Word: angeli
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...events of the few days that follow are devastatingly realistic. The talented Ang Lee (The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman, Sense and Sensibility) has directed this story of uneasy family relationships in the restless, promiscuous culture of the early 1970s with crystalline precision, leaving the audience to stare at the ugly and universal truths underneath. Ben Hood (Kevin Kline) is having a decidedly unromantic affair with his next-door neighbor Janey Carver (Sigourney Weaver), while his wife Elena (Joan Allen) is showing signs of being unable to put up with the charade of their 17-year marriage any longer...
...pick them out, and new sexual partnerships are formed--a surer route to public embarrassment than to private ecstasy. The omens are clear: the founderings of all these nice people will lead to trouble. A child must be sacrificed; men must sob at their loss. The Ice Storm, says Ang Lee, director of this daring epic in miniature, is "a disaster movie. Except the disaster hits home...
...grace of an Ang Lee film is in his avoidance of the gaucheries his characters cannot escape. He calls this "a costume drama," but doesn't push the period. "I haven't seen the '70s treated realistically. Most films mock the '70s. But it's both period and very fresh in our memory. That ambiguity fascinated...
...Kline's Manhattan East Side apartment. The album was a gift from Sigourney Weaver, who plays his mistress in the film. It seems that Kline was rehearsing a benefit Shakespeare performance during shooting and spent every spare moment reciting speeches to the cast and crew. Weaver got director Ang Lee, co-stars Joan Allen, Christina Ricci and others to pose while yawning, sleeping or looking otherwise bored during Kline's endless classical recitations. "I always wait till the yawns are audible before stopping," Kline says...
Though it doesn't quite match Ang Lee's wonderful gift for rendering social conventions hilarious, "Shall We Dance?" is bound to tickle the most staid viewer. It makes abundant, admittedly effective use of stock comic devices and characters. Eriko Watanabe cuts a droll figure as the experienced but caustic and somewhat unattractive dancer whom Sugiyama agrees to partner in an amateur competition; Naoto Takenaka hams it up as a painfully self-conscious colleague who dons a wig and hurls himself with fiendish gusto into the rhumba; Sugiyama's two fellow dance-pupils--one short and hyper...