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Reviews
The Lake House (2006)
Did the dog Jack travel in the mailbox too?
This is a fantasy, and if you don't try to have all of it make sense, you can enjoy the movie. Lots of plot holes in the story... more about this later... but it was fun to watch Sandra, Keanu, and Christopher Plummer do their thing very well. Suspend your disbelief and go with it.
A trend in the IMDb ratings seems to be that people who watched it soon after its theatrical release really liked the movie. Those who have watched it later seem to really not like it. With the DVD release in the US in the last week of September 2006, maybe the reviews will become more balanced. I will definitely put the Korean Il Mare on the list of movies to rent.
If you allow for the mysterious conduit between the two years to be the mailbox, then the most glaring hole in the plot is what happens to their dog Jackie. Does the dog time travel in the mailbox, but not for the exactly two years the the letters time travel? Or does he just hang out in the forest? Why doesn't Alex come back to the house to look for Jack? If Alex has already rented the lake house to Kate, where he lost his dog, why doesn't he come out to the house to look for his pooch? On another level, how does a busy doctor doing 30 hour shifts get the time to travel way out to the lake house - a long drive - so frequently to carry on an inter-temporal correspondence with such frequency approaching Instant Messaging in its dialog-like banter? It's obvious that the writers haven't written a real handwritten love letter in long time, if ever. Clearly, artistic license, to keep the plot moving.
Hangmen (1987)
Amateurish
WAIT until you've watched most of all other films ever released, wait a year, then watch this when you're ready for something with such low production values it that will not challenge anybody's imagination.
I agree that whoever rated this movie as a ten-star production has to be doing it to skew the data. Anything above 8 would be odd.
Nice to see the very young Sandy Bullock in her poofy hair for the short time she was featured, though she overdid the New Yorker accent but other times her southern (Virginia & NC) accent did sneak through. Ancient history for this accomplished actress who has grown so much since this film.
The DVD I rented had two bonus features, a mini-bio section that only featured Sandra's bio - taken verbatim from IMDb. It also had a Trivia Quiz as a bonus - 3 questions. Hope you get them all right!