Member review

From watching the trailer, I was expecting two schools to have a competition to see which school had held the best nativity. I was also expecting to hear a few recognisable Christmas songs as the movie was based around the festive season.

Paul Maddens is a primary school teacher who is being made to produce this year’s nativity as he is catching up with this old friend Gordon Shakespeare as he tells a white lie that his ex-girlfriend Jennifer is coming to watch the nativity and that she’s going to bring her Hollywood industry with her along with trying to teach the children the nativity. The plot makes sense because it is basically a romance story between two people masked over a children’s nativity. I would say that the film is believable because most of the characters were relateable as you had the children who weren’t really interested in doing the work which ultimately annoyed Mr. Maddens and then you had Mr. Poppy who is immature and wants to be friendly to the children and constantly undermines Mr. Maddens but has the children’s best intentions at heart.

I enjoyed the film because I thought that the cast was great which made the plot of the story a whole more believable. I thought covering up a romantic story between two characters over a children’s nativity was very clever as that brought a load of comedic moments for the audience to laugh at. One good point for the whole film was the friendship between Mr. Maddens and Mr. Poppy as I believe that they have a love hate relationship throughout most of the film because even through Paul can see that Mr. Poppy is an immature and irresponsible character towards the children Paul can also see how much that Mr. Poppy cares about the children at the same time. One bad point would be letting two of the children go to America with Paul because in the next scene its revealed that the parents didn’t sign the consent form which doesn’t seem to believable because I don’t think that the school and the parents would be so care less.

I liked the scenes where the children were auditioning or rehearsing the songs because they were funny and brought the comedic effect but pretty much every time the children were singing it would bring back happy moments from Paul's relationship with Jennifer which gives Paul ultimately the realisation that he is still in love with Jennifer.

One fact I learnt about the production was that it was filmed in Coventry because Debbie Isitt said that you don’t always need to record in London because everything is done there. Along with this point Debbie also said to film in areas that you know so then it would be easier to find the location when filming your production.

I would recommend this film to teenagers and adults who are struggling in their relationships to show them how far people will go for love.