The Lake House
The Lake House brings romance back to time travel movies.
DMR and Beloved Wife (BW) give it an A-.
Woman, research shows, use more of their brains than men, they feel emotions with greater intensity and acuity, and they can articulate their emotions more clearly.
Knowing that, my focused male brain tells me that I have no business reviewing The Lake House, the romantic time-bending movie with Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves. But time travel, that’s pretty cool, and Keanu was in the Matrix trilogy and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Plus, there are plenty of memorable time travel movies and Sandra Bullock’s certainly likeable. How bad could it be?
Still, to be fair, this review will feature in part the perspective and voice of my Beloved Wife (BW) of the last nine years. No, she hasn’t seen it yet, but nine years is long enough to know how she would react to most things. Except, of course, when I’m wrong.
BW: The movie starts a little slow and the premise takes a little while to build, but Keanu and Sandra have real chemistry. You can really tell that they get along on and off screen.
Dollar Movie Review (DMR): That chemistry is vital to The Lake House, because they spend very little of the movie physically together. Sandra stars as a newly-minted doctor fresh from several years in a stunning modernist house built over a lake in Wisconsin before moving to Chicago for her residency. As it turns out, the home was built by Keanu’s dad, a famous architect played by Christopher Plummer, whose reputation was established after building the eye-catching home. Keanu grew up there and moved back in 2004. When he gets there he finds a letter in the mailbox from the previous tenant, Sandra, who asks that he forward any mail. But there’s a curiosity; he’s living there in 2004 and her letter dates from 2006.
BW: Boring! When are we going to talk about their relationship?
DMR: Go ahead.
BW: Both Keanu and Sandra are hurting and try to bury the hurt in their work. They both have lost beloved parents, and Keanu’s relationship with his father is strained. That’s because Keanu has sold himself short by becoming a developer of cheesy suburban townhomes. And in moving to Chicago for her residency, Sandra is leaving behind a relationship with a lawyer who loves her but isn’t right for her. I had a girlfriend like that who married her second choice and it was pretty loveless. That’s why I always… Oops, words count here, don’t they?
DMR: Once they get past their initial skepticism, they devise little tests like sending a scarf back in time through the magic mailbox just in time for a late season snowstorm. In so doing Keanu figures out that he can meet her in the past, which he does.
BW: But that isn’t where it goes. It’s not like Back to the Future where Marty is in the car with his mother before the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance.
DMR: That’s true, Marty kisses his mother and it’s nasty. Whereas when Sandra and Keanu kiss in his timeframe they both feel great longing.
BW: That’s really one of the cutest moments in the movie, the two of them dancing to Paul McCartney’s “This Never Happened Before.” We should get that.
DMR: It is nice. Of course their relationship has to end. Sandra realizes that she can’t keep living for the future. So she takes up with her old lawyer boyfriend Morgan who has moved to Chicago…
BW: He was nothing special…
DMR: … and leaves unanswered a stack of letters from Keanu. But circumstance make her realize that Keanu had tried to catch up to her and in so doing had died in her arms.
BW: …but she didn’t realize who he was at the time.
DMR: After two years of go-slow romance, it becomes a race against time to see if she can save him.
BW: It’s a sweet movie. I liked it a lot.
DMR: But is it too sweet? Were there enough tears?
BW: I cried enough. What did you think?
DMR: I wish there was a DeLorean in it, or a Flux Capacitor.
The Lake House is rated PG for "some language and a disturbing image."
The Dollar Movie Reviewer and beloved wife give it an A-.
The Dollar Movie Review Grading System: The Dollar Movie Review grades on a curve. Movies that make choices to be course or vulgar are downgraded a full to a half grade or more. Likewise, movies that don’t gross out or offend too much can be upgraded as ‘a thanks for trying’ attaboy. The Lake House, which is almost free of offensive language and has only implied sex, was graded straight up.
DMR and Beloved Wife (BW) give it an A-.
Woman, research shows, use more of their brains than men, they feel emotions with greater intensity and acuity, and they can articulate their emotions more clearly.
Knowing that, my focused male brain tells me that I have no business reviewing The Lake House, the romantic time-bending movie with Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves. But time travel, that’s pretty cool, and Keanu was in the Matrix trilogy and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Plus, there are plenty of memorable time travel movies and Sandra Bullock’s certainly likeable. How bad could it be?
Still, to be fair, this review will feature in part the perspective and voice of my Beloved Wife (BW) of the last nine years. No, she hasn’t seen it yet, but nine years is long enough to know how she would react to most things. Except, of course, when I’m wrong.
BW: The movie starts a little slow and the premise takes a little while to build, but Keanu and Sandra have real chemistry. You can really tell that they get along on and off screen.
Dollar Movie Review (DMR): That chemistry is vital to The Lake House, because they spend very little of the movie physically together. Sandra stars as a newly-minted doctor fresh from several years in a stunning modernist house built over a lake in Wisconsin before moving to Chicago for her residency. As it turns out, the home was built by Keanu’s dad, a famous architect played by Christopher Plummer, whose reputation was established after building the eye-catching home. Keanu grew up there and moved back in 2004. When he gets there he finds a letter in the mailbox from the previous tenant, Sandra, who asks that he forward any mail. But there’s a curiosity; he’s living there in 2004 and her letter dates from 2006.
BW: Boring! When are we going to talk about their relationship?
DMR: Go ahead.
BW: Both Keanu and Sandra are hurting and try to bury the hurt in their work. They both have lost beloved parents, and Keanu’s relationship with his father is strained. That’s because Keanu has sold himself short by becoming a developer of cheesy suburban townhomes. And in moving to Chicago for her residency, Sandra is leaving behind a relationship with a lawyer who loves her but isn’t right for her. I had a girlfriend like that who married her second choice and it was pretty loveless. That’s why I always… Oops, words count here, don’t they?
DMR: Once they get past their initial skepticism, they devise little tests like sending a scarf back in time through the magic mailbox just in time for a late season snowstorm. In so doing Keanu figures out that he can meet her in the past, which he does.
BW: But that isn’t where it goes. It’s not like Back to the Future where Marty is in the car with his mother before the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance.
DMR: That’s true, Marty kisses his mother and it’s nasty. Whereas when Sandra and Keanu kiss in his timeframe they both feel great longing.
BW: That’s really one of the cutest moments in the movie, the two of them dancing to Paul McCartney’s “This Never Happened Before.” We should get that.
DMR: It is nice. Of course their relationship has to end. Sandra realizes that she can’t keep living for the future. So she takes up with her old lawyer boyfriend Morgan who has moved to Chicago…
BW: He was nothing special…
DMR: … and leaves unanswered a stack of letters from Keanu. But circumstance make her realize that Keanu had tried to catch up to her and in so doing had died in her arms.
BW: …but she didn’t realize who he was at the time.
DMR: After two years of go-slow romance, it becomes a race against time to see if she can save him.
BW: It’s a sweet movie. I liked it a lot.
DMR: But is it too sweet? Were there enough tears?
BW: I cried enough. What did you think?
DMR: I wish there was a DeLorean in it, or a Flux Capacitor.
The Lake House is rated PG for "some language and a disturbing image."
The Dollar Movie Reviewer and beloved wife give it an A-.
The Dollar Movie Review Grading System: The Dollar Movie Review grades on a curve. Movies that make choices to be course or vulgar are downgraded a full to a half grade or more. Likewise, movies that don’t gross out or offend too much can be upgraded as ‘a thanks for trying’ attaboy. The Lake House, which is almost free of offensive language and has only implied sex, was graded straight up.
No comments:
Post a Comment