Ice Angel

Am I a girl? I am a 31 year old male, but just recently films with a strong emotional base seem to have my British stiff upper lip trembling all over the place.

Has (in a strange parody with this film) a girlie girl figure skater possessed my body with the sole intention of applying the water works to my eyelids? It appears so, because this film really had me choked up with emotion, it was great.

Make no mistake, this film is a bit of a turkey, and when I say a bit I mean a Christmas dinner that can feed a small nation, but none the less there was something about it that made it impossible to switch over.

Matt Clark the strapping captain of the U.S.A. Olympic ice hockey team, meets a premature demise but is returned to earth in the body of Sarah Bryan, a U.S.A. Olympic figure skater.

We start out with the usual gender bender clichés as the bewildered Matt tries to adapt to the body of a young and beautiful woman, but it is when this former 6 footer starts to take figure skating seriously the film starts to come into it's own.

Nicolle Tom I feel plays her part so well, even adapting her walk to be consistent with that of a male hockey player, which of course is in direct contrast to the thing of beauty she undoubtedly is.

I was really surprised with myself when in the final scene, I found myself cheering at my TV with the rest of the Olympic crowd with layers of built up tears in my eyes. It was fantastic though. A real feel-good moment.

When I think of how soft I seem to be getting lately.....I could blush really.

The biggest problem with this film however was the ending. There was no fanfares or fade outs, not even those silly little captions explaining what happened next. There was nothing. It just stopped dead. As dead as Matt Clark himself.

There was so many lose ends the audience was so desperate to see tied, like any further interaction between Matt's 'widowed' pregnant girlfriend and his best friend, who had both figured out that their former comrade and pal was locked inside Sarah's body.

Maybe just one outward reference to it would have put the icing on the cake. But sadly we are left hungry.

Well to recap, the film is enjoyable although it's not that good, the ending will excite you and then disappoint you in the same minute and I'm a big sissy girl, who can't keep his emotions in check.

And I'm going to end this review in the same style as the film where by I am going to......

For years I've watch all the figure skating movies I'e come upon. This one has become my favorite. It goes beyond the story of a skating career and casts an amused but compassionate glance on the human condition.

It is surprising with all the modern interest in unconventional sexual themes that movies where the member of one sex experiences the life of another are so uncommon. I don't mean transvestite stories like TOOTSIE, but plots wherein a person undergoes a real change. This gives a film a real chance to explore sex roles, a theme ostensibly so important to modern consciousness. There have been some such films, but these have been shallow comedies going for simpleminded yucks, like "Dr. Jeckyll and Ms Hyde" and "Switch" that really have nothing to say about the being a better humanbeing. Wouldn't it be better to address ideas of courage, compassion, and resilience in the face of difficulty? I thought Sarah's story of coming to grips with a new kind of life, of making peace with the past and moving on to the future, of friendship and striving to excel, made the story as warm as it was funny.

In criticism, it was too bad that the film didn't deal more with Sarah's social adjustments and less with skate training. Time to do so could have been salvaged from, for instance, that street hockey scene that was pretty much a throwaway. I think Ms Tom was a little too mature for the way the role was written and an actress who looked the age of Tara Lipinski would have been more suitable. Nonetheless, Tom does a good job and it is a shame that she doesn't get the chance to do more movie work (It is also a shame that her NANNY role was so restricted, and she was never allowed to break out of the background, as Nikki Cox did in UNHAPPY EVER AFTER).

Like "Heaven Can Wait," "Ice Angel" is clearly inspired by the classic "Here Comes Mr. Jordan." I hold it is superior to the former movie in thought and content, though shot on a small budget.

I'm amused by Nancy Kerrigan fans (which I count myself one)who express the wish for more screen time for our star. The few lines she had in the movie showed her limitations in delivering a dramatic line. She is a wonderful skater, but not an actress. Tara Lipinski did much better as the second lead.

Comparing it to Heaven can wait, which was made on a major motion picture's budget, at the pace of a feature film (twice as much time to film as a tv movie) is hardly fair.

This film is quite nice for a low budget film produced for a cable network. The lead actress was good in her role. Her performance was on a par with Ellen Barkin in Switch, as a friend of mine commented.

The pace of the story is good, and the fantasy elements are kept believable by the writing and acting skills. There were some performances that were simplistic, but mostly for secondary performances, not those of the lead characters. The parents did border on being parodies of dumb parents however in a few scenes.

Skating scenes were also believable.

The film may not be an Oscar winner, but it had heart and soul, and relied on more than cliches to tell the story. (Not that there were no cliches!) But it was a good, enjoyable film I would watch again.

I myself thought that this film was great and witty too, its one of a few movies that Tara Lipinski (an Olympic Gold medalist) has appeared in but hopefully more to come because she is a rare talent and i think that this movie was really good. see ye Carol

This movie was great! I've read other comments that state the movie was bad because it was Canadian, But frankly, I don't Believe that that has anything to do with the movie. I am glad to see a movie made for and about ice skating that wasn't a compation because most are, and they take place only on the ice. I am glad that this one didn't!