Click on the Lake House

Yesterday was an awesome, feel-good day. Somehow, after watching one perfectly interesting comedy with a unique premise, and a romantic love story I’ve anticipated since weeks ago, I left the cinema feeling utterly complacent, a sense of carefree, and a heightened appreciation of every single thing happening around me. Oddly, I felt relieved, too.

Most of the people we called to join both Andy and I were sick, busy, tired, or is in a dire state financially, so we left for Pyramid at nearly 7pm from Andy’s house and sped straight to our destination. Traffic jams nearly stalled us, especially the roads leading to Pyramid, so I took a longer, workaround and managed to reach the cinema 10 minutes late from Click’s showtime of 7.20pm.

We still managed to buy the tickets, but being the greedy capitalist TGV Pyramid is, Friday nights and weekends see an increase in price up to RM11 and we couldn’t even use our student cards. Bloody lying website of theirs. Irony is when we have no other choice but had to buy the tickets there anyway, since GSC Summit doesn’t screen The Lake House, at all.

So we bought two tickets each to Click and The Lake House, running consecutively.

The movie mini-marathon ended at nearly 11pm, and I picked up Kai Tzin from his house and Esther at USJ 2 and drove aimlessly around SS14 before settling at SS15’s Malaysian Chef. Funnily enough, Esther’s colleague who dropped her off at USJ 2 was at the same restaurant as us as well. Reached home at 1.30am.

Click wasn’t as funny as I thought it would be, with blatantly ridiculous (but still hilarious) jokes in some scenes as almost all Adam Sandler’s movies are, but hey, for a movie that teaches you to value your family and spending enough time for them, the idea actually works, even though this particular lesson ingrained in movies has been done to death, whether through some slapstick shows or tear-inducing tragedies. Click falls in between these two categories, leaning onto the former.

I’d happily give Click a 3.7/5 rating, but expect not to laugh for the entire 100 minutes, since from midway till the end, it gets a little serious, and a little touching.

I’ll have you know that I have been waiting to watch The Lake House since before my exams, so naturally, waiting incurs more expectations and I’m happy that it’s worth the wait, and as far as expectations go, it fulfilled every single bit.

Since we had a 10 minutes interval between Click and The Lake House (at 9.10pm), we went for a toilet break and immediately jumped into the next hall.

In The Lake House, we see two parellel stories of Alex (Keanu Reeves) and Kate (Sandra Bullock) running concurrently, and how they intersect one another. The former lives in 2004, while the latter in 2006, and as far-fetched as the story sounds, if you realise that you’re actually watching a movie and not a documentary or autobiography of a couple, you won’t be making any complains.

It might be a little too slow-paced for some, but then again, you’re watching a romance and not Mission Impossible III - if you want to watch the biggest yawn of the millennium, remember Puteri Gunung Ledang. The pace was fine for me, it weaved and drifted from one scene to the next, and in the end all that was left was a beautifully, poignantly crafted love story, movie, and adaptation (from the Korean movie Siworae).

And for a romance settled in an alternate realm, it’s safe to ignore certain discrepancies that sharp-eyed viewers might notice, such as how planting a tree makes it grow thrice its height in two short years. The constant time-shifting had me confused at certain points, but nothing is clearer than the fact that Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves are hot -- well-chosen casts.

I loved the gorgeous surroundings, the non-clich?d dialogues, and my newly-found tiny knowledge of architecture (ironically, both Click and The Lake House have architects as their main characters); and how I know now it isn’t easy to construct a particular building, as aspects such as light, and location of other buildings are taken into consideration. I loved the sub-plots, and the minor characters like Dr. Anna Klyczynski. I loved the camera pannings, the soundtrack. I loved the movie in its entirety.

If you’re a hopeless romantic like yours truly, your biggest regret of your life would be missing out on this movie. It gets a 4.8/5 from me. And like the movie’s message suggested, it was well-worth the 2-week wait.