Reveiw by Mark Mallon

I have never seen Frequency, in which a fire fighter and his dead father communicate over the radio and change the course of time. It's a real shame, too, the time-travel mechanics would have been good for comparison. In The Lakehouse, they used a mailbox. Whenever you discuss a movie with a time-travel element, you have to at least try to explore that element, how it works, what the rules are, etc. I'll try to do that quickly, so I can move on to actually reviewing the movie.

I guess from what I've heard, in Frequency, they made some change for the better, and it changed a few other things as well. So I'm guessing the mechanics were similar to those used in the Butterfly Effect: Every moment changed in the past precipitated every subsequent moment, and the present to which Ashton Kutcher returned was entirely different. It was a very cerebral movie.

The Lakehouse was not. The writers adopted a theory similar to Terminator 2's "No Fate". What that means is that they didn't worry about it. They simply had two people interact over a space in time, and didn't bother rewriting history. There were of course changes made, but the mechanics of a single tree's growth would take so much time to explain that I'm certain no one would care about the rest of the movie anymore. If you'd like me to give you my explanation, I encourage you to email me at wordsmith@magi-creations.com (use hotmail, if possible, it's proven itself reliable). I would love to share a dialogue about it.

It's really rare to see a movie in which the medium for the characters is letters. It's an element that's been lost to old war movies and Jane Austen novels. If you're always thinking about it, like me, you can see in this movie why they are lost--they aren't bad, they just lack the speed necessary to keep the story moving forward, and the characters respond to the paper, not to each other. They've compensated for this with split screen, and some artistic license when it came to the interaction of these two people. This gives it a nice pace, so that when they introduce their twists, you're still interested enough to care.

I especially liked the fact that this movie didn't involve consultation with some know-it-all expert, who could explain everything well beyond what anybody should know. It would have been so tacky for them to have said, "This happened once before," or something equally clichéd. No, these characters stumbled over the time-barrier, not concerned with causality or paradox. It's a shame they didn't think to cash in, because the 2004 NHL playoffs would have been a great way to do it.

It was pathetically tragic to see Keanu interacting with past-version of Sandra without being able to tell her anything, knowing future-Sandra was in love with him. A little pathetic hero in a love story can go a long way, n'est ce pas? (Hell, Hugh Grant has proven that time and again.)

The verdict should be clear by now: I liked this movie. If it had tried to explain itself any more, it would have fallen short, but since it didn't, it was a great story of how two people with no idea how something works just accept that it does, and you have a great date movie