8.20.2006

Ice Princess = Brain Freeze

Ice Princess = Brain Freeze

I TiVo'd the movie Ice Princess for Iz, because it is about ice skating and it has the word princess in it (two Boing!s for my kid), and it's about a girl (Casey) who is really good at physics and uses her brain to improve her figure skating (go smart girl role models go).

What I did not know is that Casey becomes so passionate about figure skating that she bails during her Harvard admissions interview to pursue her !Dream!

(**Squid brain explosion noises**)

Now, some of you might say that the movie was being realistic. If Casey really did want to pursue full-time competitive figure skating, then she would have to give up everything else. I say that since Disney fucks realism in the ear every chance they get, why do they then pull out the Real World card for the first girl-candy movie in recent memory with a super-smart lead? Why couldn't their hero pull a Natalie Portman, and do both?

Iz's reaction: She wants to take ice skating lessons. Because Casey's love of physics was ridiculed by most of the other kids in the movie and ultimately discarded, it didn't register with Iz as cool or noteworthy, though I'm sure many of the people behind the movie worked the Cute Teen Chick Physicist angle to get it made.

I also hated that Joan Cusack (the mother) was written as such a shrewish and unlikable academic puppeteer. She gave a heartfelt speech about "the shelf life of a figure skater as opposed to the shelf life of your amazing brain" that to me was completely valid, though the movie framed it as balls-out manipulation.

I would really love to know the story behind this completely squandered opportunity. I could rant about toxic media messages for several paragraphs, but I think you get the point.

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