The Ice Storm

The Ice Stormⁱ has the dubious distinction of coming out a year before the Great Ice Storm (of '98). Other than that it is an entirely banal and unremarkable exploration in the minutia of boring, irrelevant, immaterial lives. The father's a Wall Street hot shot, the mother's searching for herself and the kids are various flavours of alright, from sorta to kinda.

I have no idea how people manage to go through this muck, either in its sticky reality or in its stupefying depiction. Or both. You'd think everyone in the US is a Wall Street hot shot living in Connecticut, doing somethingⁱⁱ in the office for about five seconds during every three hours and otherwise dicking about the place like the average homeless bum. I guess maybe that's the appeal, dress the pauper as prince and depict him engaged in pauper activities. Dream factory.

Anyway, through what I suspect is pure happenstance this film does contain two memorable points. One's a mother-daughter pairing, the mother walking in front, blonde bob cut in a light overcoat, daughter in the back, brunette bob cut in a black jacket, quite the splendid contrast.

The other's a little more complicated. Clever housewife stuck with boring dweeb discovers he's cheating on her (with an incredibly beastly grunt of a neighbour). The moment it all comes in perfect focus before her eyes is during a car trip towards a party, he's driving. At the party the host presents them with a bowl in which there's a lot of car keys. It's a "key party", which is some sort of bored & boring suburbia rendition of the time-honoured wife swap. They panic and run like children.

Once in the safety of their car they get worked up into a frenzy, return to the party, add their car key to the designated car key bowl placed atop the car key bowl receptacle in the car key bowl receptacle corner (don't knock on the glass) and proceed to whatever they do at parties (this one was particularly humourless, doofuses who couldn't tell a joke and wrecks that couldn't do the splits to save their respective lives). Hubby gets totally shitfaced, moves into the bathroom. Wife doesn't really want to fuck a random stranger but the guy - the last guy left - is kinda nice (incidentally the grunt's husband) and so they sort of hit it off. She casually observes to him that she's been married for seventeen years, her husband is sick in the bathroom and there's not one shred of desire in her to go get him.

They go to his car, where they suddenly get excited, push chairs back, get in position and... he comes. Literally, I doubt he even entered her, she just got squirted as if she were a flower. So here she is, forty something in a forty something boring dress, with forty something untoned ass cheeks and hips that won't part all the way, covered in the sticky cum of some neighbour that she didn't even get to fuck. So she excuses herself because well... she does need to get cleaned up.

And so she goes. To get cleaned up.

To the bathroom.

Good times.

1. 1997, by Ang Lee, with Christina Ricci, Sigourney Weaver [↩]
2. He looks lost for five seconds, is what he does. [↩]