REVIEW: Lake Tahoe (2008)

I’ve long championed indie undertakings with subtler, more measured, true-to-life progressions, but there’s slow and then there’s glacial. Unfortunately, Fernando Eimbcke’s sophomore effort, Lake Tahoe, a dry attempt at slice-of-life cinema, belongs to the latter. The narrative follows Juan (Diego Cataño), a teenage boy who crashes his car into a telephone pole at the onset of the film and spends the rest of the movie intermingling with eccentric locals — a feisty old mechanic (Hector Herrera), a young mother preoccupied with punk-rock (Daniela Valentine), and a kung-fu obsessed young man (Juan Carlos Lara). With a lackluster plot, tedious pacing, and a tacked-on ending to justify the title, Lake Tahoe never gains momentum or manages to tackle the tragedy that has left Juan’s family in shambles. At one point while watching Juan’s indifferent reaction to his martial arts moves, the kung-fu fanatic repeats over and over “We need some emotional content!” My thoughts exactly. (Liesl Swanbeck)

Opens at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas on Friday, July 24th