Movie Girls Just Want to Be Pretty

There's a "gotcha" moment in Ice Princess where the entire philosophical grounding of feminism falls to its knees in the service of Disney family entertainment. A tired-looking Joan Cusack, who plays a single mom with annoying determination, discovers a pouffy red Spandex figure-skating outfit in the spilled contents of her Harvard-bound daughter's backpack. She holds it with outstretched arms as if it were hazardous material, dumbfounded by her disappointment.

In this mom's-eye view, which is set up as the fuddy-duddy spouting of time-worn wisdom ‑- as if she were saying that girls shouldn't take gym class when they have their periods ‑- she thinks smart girls are well served by their lonely, bitter teenage years. All they have to do is wait until they grow up, and they'll get the best end of the deal. In the movie universe, that means they eventually get to flower and turn into Bea Arthur.

In Hollywood's corruption of that smart-movie-girl genre, these potential heroines want to grow up to be Michelle Pfeiffer. A trio of new releases in theaters is now assaulting us with modern-day fables about talented females who really just want to be pretty. Michelle Trachtenberg's character in Ice Princess might be a physics genius, but she drools over the prospect of being graceful and popular. Sandra Bullock's Gracie Hart loses all of her clumsy toughness in Miss Congeniality 2 to fully embrace her inner diva. And the whip-smart college girls who aced the SATs in the low-budget indie D.E.B.S. buff their nails and trim the hems on their miniskirts, all while learning to be government spies in a supersecret academy.

Whatever happened to gangly misfits? It was only a few years ago that Trachtenberg was giving life to that awkward preteen inspiration Harriet the Spy. Now, in Ice Princess, Trachtenberg's character tries the line that ice skating is actually a sport that requires extreme physical prowess, but that belies the point that she's really just caught up in how she looks when she's on the ice. She feels pretty, she says, and that's all that matters. So screw Harvard, the eating disorders the film makes light of, the cheating it almost condones and the rampant bitchiness. This girl wants to wear a flashy dress and get the cute guy.