The Ice Storm

[Guest]

Saw this last night, more than a decade after everyone else watched it. Haven't enjoyed a film so much since, probably, Happiness (with which it shares numerous themes and tropes).

It was billed as a drama but there were at least ten or eleven moments in it which had me crying with laughter, particularly the wife-swapping scene and the bit where the Tobey Maguire character is trying to get the Katie Holmes character into bed.

Elijah Wood, as usual, is useless as the nerdy oldest son -- the one solitary dud in a cast full of people giving terrific performances.

Anybody read the book? (Although is there much point in me reading it now that I know the entire story . . .)

[linus]

The Ice Storm

Great film indeed.

It's been a while since I last saw it, but among other things, it had a great sense of time and place and a well-rendered strong undercurrent of suburban languor. It also had solid notions of cross-generational social detachment that you'd see in The Graduate, in a more mature and less idealistic treatment that came with the 70s (vs the 60s).

It's a pretty impressive movie by Ang Lee, who was a bit of an outsider having been born and raised in Taiwan (though he did study at Illinois.)