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Forget what a fun couple Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves were in Speed. In this slow and heavy kickoff to the summer romance season, they play the mopiest lovers to hit the big screen since Tony and Maria channeled Romeo and Juliet on the fire escapes of New York City. Bullock is rather good as a lonely Chicago physician, Reeves his vaporous self as an unfulfilled architect with oedipal issues. The two share a lovely modernist lakeside house and a perfect storm of love letters, except he's in 2004 and she's in 2006 — a predicament that creates all manner of difficulties, not the least of which is the groan and creak of surplus contrivance as the plot strains to bring an epistolary love affair from the twilight zone into the corporeal realm. Based on the 2000 South Korean sci-fi romance Il Mare and flimsily directed by Argentine filmmaker Alejandro Agresti, The Lake House may be the most convoluted film ever made about people in glass houses.

Now showing at four or five local theaters