My Life on Ice

That's the kind of movie that makes you leave the room with a nice feeling that the world is beautiful and everyone is in peace. The best scene though is when Etienne's stepfather starts doing a strip tease for him. Great! Pity it lasts only a few seconds as the latter changes his mind. By the way, the school teacher becomes boyfriend of Etienne's mum, after the boy is reprimanded at school. At least that is how I understood, but I got a bit confused when I read the previous user's comment.

This film is so subtle that you never really get it until the very end. There are clues along the way, but they are easy to miss if you are not paying attention. It is a slice of life film, very natural and paced realistically. In fact you get so caught up in the naturalness that you neglect to recall why you are watching to begin with although along the way you do get jarred into the reality of the drama but again it is so elusive you have to question if you really get it. The cast is absolutely outstanding across the board and very seductive so you have to be interested even if you have no idea where it is going. There are some very erotic scenes but they tease you rather than provide a sense of direction so aimlessly you continue saying to yourself where is this going and why am I here?

Some critics say this movie isn't dealing about anything. That's true. It just deals about a 16 year old ice skater who gets a videocamera and films his life over one year. He's preparing for an ice skating championship, his best friend wants to be an actor is is having one girlfriend after the other, his history professor is starting a relationship with his mother and he comes to terms with being gay. That's not revolutionary, no. But it's nice. I guess the critics who did not like this movie, were not charmed by the debuting actor Jimmy Tavares who is great. (he's a real ice skating champion and gives a daring performance). He will remind people of Jamie Bell in Billy Elliott. Maybe the two can star together in a movie! If you liked Drole De Felix and Billy Elliott, you'll like this one as well.

This is a coming of age story about a young gay man who likes to film people with is movie camera. He films absolutely everyone who is involved in his life but his family, his straight friend and his mother's boyfriend are the main subjects of his intense study.

It's actually a very unusual film and the way it is shown through the lens of the boy's camera is an approach to story telling that I have not seen in any other film. It records his passage through about a year of his adolescence, with plenty of candid and close up studies of his mother and grandmother as well as the two main men in his life, who both happen to be quite handsome men. It also records how he falls in love with his friend and his disappointment when he realises that his friend is definitely straight! Because of the unusual approach in filming it may not be to everyone's liking but it certainly left me feeling good. It's really quite a beautiful story.

I've really liked some of this duo's films, been unimpressed by others, but this was the only one that seemed like a waste of time and effort. Not that it's bad, exactly, just that there's so little point to it. The gimmick is that the teenage aspiring-figure-skater protagonist (played by an actual teenage aspiring figure skater) is given a vidcam for his birthday, then proceeds to film everything and everyone around him. Which is exactly as boring as that sounds.

This movie ends up in that "found footage" trap where the content has to be psuedo-random and mostly uneventful enough to sustain the illusion of being "real," yet professional actors are used, so that illusion is never convincing-we're obviously watching performers pretending to be "awkward" and "natural" on camera. The lead Etienne is OK but not very interesting or charismatic; his best friend is a bit more appealing. This is supposedly a "coming out" story, but despite our hero proclaiming early on that this is the year he will lose his virginity, nothing happens on that front-not even flirting-until the very end. Indeed, the only thing that really "happens" is that the lead annoys everyone by insistently filming everyone all the time, even when they explicitly ask him not to. It's a miracle his best friend tolerates this as long as he does.

This is just one more proof that unless you have a very, very good reason for using the "found footage" gimmick (as in, say, the "Paranormal Activity" series), it's better to simply do a conventionally scripted and shot narrative. Better for viewers, at least. Or in this case, it might also have been possible/better to do a documentary about the lead's real life. Landing somewhere in between, "My Life on Ice" isn't as shapeless as watching someone else's home movies, but it's still pretty tedious as fictional entertainment. Unless you find the lead particularly attractive or relatable, there's nothing much to hold attention. Within its chosen limitations it's a decently-crafted movie, but a failed experiment that doesn't reward the effort it took to make it-or that it takes to watch it.