So I finally got around to watching Ice Castles off my DVR having recorded it ages ago. The movie is available on DVD, so I'm OK with doing a full-length blog post on it.
Nick (Robby Benson) is returning to his home town of Waverly, IA, after a semester at college. It turns out that he was going to college to study pre-med, but he's dropped out because he likes hockey and is good enough to have gotten a tryout with the Minnesota North Stars. (For those who don't know sports, the North Stars were in the NHL at the time before moving to Dallas; Minnesota got another franchise several years after the move.) Nick's girlfriend Alexis (Lynn-Holly Johnson) lives with her widower father Marcus (Tom Skeritt), and practices figure skating at the local ice rink run by Beulah (Colleen Dewhurst).
Alexis is good enough to go to a regional skating competition, where she's discovered by a skating coach Deborah (Jennifer Warren). Deborah is eventually willing to take Alexis on as a prospect because she's good and telegenic. Sports reporter Brian (David Huffman) has it all figured out that they can promote Alexis and some of the other world and Olympic figure skating hopefuls, presumably making a lot of money off the amateurs in the process although that's not really mentioned.
There's the potential in Ice Castles for a look at the exploitation of amateur athletes, but the movie decides it's not going to go down that road at all. Instead, after winning a big competition, Alexis decides to skate at an outdoor rink while everybody else is partying inside. Alexis crashes into some patio furniture, being in a coma for a couple of days and then coming out of it suffering near-blindness. Ice Castles then descends into melodrama, as Alexis has no desire to do anything, while quitter Nick (he's quit hockey too) comes back to Alexis despite having seen her kiss Brian (seems like a severe conflict of interest here for Brian).
Once Alexis suffers her accident, Ice Castles becomes an unintentional comedy, filled with all sorts of plot holes and overwrought dialog. Nick is insistent that Alexis return to competition, which is nonsense since she wouldn't be able to do the compulsory figures with limited sight (the compulsory figures were removed from competition after the 1988 Olympics). And the premise that nobody knows about Alexis' near blindness is ludicrous. She was being heavily hyped; even though it was the days before ESPN, an insular world like that of amateur skating would have learned through the grapevine what had happened to her. Especially since they all knew what had happened to another Olympic hopeful. And the less said about Robby Benson's "acting" the better.
All in all Ice Castles is a movie with some interesting ideas and some really nice location shooting (Minnesota and Colorado substitute for Iowa), but one that doesn't quite add up. Still, feel free to watch and judge for yourself.
Saturday, October 7, 2017
Ice Castles (1978)
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1 comment:
Nearly everyone this girl came in contact with was abusing her. Her father, both female coaches, 2nd coach's boyfriend. I suppose you couldn't put all this together now, listen to the things the girl at the training facility talks to her about. The first thing is lesbianism. The second is girls leaving training who aren't really injured and in fact are having mental breakdowns. Notice how the precedent of the screen going black before a sexual encounter is set by her and the boyfriend in the beginning. Then notice how it does the same when she is being subjected to other abusers. Notice how she often looks dead eyed. Notice how the 2nd coach used trauma and talks about how much money it's costing her. Notice how it appears that the father and 1st coach sold her the the 2nd coach that was introduced leering at her like a predator, while she is skating around. Then because they couldn't give too much away, they have the boyfriend catch her with the older creepy man all over her. This stuff is in your face and Hollywood has been exposed these days for exploiting and abusing women and children as a matter of common practice.
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