Written by: Susan Granger
www.susangranger.com

Alas! I had such high hopes for "The Lake House." The trailer was intriguing, and the pairing of Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves evoked memories of them coping with that bomb-on-a-bus in "Speed." Now it's a time-bomb.

She's Kate Forester, a lonely, workaholic doctor who's leaving the suburban lake house she loves for a position in a downtown Chicago hospital. As she drives off with her dog she leaves a note in the mailbox, apologizing for the paw prints on the deck and asking the next tenant to forward her mail. But Alex Wyler, the architect who moves in, finds no paw prints - until a stray mutt scampers in just as he's painting the wood on the deck. It turns out that Kate is living in 2006, while Alex is in 2004, though they can send each other letters via the magical mailbox. Predictably, inevitably, they fall in love - but can they ever find each other "Somewhere in Time" (evoking a far better movie)?

Based on a South Korean film called "Il Mare," it's a time-tripping, metaphysical fantasy which defies even sci-fi logic. While one can suspend disbelief for the romantic yearning of "Ghost" or the nostalgia of "The Notebook," even the urgency of the ham-radio operators in "Frequency," screenwriter David Auburn's lugubrious, cliché-laden script never engages emotionally and it's not helped by Argentinean Alejandro Agresti‘s heavy-handed direction.

The thinly sketched supporting characters are wretchedly superficial: Christopher Plummer is shamelessly loathsome as Alex's famous but dismissive architect father who rambles on about why the structures in Barcelona differ from the buildings in Tokyo, Shoreh Agdashloo ("The House of Sand and Fog") is Kate's concerned confidant and Dylan Walsh ("Nip/Tuck") is earnest as Kate's patient suitor.

On the Granger Movie Gauge, "The Lake House" collapses with an improbable 4. Time warps this time ‘round.