Steinesongo Too many fans seem to be blown away

Develiker terrible... so disappointed.

PiraBit if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

stensson After an hour, you come to understand why this Juan is driving his father's car. And not until in the end, you realize why this movie is called "Lake Tahoe".The tempo is slow, showing this day in Juan's life which makes him grow up. Ordinary things happen, but you understand that they are all very important, and no Juan day will be like this in the future and change him more.Sometimes you come to think of Jacques Tati. Both from the camera work and the sterile environments, including some glimpses of life. And very important ones too. Very strange and quite see-worthy.

Michael McGonigle The film Lake Tahoe acts as a very good lesson in no-budget film-making, but it also demonstrates that if your cinematic style does not jibe with your subject matter, it doesn't matter how frugally you make the film, it simply won't work.The film begins with Juan (Diego Catano), a Mexican teenager accidentally running his car into a street post. After this, he can't get the car started so he embarks on a slow, and I mean slow visit to every auto parts shop in the nearby area. This journey is filmed in very long takes with NO camera movement (except for a handful of shots, presumably filmed on the day the filmmakers either borrowed or rented a dolly).The set-ups are maddeningly repetitious. We will usually have a long shot of a garage or auto shop from across the street. Juan will walk into the frame (usually from the right to the left) and he will either stop at the store and ask about spare parts or he will just continue through the frame and out of sight.At this point, we will usually cut to black and this black will either be a silent or it will contain some sound effect like a car crash or a dog barking, but mostly, the black frames are silent.Now, this happens again and again in Lake Tahoe and while I tried to empty my mind of ordinary film technique, I couldn't help asking myself if these cuts to black were an attempt to compress time or were a way to show that our hero has walked a long distance.Certainly, if the director didn't cut to black between shots and had simply continued with the long shots of Juan walking cut together in continuity, I would have gotten a sense of space and location, but by depriving us of this continuity of locale and not being clear about time compression, I was left wondering just what the hell was I watching.Ultimately, we learn that Juan's father has died, presumably very recently and that he, along with his mother and younger brother are trying to deal with their grief, but they don't seem to be doing it very well.Mom simply sits in the bathtub chain smoking and crying. Little brother hides in his tent in the front yard or in the closet in the room he shares with his brother. Meanwhile, Juan keeps looking for a distributor harness so he can get his car repaired, but considering he makes several visits during the course of the day to his house, he must not have crashed very far away in the first place, but then again, without any indication of time or locale, I don't know this for sure.The rest of the film follows Juan as he deals with a variety of eccentric local people, but presumably, these people are his neighbors so I am at a loss to explain why he doesn't know them.Juan meets an old man at a garage who asks him to walk his dog, named Sica, which the boy promptly loses. He meets a girl in a spare parts store who asks him to baby sit for her while she goes to a concert. He also meets another teenager named David (Juan Carlos Lara), about the same age as Juan who is a mechanical whiz and he manages to get Juan's car started again.David also invites Juan to see the film Enter The Dragon later that night when it plays in a local movie house. The upshot of the whole movie comes when Juan finally gets his damaged car home and he peels off a bumper sticker that say LAKE TAHOE on it which he was apparently given as a gift from his deceased father. Cut to the credits.Now, all of these long shots and black outs are deliberate choices made by director Fernando Eimbcke and I haven't the faintest idea what he is trying to say about grief by using this technique. Now, other directors have used long static shots followed by blackouts, most notably Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders, but here the style is just plain annoying and pretentiously quirky.If you are going to eschew conventional film-making techniques, that is perfectly fine, but have a point for doing it. What is the director trying to communicate on a formal level with this heavy, deadpan style that could not be communicated with regular style? This doesn't make Lake Tahoe stand out, it just makes it tedious.Furthermore, it seems like the actors were all told to deliberately tone down anything like emotion in their performances. The only character who comes to anything resembling life is David, the boy mechanical genius and that's because he happens to love the martial arts and is forever practicing his high kicks when he gets a chance. It's not much to build a character on, but Juan Carlos Lara is the only person in this film with a personality.By the end of the film, I was even more perplexed than I was at the start and I am still wondering what Lake Tahoe has to do with anything. As a film lover, I know that Lake Tahoe was where Michael Corleone had his brother Fredo executed in The Godfather Part II and that the entire story for the great thriller The Deep End took place there, but what this fresh water lake in Nevada has to do with anything else in this film is too obscure for me to comprehend.

Chris Knipp 'Lake Tahoe' is a work of inspired minimalism formally laid out in luminous long shots--long and thin, because of a wide aspect ratio--and cut into segments with blackouts as in early Jim Jarmusch. As in Eimbcke's 2004 first film, 'Duck Season,' the protagonist is a teenage boy, whose meandering day seems a combination of Kafkaesque delays and the mañana spirit but gradually reveals a sense of dislocation due to personal loss. Someone important has died in his family. His mother (Mariana Elizondo) is smoking and weeping in the bathtub, and later lies asleep. His little brother Joaquin (Yemil Sefani) sits in a little tent in the backyard clipping football photos and later crouches in a bedroom closet.But the morning begins for Juan ('Duck Season's' Diego Cataño) not at home but wandering on the road. He crashes the family's little old red Nissan into a tree (we just hear the crash in a blackout between static shots and then see the car and the tree). Juan is unharmed but the car won't start. A droll series of frustrations follows as he goes around on foot trying to get help at one garage after another. Juan needs a mechanic and instead people want his help and his friendship. These include an old man, a scrawny Bruce Lee fanatic who takes Juan back and forth to his Nissan on a rickety old bike, and a young woman with a small baby that stops crying and begins to coo whenever Juan holds it.Eimbcke makes good use of the stillness of his young actor and of the camera. The old garage owner, Don Heber (Hector Herrera) takes Juan for a thief and has his dog, Sika, keep guard while he searches first for the phone then for the phone book to call the police. But the phone is dead, and before long Don Heber is sitting down to a cereal breakfast with Juan. When Juan declines ("I've had breakfast") Don Heber says "Sika!" and the dog jumps up on the table and eagerly consumes Juan's bowl of cereal. Don Heber decides without seeing the car what part is broken (the distributor harness) and tells Juan to look for it in his garage, then falls asleep in a hammock.David (Juan Carlos Lara II), who's about the same age as Juan, boasts of his prowess as a mechanic, but disappears for long periods. While waiting for him in the doorway of a parts shop Juan gets to know Lucia (Daniela Valentine). He's also sidetracked to a meal at David's. While David is a fanatic of martial arts and invites Juan to a Kung Fu movie that evening, David's mother tries to convert Juan to her born-again Christianity.It's Juan's deadpan manner and the deliberately ineloquent camera that help make the various incidents droll and somehow touching. Lucia wants something of Juan too: for him to babysit her baby, Fidel (Joshua Habid) so she can go to a concert.Every shot seems to fall into the spaces defined by a quiet maze of low white buildings, graffiti and sunlight, as if all the locations in the little town were scattered in a small circle. Each image is beautifully composed and shot by cinematographer Alexis Zabe: even the shots of Juan driving the car, shot from outside the windshield, happen in lovely sun-kissed shadow. As he wanders around Juan passes by his modest family house, which is cozy and interesting inside, but full of emptiness. It's these touch-downs at "home" that show Juan's life has broken free of its moorings. It's emotional confusion as much as the day's circumstances that explains how Juan's come to be adrift in time. And yet he both retains a sense of purpose (and gets David to fix the car) and still has time to connect further with Don Heber, David, and Lucia, returning after a magical night away to fix hotcakes for Joaquin and add one significant touch from the front bumper of the now-revived car to complete Joaquin's scrapbook of their lost family member.'Lake Tahoe' is only 81 minutes long and is a marvel in its use of limited means to charm, to create a unique (yet familiar and believable) world and to develop character and touch us with few words and few gestures. Though the blackouts may remind one of Jarmusch's 'Stranger Than Paradise,' Eimbcke carries them further, making them last longer and stand for the passage of time and also enriching them by continuing the sound track over the blackness, notably and drolly the screams and screeches of Kung Fu masters as Juan watches the Shaolin classic in a darkened cinema with David. The blackouts symbolize stoppage but also show Juan's life leaping forward even as he sits stymied.Shown in February 2009 at the Walter Reade Theater of Lincoln Center, NYC, as part of the FSLC 'Film Comment' Selects series. Shown at numerous festivals with several awards and nominations.

boyan_d Does anyone know who sings "La lloroncita", the end credits' song ? I loved it but can't seem to find out who sings it…Regarding the movie, i was under the charm of its slowness, the drama increasing gradually to an issue that i definitely found worth the while. I enjoyed these long moments of wait with the characters, i loved that tale of minuscule things. What else ?… Lots of humour and weird characters accompany the boy through what can definitely be named a journey of initiation to aspects of life. Lots of emotion and empathy are present here as well.I heard the director made the movie out of his personal experience. Maybe its truth comes partly from there.