The Prince and Me (2004)

wonderful and entertaining. By the way, there is a "real" Crown Prince of Denmark who has just married a girl he met in Transmania in far away Australia. Fairy tales still come true these days. Amazing!!!!

Julia Stiles is simply superb... Funny the way Shakespeare surfaces all along. I really enjoyed the scene when they are reading the poem. The chemestry is wonderful.They make us believe it´s really hapenning. Denmark must be a wonderful country. And they like their Royal Family. I also enjoyed the races.

Fmovies: Definitely a politically correct fairytale, although I don't mean it as derogatory as it may sound.

A playboy prince is lured to Wisconsin by an ad he sees on TV where some small time producer has gotten girls to lift up their shirts and other sordid activities by (apparently) pleading and asking nicely. Coming to the states with this attitude, he is rejected and then intrigued by an ambitious and intelligent doctor-wanna be (Julia Stiles) who thinks (as most would) he's a scum-bag. But she needs help with her Shakespeare credit she has to get on her way for her scientifically oriented career. The Prince is a perfect help, being well versed in this sort of literature.

An inevitable romance brews between the two, as we all expect. Yet it's not a "happily ever after" ending.

The unsettling ending is what saved the movie in my point of view. Not a Julia Stiles fan, I found her performance mediocre and the Prince's was decent. Ben Miller, stuck in yet another role as hand-servant/butler/sidekick (Bough from Johnny English), was enjoyable. The twist towards what you would think is the end is what got me. Where most American boy-meets girl movies would have cut, cleaned and wrapped it up, The Prince & Me goes on. THAT'S when I started to pay attention and get "into" the story. I even rewound it to that part just to watch it again.

It's not a movie I would go out and buy for my home collection unless it was in a clearance bin. But it wasn't a terrible flick, either.

I enjoyed this movie, but I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I'm a Dane myself. I found myself smiling on a few occasions, which involved Danish actors or mentions of other Danish things.

But there's many things that's not correct, obviously. Danish princes are practically always called Christian or Frederik, we currently don't have a king but a queen, we speak Danish and our newspapers are also in Danish, and monarchs are not allowed to be involved in politics. I'm sure there is more, but I can't remember.

But it's a cute story, predictable, but it's a romantic comedy, and those are predictable.

See it, enjoy it, but don't take it too literally.

The Prince and Me fmovies. The fact that I'm a Dane made my view towards this movie very critical. The way Denmark and Danes are portrayed don't have any part of reality in it, and the view on Europeans seems shallow, simple and very caricature-like. I hope that one day even teen-movies from U.S.A. can be a little sophisticated and subtle.

I really like Julia Stiles as an actress and I admire her talent but I simply doesn't get why she's able to participate in such a simplified film. The old-fashioned love story is kind of great, but when you have some knowledge of how Danish society actually functions you can't really appreciate this movie as you're supposed to.

Facts about Denmark: The Royal Family doesn't take part in politics and none of the members are allowed to vote at elections. The actual Danish Crown Prince, Frederik 10th, has been studying Political Science at Harvard University (92-93) without any undercover servant/nanny, can you believe that!(just kidding)

To sum up the plot itself is okay, but the superficial way of portraying Europeans is a bad habit a lot of Americans has, sorry but true. A whole lot of people seem to think that Denmark is the capital of Sweden. My point is that Europe contains several different cultures and the countries are actually easy to separate from one another.

I absolutely adore this movie. So, it might not have won an Oscar and it may not be a cinematic masterpiece, but then again, it didn't try to be, either. "The Prince and Me" is everything a good movie should be. It's cute, funny, easy to watch, enjoyable, it doesn't resort to swearing, violence, or sex, and it's not pompous, presumptuous, or didactic. It IS happy, uplifting, creative, funny, cute, modern, and overall completely enjoyable. I think it's silly that this movie is called "a Cinderella story" by many. Just because a girl (unknowingly) meets a European Prince doesn't mean the girl's going to be Cinderella. In fact, the main character, Paige, is a modern, ambitious, typical middle-class American college girl with dreams of being a doctor. She's a hard worker and we get the impression she's never had a serious relationship because she doesn't want to get "distracted" like her friends, who all seem to be falling in love and getting married. Paige is obviously the focused, studious one in her group of friends. Meanwhile, her life couldn't be much more different than the life of the young Danish Prince Edward (who is fictional, by the way; this movie doesn't pretend to be a documentary). The playboy Prince is immature and unfocused and resistant to his royal destiny, preferring to race cars in the streets of Copenhagen and make the headlines of tabloids. In the hopes of finding a fun, carefree life with crazy college girls in America, he decides to be an exchange student in Wisconsin at the university that Paige also happens to attend. The story unfolds from here, as Paige learns that chemistry isn't just something that you learn in a classroom, and as Prince Edward learns the meaning of hard work, responsibility, and how to be an ordinary college student with a personal egg poacher. Ultimately they both learn the meaning of true love. However, don't expect a sugary sweet fairy tale story: while it is sweet, the story has many modern twists and plenty of humour thrown in for good measure (Scotty the roommate and Soren the butler/caretaker are, quite simply, hilarious). Overall, this is a smart movie, well thought out, well planned, and completely enjoyable. I loved how this movie was a college student romance. Too often with romance movies we're left with are either 20-something urbanite stories or silly high school romances. I loved the one-liners, irony, surprises, and humour in this movie and I highly recommend it as a perfect Friday night movie rental. Don't get tripped up in the irrelevant details (apparently it was a really warm Thanksgiving in Wisconsin, and yeah, the Danish prince has impeccable English, and the technicalities of the Danish government aren't exactly followed to a "t")... but this is a movie to be enjoyed and not overly analyzed. It strikes a perfect balance between just being realistic enough with being a fun, modern, sweet, relatively carefree romance.

"The Prince & Me" is likely to be skewered by critics for being entirely predictable. Meet Paige. Pre-med student who has ambitions of seeing the world with Doctors Without Borders. Meet Edvard. Danish crown prince who wants to go to America, Wisconsin particularly, because he sees one of those "Girls of Wisconsin" videos. He enrolls at Paige's school as an exchange student named "Eddie". He's incognito because he wants to avoid the papparazzi. Do you think he'll get along with Paige at first? Think they'll fall for each other? Think the fairytale romance won't blossom? If you doubt any of this, then you A) have been living under a rock B) have never seen a romantic comedy in your life. "The Prince & Me", which I was dragged off to see by my girlfriend, *is* that predictable. There's hardly a plot twist in sight. Everything happens according to the book. Girl meets prince in disguise. Girl falls for prince. Prince reveals identity. Girl gets mad. Girl realizes she loves prince. Goes off to neverland to marry prince. Etc., etc.

But I figured if I could stay awake through this movie (and I did) it had to have some merit. And it does.

The "Danish" royal family in this film is a thinly-veiled parody of the British royals. The old queen with the aversion to her kin marrying commoners, the playboy prince...you get the point. This part of the film adds a touch of realism to the proceedings. I kind of liked that. I've seen royalty portrayed in other movies that I've been forced to watch (eg. King Ralph, Princess Diaries) and they couldn't have been more off the mark.

There's some genuinely amusing (but not laugh-out loud) moments in the film too.

I won't spoil them for you here. But if you're a guy, and your girlfriend is begging you to see this, you might want to give it a chance.

7/10