Rating: 
Summary: Coming of age film for adults in the 1970's ..... or ....
Review: is it another Ang Lee masterpiece film that takes the reluctant viewer on trip through time and tradgedy. Certainly you'll remember this film for years to come and probably you'll wonder what in the world was Ang Lee trying to tell us ....
In the comfortable hinterland of Connecticut we are presented with two families during a 1970's Thanksgiving weekend. It's the sexual revolution for the 30 to 40's crowd and the adults all seem to feel kind of special but really can't figure out why they are so so unhappy. They are totally, and I mean totally disconnected with their kids, and pretty well totally disconnected with each other as well.
Matter of fact the movie would be a wonder as an introductory psych class since each of the players has 'issues'. Ripley .... OOOPS I mean Sigourney Weaver treats sex like fast food and manages perhaps to be the best adjusted character in the movie, while her husband is an uptight inventor oblivious to both his chldren and his wife, the young son need major help as he tries to blow up everying in sight, has visions of blowing up his teacher and completely falls appart when he has the opportunity to play 'I'll show you mine if you show me yours' with his older brother's girlfriend. ....
Kevin Kline character is married to a cold troubled cleptomaniac who gets the hots for a crazed funky preacher and really seems to bothered by everything around her .....
Needless to say, the poop finally hists the fan when one of the characters of friends decides to have a California style key party on the Thanksgiving weekend, in the middle of an ice storm, they all try to make it look so so normal ....HMMMM
Anyway, on it goes, certainly a very very unique film that is not everybody's fare, but, if you enjoy character studies and a strange trip down memory lane of reality, teenage sexual gropings in the backseat kind of thing and the tensions of unconnected marriages .. you'll love this film ...
Even though I gave the film 5 stars it's for the directing excellence not really because I like the film as much as some REAL Ang Lee masterpieces like 'The Wedding Banquet' and 'Eat Drink Man Woman' it was more like his 'Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon' movie that almost made me vomit with it's stupidity ....
Rating:
Summary: Comedic?
Review: Since I was 21 in 1973 I'm biased: I found virtually nothing comical about this movie.
Its insistence on accurate visual and auditory detail is absolute, first of all. When you see the movie, you are transported back to 1973 completely. Usually "period" work is marred by detectable errors - but I could not find a single one here.
The alientation among the people here is also evoked wonderfully. To me, the key to the film is how unnoticed the lack of vulnerability is. No one can let their guard down with anyone else - not the children, not the adults. Thus all are robbed of intimacy.
The ice is a character, with dialogue. It cracks and crunches. It moans. And it is at once threatening, isolating and hopelessly beautiful.
It is not until life itself is lost that they wake up, as though from a coma, and at that only in the last few minutes of the movie.
Comedy? Maybe only in the strictest classical sense that anything spared an unremittingly tragic ending is comedy.
Someone further ahead says that it's one of the best movies of the last 25 years. I'm prepared to agree, but there were parts that were excruciating to watch. Enjoy!
Rating:
Summary: Refutation of the Sexual Revolution
Review: Set in 1973 upper middle-class America, the Ice Storm profiles two families that are ensconced in the Sexual Revolution, evinced by "key parties," where couples bed whomever takes their key in a hat, have affairs in order to find self-fulfillment, and in general pursue the Cult of the Self, all the while ignoring their children whose neglect and neuroses fester in this movie to a climactic scene that you'll have to see in the movie. The Ice Storm is a sad film, full of cold, icy images and suggests that the Sexual Revolution was a fraud, a false storm that swept people away with its inane promises of self-fulfillment and happiness. Like so many great American films (Mulholland Dr. and Boogie Nights come to mind), the Ice Storm examines the Faustian Bargains we too often make and the perdition that must follow.
Rating: 
Summary: "A family...like your own anti-matter."
Review: It's hard to believe that this film was made in 1997. Every aspect of it, from the haircuts, dress styles, architecture, and furnishings to the attitudes and angst exhibited by the characters reeks of the 1970s. Directed by Ang Lee, the film captures the free-wheeling, introspective, and self-indulgent era in which parents absolve themselves of responsibility for guiding their children while they themselves explore free love and key parties. No one is happy. Everyone is trying to "connect."
Ben Hood (Kevin Kline) and Elena (Joan Allen), parents of Paul (Tobey Maguire) and Wendy (Christina Ricci) have lost touch with their "inner selves." Ben is trying to find it with Janey Carver (Sigourney Weaver). Elena, disillusioned, looks toward Rev. Philip Edwards (Michael Cumpsty) for revelation. Their children explore sexuality at young ages, with Wendy being very bold in asking for what she wants from younger kids who have not even entered puberty. Janey Carver (Sigourney Weaver), the mother of Mikey and Sandy, is the unfettered wife of Jim (Jamie Sheridan), who never seems to be part of her life. All experiment with sex, drugs, and alcohol, kids and adults alike, as all also try to find meaning in life. When a dangerous ice storm hits on the night of a major party for the adults (while the kids have their own plans), lives are permanently changed.
Set in New Canaan, CT, the film alternates moments of dark humor with moments of ineffable sadness, offering a close-up view of suburbanites and their children as they try to negotiate their way through the minefields of self-indulgence in their search for identity and "meaning." Everyone takes chances--shoplifting, taking drugs, sexual experimenting, daring of convention--and no one expects to be caught. The cinematography highlights the attitudes of the times and the relationships of the characters. Like the setting, it reflects the 1970s, the camera angles and lighting emphasizing the shallowness of the times. Developed from the novel by Rick Moody, this film showcases the era, from Watergate to Vietnam and the alienation of the suburban gentry. Mary Whipple
Rating:
Summary: "Morality"
Review: I see the movie "Ice Storm" as being a good example for parents. It shows parents the importance of establishing good moral values, characters and good manners. In establishing those values, one could say that it will be far more difficult for one's family to deteriorate and for children to inherit bad manners. On the whole, one could say that the moral deterioration and the pursuit of happiness that lied in the heart of this family proven to us the root of a problem that could be raised in a family. I hope parents take notes of those lessons.
Rating:
Summary: Dark,compelling story set amid social changes in the 1970s
Review: This fim is moody and morose, just like the book which I read a few years ago. It now has a talented director (Ang Lee) and some well-known actors (Kevin Kline, Signorey Weaver). The Ice Storm is a metaphor, of course, and the scenes takes place over a Thanksgiving weekend in New Canaan, CT in the early seventies. The parents are experimenting with the sexual revolution. The teenage children and smoking pot and feeling the anti-war movement. The sudden social changes are confusing everybody.The story is dark and compelling and the children come across as more real than the parents. It is a hard film to watch, given its subject. Thought it was was excellent athough I wasn't smiling when the film ended. I was thinking.
Rating:
Summary: Take that 1970's!
Review: The Ice Storm is one of the all time great films in the past 25 years if not 50.
The director Ang Lee is easily one of the best Hollywood directors working today. Lee is special because he gets the most of out of his actors. The performances here are stirring and mesmerizing.
This film teases you and then slaps you upside down by it's stirring climax. Quite simply, one of the best endings ever!
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