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I love this movie so much

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

The movie is very depressing but very well done. I don't know if it may be deeper than what I got from it. It is pretty much about two families where adults fell out of communication with each other. They try to make their lives more fun with the new found freedoms of the 70's but it doesn't help because they lack connection.The kids are in the meantime also exploring their sexuality. And it also gives one a sad vibe as lacking any real emotions and excitement that comes with adolescence.The actors are all great. Actually the ones who played the teens ended up all being very well known. Actually they weren't new to acting with this movie anyways as they have been in business since childhood and so their acting already was experienced. Christina Ricci somehow manages to creep me out. Her sexual explorations make me feel like she is making something really wrong, even though she is a 14 years old and more like an innocent teenager starting life than a creep. The tragic end at the same time makes one wonder if this loss will turn around the lives of these two families after they witnessed the fragility of life and discovered how important it is not to miss communication with each other.

When watching "The Ice Storm" you get the feel that life is somewhat of a dread and a dark nature, as you see the characters in the movie struggle with things and everyday real life. Still the picture teaches the need to explore and it shows how everything and everybody's life is connected in one way or the other. The film is well acted too with an all star cast as the on screen chemistry is top notch.Set in 1973 Connecticut "The Ice Storm" looks at the life of one family that being the Hood family and how they deal with nature and human nature combined with emotion and dysfunction. The main themes involve abuse and casual sex as Ben Hood(Kevin Kline)is a self centered husband who's in an affair with a middle age mistress named Janey(the elegant and sexy Sigourney Weaver)and due to this Ben's relationship with his wife Elena(Joan Allen)is growing colder as Elena does a husband swap at a friends party. Plus to complicate this all both children of the Hood's have growing pains with drugs and sex as Paul(Tobey Maguire)is a comic book reading nerd who's exploring the vices of sex and drugs for the first time as the same holds true for the daughter Wendy(Christina Ricci). Thru it all change and acceptance and discovery and coming to terms with life is reached by all in this movie true, this film is dark in nature still it's a drama that teaches patience and dealing with life.

Would Ang Lee's The Ice Storm be as effective in a bright summer's day? I think not. The opening has a ghostly, near empty train diligently chugging its way through the icy winter landscape, as a sort of futile attempt to bat back the elements that buffet these suburban families. It shines its headlights out in vain. Other vehicles, including the numerous cars parked on the street too fall to this chilling weather. Would the characters feels as frozen and trapped if it was not below and zero, thus forcing them to stay indoors to keep warm and confront the utter banality of their middle class lives. The answer is no. Ang Lee has composed a quiet, frozen little picture of this town, and how it has rendered its inhabitants frustrated and static. We do not ever learn of the setting's name; it could be anywhere in 70s America. The production design and costuming has a particularly dulling effect. It feels as if even in the cold weather they are trying to maintain stylish through fashion and decor...these bright colours might pop in the sunlight but there is none of that around, and thus staring endlessly at the same wardrobe and kitchen set they begin to realise the complete facile nature of their lives. Some have long resigned to it - see the long line of gray trenchcoats congregating at the train station for another day of 9-5. So what do they do but resort to a wide range of wild vices, the usual escape from the clean, uncluttered and nuclear image of the American dream. Sex in the abundant theme here. A key swap party is one of those things that sound spicy and exciting in theory but cannot suddenly be thrust into a community as miserable and anxious as this one and bring about a change or epiphany. Their wide eyes and fake smiles persist agonisingly up until the actual choosing of the keys, where their wild personas begin to crack and we can almost hear their brains churning and thinking "So this is really happening then...". The film's best moment is that one couple that 'accidentally' chooses themselves, and feigns a small fuss and quickly scurries away before anyone can object - none of these adults can readily and openly admit that they are not nearly as emotionally stable enough for this kind of game, so this couple sees its chance and runs with it. Another brilliant moment is shortly before that, where a plumper woman fishes out a set of keys and waits a little longer for someone to confess or to bite. It manages to hit that tender note of being both a little funny and a little sad at the same time. What was wild and adventurous in their minds has warped into something stifling and uncomfortable and it takes a moment for them to realise it. No doubt that no couple's affair that night lived up to what they had been promised. Opposing them of course we have the kids who are ironically, the more mature ones about their sexuality. This theme is a little on the nose. We can see that the adults are pretending to be risqué but really rigidly uncompromising without having Ricci parade her body around to any boy who cares to look/feel. Lee somewhat tries to get away with this by masking it with the sexual curiosity of young children, but his objective is pretty clear. He pushes these scenes together for this purpose; Janey chastises the kids for being so sexually explicit and open, warning "our bodies betray us" and yet later she is in bed with someone that satisfies her on a purely physical level (and perhaps not even that by the film's end). Ben does the same when he discovers them in the basement, deflecting his own infidelities by telling off her daughter for being so sexually frank. Meanwhile Tobey Maguire is the third counterpoint - the dopey, naive freshman who has a girl's mouth deposited right onto his crotch, but knows better than to take advantage. How long before he too is frustrated and bound by the confines of the small town? I cannot avoid a mention of Revolutionary Road. Yates wrote about a different time period, but the feelings are all the same. And yet that story of the Wheelers feels more developed, more natural. Their ambition to flee the quaint little suburban setting is the actual thing that destroys them, and it is tragic in the way they have blinded themselves and yearned for things far, far away whilst ignoring the material right in front of them. In The Ice Storm the characters are also pretending. But their demise doesn't come from within, from their own mistakes and self-delusions. It comes from the titular phenomenon itself, as Mikey is struck down by the electrical wires. This is the cheapest way to invoke tragedy, to pick the most innocent character of them all and to kill him off arbitrarily. In the end they are sobbing, but because it has occurred as a freak accident removed from their actions it feels needlessly cruel rather than truly tragic. The punishment is not earned.

Ang Lee really managed to grasp the moods, torments, emotions of this gallery of characters and this basically is the greatest satisfaction of The Ice Storm. But what this movie lacks is a real plot and a clearer direction, indeed the scenario resembles a patchwork of disconnected, rather uneven scenes and story lines that are not that productive. There is also too many characters which induces a inevitable dilution of the story, not to mention that the common denominator, the sexual liberation in the 70's, is not the most interesting. Ultimately, the only thing that really stands out in this movie, whose cinematography is excellent by the way, is its genuine sensibility.