The very fact that I am writing these words proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that this blog is not about street cred. It is, as I have said, a record of the movies I've seen--and it would be against the spirit of the thing to deny a movie just because it was a Disney movie made for little girls. And it's about Ice Skating. And the box shows two views of the protagonist with the words: "From Scholastic...To Fantastic!"
I'll ignore the implication that smarts ain't all that, and focus instead of the weird self-mocking the movie engaged in. Joan Cusack (whom I would watch in nearly anything, but was made very dowdy here) played the mother of our physicist-on-ice. She complained about feminist ideals throughout, including a critique of the ice skating costumes as sexist little misogynistic ideas of what girls should be (well, not those words exactly...) to which her daughter replied "But mom, they're actually very aerodynamic!" The message our young viewers were supposed to take away is that Mom is strident and unrealistic, and not with the times. I suspect a writer who worked on it is a Sarah Lawrence grad who was full of self-loathing for writing such fluff (and for Disney to boot!), and crafted the mother carefully as both a foil to the intentions of the Dorothy Hammel-Bohr character and as a way to express her own loathing of the material in a contained and approved way.
At heart it's a sports-plot movie (plot number 1 in my review of Murderball), which I usually find much more rewarding than watching actual sports since the story arcs are more controlled, and the competition is a distillation of real sports. You have to be a serious fan to sit through all the mundane normal games to catch that amazing, exciting game. Sports movies deliver that fantastic game every time, without fail.
Other brief comments:
* No matter what you think, or what characters you might see in movies, it is impossible to be punk rock while ice skating. Can't be done. There's no such thing as punk rock sports. Even the X-games. If punks and jocks actually ever merged, the universe would implode.
* Sometimes you must realize that the mean popular girl is actually very nice pretending to be mean. It's actually her mother who is mean pretending to be nice.
* No matter what role she's in, Kim Cattrall looks like she's about to talk dirty to you.
* Ignorance can be overcome with a quivering lip and dazed expression.
* Zamboni's can travel over land.
Heh -- I'd argue that admitting you saw this is a kind of street cred.
Posted by: Kza at August 22, 2005 06:51 PM