the lake house

Agh, busy day today so just time for a bit of cut and pasting; Peter Bradshaw's film reviews in the Guardian are a pretty reliable good read, but his review of The Lake House, which sounds like a particularly inane time-slip love story, wherein Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock live in the same house two years apart but manage to communicate by writing grafitti on the walls for each other to find in the future, is particularly good. It doesn't sound like a film that would hold my attention and it certainly didn't hold Bradshaw's. Before long his mind is wandering....

"There's only one problem with all this lovelorn loveliness, and it's not the plot-holes. Philistine non-romantics, male and female, will see it right away and be obsessed with it all the way through the movie. If you were corresponding with some sweet soul two years in the future, you might well find yourself writing: "Mmm. Yeah, Jane Austen's Persuasion is your favourite book? Oh wow; gosh you've had an unhappy love life, me too; yikes, your relationship with your dad was tough, yeah, me too, hey that's sad, I wish I was there to comfort you properly, NOW TELL ME WHAT THE LOTTERY NUMBERS ARE GOING TO BE. I'll hit the jackpot and leave half the loot in a railway luggage locker for you to pick up in two years' time! Trust me!"

As Keanu and Sandra simpered away to themselves up on the screen in their little 84 Charing Cross Road nightmare, the alternative version unspooled inside my head. Keanu scores a double-rollover lottery payout with Sandra's six numbers and immediately heads off to Acapulco with his secretary, forgetting all about Sandra. She opens up the luggage locker at Grand Central Station, wherein she finds nada. Furiously, Sandra prevails upon an ex-boyfriend, a theoretical physics major, to design and build for her a time machine. It is in this remarkable device, on the top of which helicopter rotors are attached, that she lands on the beach where Keanu is canoodling. She pulls a gun and forestalls Keanu's excuses by busting a cap in his duplicitous ass. Credits. Sadly, all we get in this existing version is slush. What it needed was a bit of realism."

Full review here, but you've just read the best bit.