the consequences of the fact they’re both very public figures who are having these feelings. And then they topple the monarchy!!! (I’m kidding about that last part, unfortch.)

Do I think it’s as fun if you haven’t read the book? I, honestly don’t know! I had a hard time keeping up with the scene jumps and I like knew what was going on? They really could have done something with title cards or transitionary captions depicting location & time since we’re skipping back-and-forth between countries and sometimes the next scene is weeks later with very little indication. I don’t think it’s unfollowable, I just know that my first watch was filled with me saying, “wait we’re already [here]??” and that won’t happen for non-book readers so maybe it won’t be as jarring!

I needed to find out more about why I thought the pacing was so bad (and where the fuck my Cornettos in the Kitchen scene disappeared to) and apparently the original cut of this movie was three hours long. To which I say, in my most film bro voice, release the Matthew Lopez cut!!!

(My kingdom for even just even one single behind-the-scenes featurette! I want to know how many squats happened on the day of that buttshot and I would have that information if this was 2003!)

But also, Matthew Lopez has mostly directed theatre so far, which also makes sense. The first movie I was ever able to “spot” that with was The Producers and I would say a lot of the same filmmaker-based issues pop up in terms of staging and character movement. The sets aren’t static here!

But I also don’t know how much of my issue with some of the scenes were just the pacing between them, or if it’s because this film bumped up HARD against its budget. And often!

And it’s really not the filmmaker’s fault that the settings are…some of the most lavish settings possible. Like, sorry, you can’t tell me that the reception was for a royal wedding. We’ve seen that shit before! In real life! And I think a more filmy-film director may have used different angles to make scenes feel more expensive maybe? Or like, filled out, at least? Feels like the staging of it all was very On Stage and the camera stayed wide a lot throughout the film. And that feels like a cinematography-choices-based issue more than a line-producer budget-cut one.

But, and I mean this in the least Liz Lemon way possible. The lighting was really good. Like, noticeably unnoticeable good. Everyone looks hot the whole movie!!! There was no weird makeup or moments where I felt like everyone was slightly melted or had definitely been on set too long. Y’know like I feel about every single Netflix-produced romcom ever.

(Okay there was one shot of Uma where it felt like they forgot to curl half her hair but that’s all I’ve got!)

But, it's sooooo good to remember that I too am an impressionable dumbass with opinions waiting to be confirmed!!

Like, I loved this movie!!!

I think the performance of Alex done by Taylor Zakhar Perez was perfect. And that was the one I was most worried about because it’s a hard balance to strike! Alex is confident but chaotic and way too smart for his own good but also doesn’t realize he’s Bi for years because it honestly seems like he was just too busy to ever really notice his own feelings. I thought his performance was very naturalistic and I wanted more scenes between him and his bodyguard because their line delivery when she’s asking if he wants to look at pictures of her dog were so perfect and they happen so early that it was the first thing that got me on BOARD for the rest of the movie.

(There are some clunky lines but he does his best and he’s very good at silently mooning over Henry which is fulfilling my pine-o-meter just fine!)

I loved Book Henry so much. Like, he was the tugger of my heartstrings the entire time. And Movie Henry lived up to it! The performance Nicholas Galitzine is giving was wonderful, even if I don’t care for blonde dudes as romance leads in general.

The moment where they get caught making out and Henry looks through the books in The Red Room surreptitiously made me laugh and laugh.

And these two are very good at making out. Way to go chemistry tests!!!

It’s a gay romcom that’s not afraid to be gay!

It’s a movie in which a bisexual calls himself Bisexual out loud instead of saying some “oh I don’t do labels” malarky. We did it, gang!!!

It has more sex than I was expecting! The book is horny and sexy but in a ~fade to black~ sort of way. We get an implied blowjob, a hot hookup in a tack room intercut with a polo scene (which like, Winning London did better tbh!), and a full-on fuck with awkward intros and hand close-ups because this movie knows its audience!!

I didn’t cry, but I was also taking notes. I did immediately turn it back on for a second viewing though, so there’s that. “That” being the highest recommendation I can think of. It wasn’t even in a let me see how I actually feel kind of way it was in a I would like to watch these two be dumb dumbs in love for a little while longer.

Did they cut an extraordinary amount of plot and important characterization from the book? Yeah. But honestly, I don’t think they could have kept an ounce more plot in this thing. It already feels rushed in places I wish it could have slowed down. I did miss the supporting cast a lot—the book is fun because of the larger friend group—but I don’t begrudge the reality that it wouldn’t have all fit. Also they kept most of my favorite parts/lines so, eh. The only weird plot choice was keeping his parents married. His dads character was not at ALL how I pictured in the book so he didn’t like…register to me as his dad. I kept being like, “wait, did they cut the sister or did I miss something?” but if you don’t know what you’re missing I don’t think the plot indicates any absences. A feat of adaptation!

Also, the side characters were solid. Great performances all around everybody!

I have been wanting more horny romance comedy movies and I got one! I’m not going to gripe or complain about the little parts that I think could have been better because this was the first movie I’ve watched in a while that my brain wasn’t trying to figure out how I would course-correct. And it was fun!

Like, the politics in the book are some of the more eye-rolly parts, but that’s a mix of the neoliberalism praxis presented and what I call Hamilton Goggles.

Remember when Hamilton came out and everyone was obsessed with it because it was feel-good and the music was catchy and there was hope and optimism because Obama was still president and everyone got shirts that said “Immigrants, we get the job done” and we were all having a fun time with a fun musical? (There were always valid critiques but I’m talking pure public opinion/general sentiment.) And then when Trump got “elected” and everything went to shit and Lin Manuel Miranda had a lot of jobs that he produced slightly-samey music for and he took one too many lip-bite photos and suddenly Hamilton was the lamest musical in the world with bad rapping and was casting the white enslavers as good guys and didn’t the audience know that Alexander Hamilton enslaved people??? How dare we be fooled as an audience into thinking the *checks notes* founding fathers were unimpeachably wonderful people!

Yeah, the look back and being like “oh Hamilton is bad, actually, and always was” despite that literally not being true is the Hamilton Goggle phenomenon. Everything that was fun and slightly earnest became unbearably cheesy and a representation of How We Got Where We Are. It’s hard to remember the actual collective conscious pre-2016. (Our window for a-historicness is growing wider at a rapid pace and I! am! frightened by that fact!)

Anyway, post-2016, politics got even harder to write about. Want to be hopeful? You better not come off as saccharine & sanctimonious! Want to make statements about America that don’t feel pandery in an eye-rolly liberal platitude way? Zoinks, have you got your work cut out for you!

And this movie has both American Politics and British Monarchy bullshit to contend with so I’m giving it a bit of a break. They streamlined some of the political plotlines really efficiently and I think dialing it back for the movie was the right choice.

Could this movie have lingered longer in some scenes to really help me see Henry & Alex falling for each other? Yeah.

Do I wish there was more emphasis on the pining? Oh you bet!

Are the (multiple) ending bows a bit neat? Yeah. But it’s a romcom babe!

And it’s gay and it’s fun and we deserve queer romances that don’t have to be everything all the time!

They did their best with the falling-in-love-over-email plot device that works so fucking well in the book. It’s tough to translate it but I appreciate their stylistic efforts that went beyond what Fincher established as The Way To Do Texts in those first episodes of House of Cards that he directed. (Even managed to bring Fincher refs into the mix—we are so back!)

Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter if there were little dips or slight tweaks I would have made. It worked for me! And I’m going to probably watch it again this weekend! It’s a fun romp and it’s snappy and I’m a sucker for a karaoke scene!!!

Smoke Show Rating: 😶‍🌫️😶‍🌫️😶‍🌫️😶‍🌫️/5 (only took one 😶‍🌫️ away for the lack of powerpoints tbh)

From the vault:

Last year: #57 - Human Expectations

Two years ago: #10 - Onion Jam & My Sanity