The Lake House (2006)
#27 in my 2007 movie challenge would have been Batman Begins, but I couldn’t stay awake for the ending. (I was more impressed when I saw it in theater.) So #27 is The Lake House, or “Magic Mailbox,” as NYT film critic A.O. Scott quipped. Ebert and Roeper liked it when it came out last year, so in spite of the mixed reviews of others (unlike the guy in Metropolitan–which is an adaptation of Austen’s Mansfield Park; I didn’t know that!–I read reviews and read books/see movies) we decided to give it a try. I’m glad I did. This was a sweet romance. Bullock and Reeves inhabit the titular house at different points, but they share a dog and a mailbox that defy the space/time continuum. I was surprised at how decent this was, and that it didn’t suck. While those sound like faint praise, they’re not. There was a nice theme about Jane Austen’s Persuasion running through it, and while they didn’t get the parallel exactly right, it was pretty close. This was a gentle, heartening movie that was good at the end of a frazzling day. The weird things that bothered me? The actor who played Reeves’s brother, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, had a very strange hairline. And Keanu Reeves in a turtleneck sweater, or perhaps any man, for that matter? No. Just, no.