The Lake House

Laugh if you want, I like The Lake House. It's a sweet movie, sort of classic in it's way. Not trying to be overly different, not crude or weird. Not dumb or silly. It's a...good movie. Totally a chick flick and I like it. It does amuse me to see how architects are portrayed in that - and other - movies though. It's almost right, but just not quite. There's are drawings in the architect's office, nice, elegantly framed stuff on the walls, but they never indicate the amount of paper that exists. Sketches that look like scribbles, mistakes on the floor or corner of the desk, files, rolls of drawings all over. I've never been in an office without them lying on desks and tables and on the floor. And I realize that drafting tables are much more romantic than computers, but almost no one uses them anymore. Then there's the actual working. Simon (Christopher Plummer) could not possibly hope to get a usable sketch holding his pencil like that on a piece of paper that isn't even taped down, and why is it folded in half if he's tracing? When Alex (Keanu Reeves) is drawing the lake house, one can not draw, nor sketch from that position and hope to get a straight line, let alone any sort of perspective right. AND we do not get to go to the construction site nearly as much as Alex does. He's there like a general contractor would be there, not like an architect would be there, which is to say, every day as opposed to once a week.
And another thing, though this isn't really an architect comment, there is NO way a tree would grow that much in two years. I'm sorry. I get the necessity of it, and the dramatic effect, but trees do not go from saplings to thirty feet tall in only twenty-four months. They just don't.
I don't mean to pick the movie apart. (Tarzan gets after me frequently for being too literal.) I really do like it. It is romantic and mushy and cute and fun. I get that's it's artistic license and only a movie. I'm sure the doctors and nurses out there have a lot to say about ER or House but it amuses me to see what the layman thinks about the profession I know.

This is me, glad to be out of that crazy life.