The Lake House review
Jul. 6th, 2006 09:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearDinner at the Rainforest Cafe with David was a good start to the evening - though the prices were higher and the food not as good as I'd remembered.
The Apollo West End cinema was quite a surprise - it looks like an office building from the outside and has the swankiest toilets I've seen in a long time (marble effect counters and a trough of fake ice instead of sinks).
The seats in the auditorium were very comfy as well - big armchair-types that tilted backwards slightly.
I wasn't sure what to expect from this film, but it was largely very good. It's one of those where very little happens, but it manages to draw you in anyway. The premise and style were both interesting and engaging, and I thought both main actors did a good job with the role they were given. There didn't need to be an explanation of how their letters reached each other across time, and I'm glad there was no attempt to explain it.
The problem was the ending. The film clearly telegraphed a sad ending from early on, and I thought it was going to be another City of Angels or Affair to Remember, with the protagonists torn apart just as they were about to get together. Now, endings like that really annoy me because they always seem so pointless, so I was steeling myself for the tragedy long before it happened. Then, the film did an about face and tacked a happy ending on instead. Now, ordinarily, this would be a good thing - but with this film, it really annoyed me, because the time aspect of the story had been almost completely internally consistent up until the denouement. While the tragic ending would have been sad, it would have made sense for the story and everything that happened would have fitted neatly together. The happy ending had the woman in the future averting the tragedy in the past, and thus securing a happy ending, but also completely destroying the consistency of the plot, because if the tragedy hadn't happened, the rest of the plot would never have happened either, in which case she would never have been in the position to avert the tragedy later on.
So, a good film, ruined by a stupid ending, made all the more annoying because it teased me with a happy ending that turned out to be just as unsatisfactory as the sad one would have been.
Hey ho.
Pirates of the Caribbean 2 on Friday - another disappointment in the making? Or will just the presence of Johnny Depp as Captain Jack, and Keira Knightley in priate gear be enough to make me happy?
The Apollo West End cinema was quite a surprise - it looks like an office building from the outside and has the swankiest toilets I've seen in a long time (marble effect counters and a trough of fake ice instead of sinks).
The seats in the auditorium were very comfy as well - big armchair-types that tilted backwards slightly.
I wasn't sure what to expect from this film, but it was largely very good. It's one of those where very little happens, but it manages to draw you in anyway. The premise and style were both interesting and engaging, and I thought both main actors did a good job with the role they were given. There didn't need to be an explanation of how their letters reached each other across time, and I'm glad there was no attempt to explain it.
The problem was the ending. The film clearly telegraphed a sad ending from early on, and I thought it was going to be another City of Angels or Affair to Remember, with the protagonists torn apart just as they were about to get together. Now, endings like that really annoy me because they always seem so pointless, so I was steeling myself for the tragedy long before it happened. Then, the film did an about face and tacked a happy ending on instead. Now, ordinarily, this would be a good thing - but with this film, it really annoyed me, because the time aspect of the story had been almost completely internally consistent up until the denouement. While the tragic ending would have been sad, it would have made sense for the story and everything that happened would have fitted neatly together. The happy ending had the woman in the future averting the tragedy in the past, and thus securing a happy ending, but also completely destroying the consistency of the plot, because if the tragedy hadn't happened, the rest of the plot would never have happened either, in which case she would never have been in the position to avert the tragedy later on.
So, a good film, ruined by a stupid ending, made all the more annoying because it teased me with a happy ending that turned out to be just as unsatisfactory as the sad one would have been.
Hey ho.
Pirates of the Caribbean 2 on Friday - another disappointment in the making? Or will just the presence of Johnny Depp as Captain Jack, and Keira Knightley in priate gear be enough to make me happy?
