 "Photo: Dreamworks Pictures")
Did we really like this stuff when we were little? Ice Princess is definitely not your next Mean Girls. The movie was written by Meg Cabot, who also wrote the Princess Diaries books. With this movie, you should expect the Princess Diaries, except it's even more cheesy and predictable.
A teen misfit who never thought she'd fit in discovers her personal edge when she risks it all to pursue her dreams of figure skating in Disney's inspirational family comedy, Ice Princess.
Michelle Trachtenberg (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, EuroTrip) stars as Casey Carlyle, a typical bookworm who wants to be part of the cool group, except Casey is unbelievably nerdy, or at least that's what the movie wants to convince us.
While watching figure skating on television, Casey has an epiphany for a physics project for a Harvard scholarship; apparently she's been living to go to Harvard. Her daily vocabulary consists of velocity, mass, and other physics gibberish. There's a reason her only friend is a fellow nerd.
Add a feminist mother (Joan Cusack) who is an English professor at a local college, and who looks down upon anything that may even imply femininity, condemning the sport of figure skating to skimpy outfits that she would never want to see her daughter in.
The story continues as all Disney stories do: with hope, then disappointment caused by the villain, and then a boy comes to the rescue driving a Zamboni, and happily ever after with a really awkward kiss that just doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the movie.
Trachtenberg does, however, look amazingly beautiful and graceful on the ice. Most of her skating, minus the jumps, she actually did herself. There were also cameos by Michelle Kwan and Brian Boitano as figure skating commentators, making it clear just how corny figure skating commentaries actually are.
Surprisingly, the best acting came from Kirsten Olsen, who plays Hallie, one of the elite "cool" figure skaters. Working under the stage name "The Jumping Shrimp," she well represents a compact figure skater who packs a lot of skill despite her small size. Brought into the film because she is a skater, she does a great job in proving her acting skills in her first film.
Kim Cattrall, better known for her role as sexually promiscuous Samantha Jones in Sex and the City, plays an overbearing mom and figure skating coach. Not very different from Samantha, except for more clothes and the G-rating, her character is the tough girl who is actually a softie.
The role was a welcome change, but it wasn't that far of a stretch, either. It would be worthwhile to see her in a much more dramatic and serious role in the future.
Like any other inspirational Disney movie, Ice Princess carries a good and true message about young girls and their dreams, for both those girls and the people they love. Disney seems to stick to wholesome goodness and fun, something that is really lacking in the movies that are created for children today. The movie will be a favorite to little 5-and-12-year-old girls.
A mix of some terrible dialogue and bad editing in the first half of the film that makes it obvious that Trachtenberg is not the one skating, the movie is very clichéd, very predictable, and very doubtful.
It's a nice try, but it's a no-go. Think of Ice Princess as a Centerstage (which did pretty much the same routine, except with ballet) for figure skating.
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