The Lakehouse

I was thinking of going to the Camden market today, but the weather looks pretty lousy so I think I'll just go to the library, do some shopping around here, and then read (the difficult bit is to not buy snacks to eat while I'm reading). But since the library only opens in an hour, and I don't have anything to do until then, I thought I'd write about the movie I saw yesterday, The Lakehouse.

It was really good, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I know a lot of people have criticized it for being unrealistic, but that's just silly - once you accept the basic premise, that the letterbox somehow causes their letters to travel through time, the rest is internally consistent which is what counts. (Although I did wonder if the rest of their post also ends up in the wrong year! :-) Having said that, though, there are a couple of things that bothered me (you might not want to read further if you haven't watched the movie yet).

Some of it's just the normal time-paradox stuff - if there wasn't a tree by her apartment, and then he planted one for her in the past, would it really just appear suddenly in the future? Wouldn't it then have been there all along? Like when he had that conversation with her on her birthday - that she remembered, and those memories didn't just suddenly come into being. And when she prevented him from crossing the road that Valentine's day - what had he then been doing for the last 2 years? Was the drawing of the lakehouse still on the wall? Did he suddenly spring into existence like the tree, and have to explain to his brother why he wasn't dead, or was he just not dead all along, like the memories of the conversation?

Not that any of that weakens the movie - any movie that has information travelling between the past and the future is going to paradoxes to deal with, and there is no logical way for it to work.

But there are two bits in the movie that I just don't get. How did she know that he'd be at the lakehouse to get her message about not coming to see her on Valentine's day? And isn't a pretty big coincidence that he was there? I guess that's just a case of a fortuitous coincidence, which tends to happen a lot in movies.

The thing with the book, though, I don't get at all. It seems as though there was more to it, which they then cut out and the bit that was left didn't make much sense. Obviously I get it that she left the book behind, he went to fetch it for her, and said he'd give it to her one day. So far so good. But how did she discover it under the floorboards? It looked as though she was stamping around trying to find a loose floorboard, but then she looked surprised when she found it and found the book. And how did the book even get there, anyway? I'm pretty sure that was supposed to be in her apartment, which wasn't built yet in his time... If she'd been looking around the lakehouse and found it, it would have made a bit more sense.

There are some more issues over at imdb - some of them are valid (how *did* the tree grow so big in 2 years? And actually yes, I wondered at the time where the attic was).

But it was a good movie, and I enjoyed it overall. Same as I picked Troy to bits, because it gets so many things wrong, but have watched it a bunch of times and enjoyed it every time (although that might have something to do with Brad Pitt, Eric Bana and Orlando Bloom....). I plan to go watch Superman Returns, next Sunday - not only is it my birthday, they're showing it at the imax (with super 3D scenes! yay!). So hopefully that'll be good - the original Superman movies were fine at the time, but Superman was fairly 2 dimensional (and now he'll be 3D! although that's not quite what I meant ;); watching Smallville, Clark is really a complex, normal person, with real feelings and conflicts and all, and to watch a movie where he goes back to being simple would be quite disappointing. But it should be interesting regardless.