The 1973-set The Ice Storm feels at home on TV partly because it turns the nuclear family depicted in so many sitcoms upside-down. The fact that it was helmed by an Asian lends some ecumenical notion to the film's ideas, which are first imparted in voice-over by Paul Hood, who likens a household--his household--and its ever-impending expiration to an issue of "The Fantastic Four": "Your family is kind of like your own personal negative matter. And that's what dying is--dying is when your family takes you back, thus throwing you into negative space. So it's a paradox--the closer you're drawn back in, the further into the void you go."

The Ice Storm takes place around Thanksgiving, at the sunset of the so-called sexual revolution. Husband and wife Ben and Elena Hood (Kevin Kline and Joan Allen) are vainly concealing mid-life crises from each other and their teenaged offspring, Paul and Wendy (Maguire and Christina Ricci). Both Ben and Wendy are secretly involved with members of the Carver family next door, she perhaps imitating the wanton behaviour of her father and his adult friends, who can barely suppress their sexual appetites. (The film climaxes with a key party.) Paul, meanwhile, is away at private school hatching a plan to bed the class beauty (a pre-"Dawson's Creek" Katie Holmes) before his conquistador roommate (David Krumholtz) seduces her.

These characters aren't motivated by their libidos alone, however. There is a shared desperation for communication among them, as well as a symbiotic exchange of values: in one scene, Elena shoplifts petty items from a convenience store, as Wendy had earlier done. This theme recurs in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with young and old characters privately yearning to be like the other. That film's villain, the iconically named Jade Fox (Cheng Pei Pei), eventually blames her greatest transgression on jealousy of the youthful Jen (Zhang Ziyi), a girl who, in turn, inherited her selfishness from mistress Fox.

Jen, due to be married but longing for the freedom of the swordsmen she reads about in pulp fiction, steals a fabled sword and embarks on a de facto journey of self-discovery. "The Green Destiny," as the ancient weapon is known, belongs to Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun Fat), a disillusioned warrior whose recent meditative search for enlightenment has found him only "endless sorrow." With Jen having used the gravity-defying martial art in which he is expert against his unrequited love, Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh), Li offers to hone Jen's impetuousness. As in The Ice Storm, the battle of wills is bloodier and more combustible than either of them realize.

The Ice Storm observes beyond the slang and easy details of the period to give us politically savvy children nestled in bean bag chairs; we hear the sloshing of swinger Janey Carver's (Sigourney Weaver) waterbed and see beige rotary telephones being used in everyday application, not as especially comic devices. (The sound of said mattress, it has been writ, provides a poignant juxtaposition to the freezing rain outside during the titular storm, a prediction of thaw.) The most haunting images capitalize on the film's intemporal, grim fairy tale aspects (the gnarly woods of the New Canaan, Connecticut setting are very useful in this regard), Wendy Hood's red riding cape the clearest example. (Ricci simultaneously starred in a twelve-minute retelling of "Little Red Riding Hood", and as an aside, it is through this failed 1997 short's black-and-white photography that we learn how vital colour is to understanding the Big Bad Wolf's passionate appetite.)

Likewise, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is ushered along by cultural and genre fluency, enabling Lee to get away with his slow-burn pace in the interim of Yuen Wo Ping-choreographed fisticuffs. It seems that cello-drenched melancholy is often labelled "Eastern," but on the film's DVD commentary track, Lee is quick to apologize to native Chinese audiences for a stretch of dialogue that establishes the Li Mu Bai-Shu Lien-Jen triangle, thus delaying the ice-breaking (no pun intended) fight. Lee has brought his methodical, multinational sensibility to the wu xia (loosely, "martial chivalry"): Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a wire fu epic of broad appeal that encompasses women (ditch the pop songstresses and seek your girl empowerment from this movie), Brother Chow fans, romance readers, and many others.

Although living room screenings of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon facilitate a reduced estimation of its razzle-dazzle, it's not my agenda to belabour this point. (I also don't mean to undervalue cinematographer Frederick Elmes' luscious yet desaturated work on The Ice Storm.) The film lingers beautiful despite its dwarfed majesty, the more intimate scale arguably improving on the dream quality of fantastic sequences like Jen and Li Mu Bai's forest duel. (They dance in Astaire fashion with swords--atop the trees.) The bottom line: with The Ice Storm and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, it's the urban versus the urbane. I come from a rather traditional postwar North American family, so maybe The Ice Storm is extra satisfying on television for me because it watches back.

Too bad Fox resigned The Ice Storm to catalogue status on DVD, though they continue to produce the finest looking non-SEs in the biz. The disc's 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer is slightly cleaner and better contrasted than Columbia's nice 2.35:1 anamorphic presentation of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; the pair are about neck-and-neck for sound. The Ice Storm lacks a .1 channel (its mix is 5.0), but Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon meekly uses its in Mandarin and English-dubbed 5.1 configurations. Unless my imagination is playing tricks on me, the Mandarin version is quieter overall. (As for the English track, it was carefully achieved but is prone to that accidental comedy of post-synch recordings.) Neither DVD sounds zippy enough for demonstration purposes, semi-enveloping scores aside. (Note: the lyrics to Coco Lee's Oscar-nominated end-title song for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, "A Love Before Time," change depending on the selected language.)

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon's supplemental section is plentiful, if not very illuminating. Lee is joined for a commentary track by co-writer James Schamus (whose contribution to The Ice Storm's screenplay went above and beyond the call of adaptation, as the first half of the film only vaguely exists in Rick Moody's source novel), and they--Schamus, in particular--participate in a smart-guys-playing-dumb routine that's condescending and weird, given the audience intellect their various cinematic collaborations presume/demand. Nevertheless, Lee fills in the occasional inconsistency for us westerners, and he's gracious with accreditation.

Elsewhere on the disc: Bravo's making-of, "Unleashing the Dragon" (15 mins.), is light on information that is useful after seeing the film and limits its interview subjects to English-speaking cast and crew; a thirteen-minute "Conversation with Michelle Yeoh" offers a lovely, firsthand reflection on her career and her decision to play the challenging part of Shu Lien; production notes; filmographies; and two theatrical trailers--the international of which, for reasons unknown, downplays Brother Chow's presence considerably and separates Zhang Ziyi's name into three words ("Zhang Zi Yi"). Meanwhile, The Ice Storm contains a not-bad six-minute featurette plus trailers for the "Fox Flix" Titus, Grand Canyon, Smilla's Sense of Snow, Inventing the Abbotts and Paradise Road.-Bill Chambers