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Capone wishes LEAP YEAR somehow involved jumping off a cliff!!!
Hey, everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
The only thing more frustrating than a shitty romantic comedy is one that actually features actors that I genuinely like in just about everything else they do. Which immediately begs the questions, what the hell are Amy Adams (JUNEBUG, SUNSHINE CLEANING, JULIE & JULIA, ENCHANTED, MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAY, CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR, DOUBT) and Matthew Goode (THE LOOKOUT, WATCHMEN, BRIDESHEAD REVISTED, A SINGLE MAN) doing in this dumpy, ill-paced, hemorrhoid of a movie called LEAP YEAR? If your only ambition for your child's life is to write crap rom-coms, take them to this paint-by-numbers example of one. Is our heroine's entire life summed up in a nice little speech at some point in the first 10 minutes of the movies? You bet. Anna is an apartment stager, who arranges hard-to-sell condos and homes for real estate agents' open houses. She's the best at what she does because she's very organized and segmented in both her work and her life. Her longtime boyfriend is Jeremy, a doctor whose greatest eccentricity is receiving surgery photos on his cell phone while he and Anna eat dinner. Yum.
Anna thinks she and Jeremy have been dating long enough to get married, and when the moment looks as though it is approaching, he gives her diamond earrings instead of a ring. We learn in the single scene featuring her father (John Lithgow, literally brought in for one scene to provide exposition and then never heard from again) that it is a family tradition that the women can ask their husbands to marry them only on Feb. 29 of a leap year...thus the title... LEAP YEAR...never mind. It just so happens that the birthplace of this legend is Ireland, which is where Jeremy is going to a "medical conference" in Dublin. So Anna decides to surprise him and pop the question.
Naturally, her travels are waylaid and she ends up far away from Dublin and must hire a driver (Goode) to take her to Dublin. In a surprise twist of events that I'll admit I didn't see coming, their car is blown up by a long-dormant roadside bomb left over from "the troubles" and the movie ends with their bloodied body parts mixed in with the wreckage of the car. Oh, no wait. That was the movie that I came up with in my head as I endured what has the be scene-for-scene the single most predictable movie ever made. Contrivance after contrivance practically fall over each other lining up to be the next obvious obstacle or romantic moment between Adams and Goode. Adams wears the wrong shoes for all the walking she must do, they get rained on, she gets muddy, they are forced to share a room, he's a great cook, she's pretty, he wears bulky cozy sweaters, the list goes on and on and on. In fact, if you've seen the trailer for LEAP YEAR, the only part of the film that will be any surprise to you is the last 10 minutes or so, and even that doesn't require a great imagination to figure out where things end up.
The fact that this film was made by two strong actors who actually rise above this pedestrian material makes it all the more frustrating. And in the hands of a capable director like Anand Tucker (HILARY AND JACKIE, SHOPGIRL, and one of the three films in the upcoming RED RIDING trilogy), the film certainly looks presentable and as green and stony as the Irish countryside is known to be on occasion. But dressing this pig up like the Queen of England doesn't make it smell any better. And yes there is a moment of great public embarrassment for both of our heroes, just like every other goddamn romantic comedy every fucking made. Watching LEAP YEAR kinda-sorta reminded me of seeing the dead husks of two people I used to really like do something really awful with the last minute of their lives (sorry, that metaphor got lost in a sea of my rage). Please don't encourage this kind of behavior in actors who can actually act and excel at creating interesting characters most days of the week. LEAP YEAR is junk, and if you go and see it you'll shorten your life span by about 95 minutes; you'll actually feel the lifeforce exiting your body. Just don't.
-- Capone
therealcapone@aintitcoolmail.com
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...so although he was born in 1972 he's only eight.They should make a movie about him. That would be awesome.
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ya beat me.
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...I need an editor.
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"Naturally, her travels are waylaid and she ends up far away from Dublin and must hire a driver (Goode) to take her to Dublin."
Unless she rowed to Ireland she'll have had to arrive at an airport. Ireland's a small country. Getting from one of the other airports to Dublin takes about 3 hours max. FAIL! -
...dramatic opportunities with an eight year old physical therapist born in 1972.This movie would rock.
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Jan 08, 2010 9:44:51 AM CST
CAPONE TAKES ONE FOR THE TEAM!
by isleptwithkathybatesandallthatigotwasthi
Even Harry isn't THIS dedicated to the wbsite. Way to go Cap!
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Jan 08, 2010 9:46:21 AM CST
...oh, wait...my friend is nine. Never mind, that would suck.
by flickapoo
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So is the movie, in fact, set in the future?
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Believe it or not but I happen to be both Irish and born on the 29th of Feb ( 1980 ) .
Will I be seeing this film ? Will I fuck !
If they cant appeal to a leap year born Paddy what chance do they have with anybody else .
Mind you . I am a straight man with a decent taste in films , so that could be the problem right there
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I thought it was world wide. Huh.
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It's not exactly a trip to Mordor or anything, but it's at least possible an American tourist (single girl on her own) would find it next to impossible to navigate the backward Irish transport system. Bus and rail can be oh so complicated.
Doesn't explain why she couldn't hop on an internal flight from Shannon to Dublin though, even if it did cost about as much as the New York->Dublin ticket. -
My girlfriend proposed to me back in the day. I turned her down, but she did it. It happens a lot actually. I love Amy Adams, she is one of my favorite actresses, but this movie looks damn awful. Glad to hear she rises above it but I ain't partaking.
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V'Shael, have you actually heard of this "women only propose on Feb 29th" thing before? I assumed it was something they made up for the movie and that it was just a tradition in Amy Adams' (fictional) family.
I once dated a girl who was very superstitious/would follow this kind of tradition. She was also of mostly Irish descent and pretty well versed in Irish lore, and her threats to propose to me if I didn't never seemed dependent upon leap years. -
Kind of hard not to, as it usually features as a fluff piece in news papers and news programs every single time.
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Actually those of us (I am one of them) who were born on 2/29/72 are in fact now 9 years old. My son, who was born in 1999 likes to remind me at every opportunity that he is older than I.
Too bad that the movie does not do this magical day justice. I was afraid of that... -
...37 year olds...must have something to do with how old we were when STAR WARS came out.
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Adam Scott is great.
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that John Lithgow strips naked and cuts Amy Adams up in a bathtub? Why even have him in there, then?
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I never said she landed at an airport in Ireland. She actually lands in Wales, has to take a ferry to Ireland and then meets up with a driver. Now you know why I didn't go into all that detail--it's fucking boring, just like this movie.
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Must be the Pembroke->Rosslare ferry, because the only other Ferry from Wales->Ireland actually lands in Dublin.
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Jan 08, 2010 10:06:27 PM CST
Ah, movies released the first weekend of January...
by nasty in the pasty
...I feel so sorry for them.
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made me laugh out loud when you said the shit about the roadside bomb. Good stuff.
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