Customer Reviews

The Ice Rink

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Jean-Phillipe Toussainte is a Belgian novelist with a cult following. His featherlight, carefree touch as writer and director makes "THE ICE RINK/LA PATINOIR" a very cool and refreshing 80 minute diversion. It's hard not to be reminded of Francois Truffaut's "Day For Night," or a carefully choreographed Jacque Tati comedy of manners and eventual chaos. Bruce Campbell ("Evil Dead") stars as a hunky American hockey player who arrives on the ice arena set of a French "hockey romance" film with a cast made up of the entire Lithuanian National Hockey Team who speak no French and a crew who cannot skate. Tom Novembre is the director of the film within the film who is under tremendous pressure to meet an impossible deadline for the Venice Film Festival. The eye-catching Doloras Chaplin, Charlie's granddaughter, plays an amorous international ice-show star in love with the square-jawed Campbell. A funny, slapstick look at the art of filmmaking and love. Some nudity. A great soundtrack includes Placebo and David Bowie. The crisp widescreen transfer is in French with English subtitles. Recommended.

I had read some reviews on other websites that did not rate this movie very highly. I have one question What were they thinking? Even though it is in French and it does have subtitles I found this to be a very touching and romantic movie. The soundtrack is great too! Even if you are not a fan of Bruce Campbell I would recommend seeing this just for the fact that it makes you happy.

I had heard of this film a while ago. When I finally saw it, I was mildly surprised. I enjoyed the light comic story as well as seeing Bruce Campbell do something different. I recommend this film to fans and non-fans alike.

While not the most elaborated story we liked this movie. Its a light entertaining film and it never pretends to be more than just a little comedy. Even though the director uses mostly only cliches for the characters, the movie is consequent in its style. Slapstick with a very cool French tone and quite funny.
Oh, yes -the story: a film crew uses an ice hockey game as the backdrop for a love story. 95% of the movie is filmed on location - the ice rink. Most of the time, it shows the film crew and the Lithuanian ice hockey players and the American Hollywood star and the ice rink manager who dreams of his famous past as ice-dancer - slipping and sliding.

Okay, let's face facts here, if you don't NORMALLY watch French films and you're only renting this because you're a Bruce Campbell fan, you're going to hate THE ICE RINK. Fortunately for me (although I did rent this because of Campbell) I've logged many hours watching all types of foreign films so the fact that his screen time is limited didn't completely ruin film for me. (He does have a great entrance though--they can't get the door of his car open, so they have to drag him out the window which only opens halfway.) This isn't a romantic comedy, it's a film about making a film more of a mocumentary actually, and while it isn't as outrageously hilarious as another French film on the same subject called LET'S MAKE A DIRTY MOVIE, THE ICE RINK still made me laugh out loud several times and that's good enough for me.

Maybe it's because I'm not French. I don't know. But I definitely didn't think this was Bruce's best work by a long shot. As a huge Bruce Campbell fan, I had been awaiting this release for a long time. The result was a movie that didn't live up to my expectations. It had its moments, but overall I was dissapointed. This is the kind of movie I would have loved to watch in my college French class, though.