Mailboxes Etc.

So, I saw The Lake House last week, and it got me thinking about corresponding with people you've never met. Personally, stuff like that creeps me out and I avoid it at all costs. But some people really do e-mail people they don't know and create relationships. In this movie, however, instead of the magical world of e-mail and chat rooms as the source of correspondence, it's a magical mailbox and the space-time continuum!

In the movie, Sandra Bullock is in the year 2006, and Keanu Reeves is in 2004. They both live at the same lake house in their separate years, and one day they realize that they can pass letters through a magical mailbox at the lake house and write to each other, while they're each in different years. Of course, as in all movies when something magical happens, they go through about 3 seconds of shock and then they're like, "Well, okay, let's become pen pals across time." So they fall in love through the letters. Now, first of all, if I saw the flag on my mailbox magically pop up and then found a letter in it that wasn't there a second ago when I was standing right next to the mailbox, I would probably run screaming into the house and never come out. Second of all, It's dangerous to fall in love with someone you've never met. You don't know who they are! A 30 year old woman could fall in love with a 10 year old boy or an 80 year old man. People can act differently in letters than they do in real life. Of course, if it's a 10 year old, the misspellings might be a clue. But so many people purposely misspell things that you can't even tell a person's age by their messages. Maybe this movie is sending a bad message to all the 13 year old girls who flock to the theaters to see deep-voiced, intense-looking, eerily serious Keanu Reeves. Maybe they will seek out their equivalent of The Lake House by looking for their own Keanu in a chat room. And what happens then? I don't even want to imagine it. It's like in You've Got Mail and Shop Around the Corner (which are the same movie, except about sixty years apart. In fact, The Lake House is really a more dramatic version of both movies, with the extra element of the space-time continuum.). I don't care if the guy is Keanu Reeves, Tom Hanks, or Jimmy Stewart. I wouldn't know who he was, and I'm not taking any chances. I know I sound like an after-school program here, but it's not always going to be Keanu Reeves on the other side of that mailbox, girls. Who knows? Maybe I'm not really who I say I am. I could be a balding middle-aged man. But I'm not.

Anyway, I really liked The Lake House, so I really shouldn't be complaining too much. I thought it was a clever idea, but all that time business made my brain hurt slightly. I'll survive, though. Well, I'm off to find problems with more movies that I liked. I'm saving the world!