Oh, It’s Tuesday: Wow, “Leap Year” is Bad
Jan12

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Oh, It’s Tuesday: Wow, “Leap Year” is Bad

LeapYearPosterSo Leap Year looked bad in the commercials, but I went to see it at the Mommy & Me movie at Americana yesterday and it was even worse than I expected it to be. All American women movie rom-com cliches, but this time exported to the Irish countryside.

First of all the Amy Adams character is a successful Type-A control freak. I find it interesting that so many rom-coms revolve around successful women, who all seem to have the exact same personality. I also think it says something about our country that successful business women are often depicted as uptight and lovelorn, as opposed to awesome and bad-ass. So we start with that annoying cliche, then…

Of course, she and Matthew Goode (seriously doing a 180 from his usual uptight rich boy roles by growing a scraggly beard which I liked) hate each other on first sight, b/c she’s all uptight and he’s all laidback and good-to-the-bone as he tries to keep his country pub/restaurant/hotel afloat.

He basically spends the whole film putting her down, which I guess is supposed to be sexy, but really isn’t. Then we’re supposed to cheer for her to get together with him as opposed to the perfectly nice cardiologist that she’s spent four years with.

The film sent a lot of weird messages 1) Passion equals argument — I didn’t agree. 2) If a guy doesn’t ask you to marry him after four years, then he’s somehow lacking. Now see, usually I would agree with this one, but the original couple had never talked about marriage. I wasn’t quite sure why she hadn’t brought it up before. Did she expect him to read her mind about what the timeline of their relationship would be? It seemed to me that they had communication issues more than cold feet issues. 3) You can truly fall in love in two days — more like a few hours, b/c the leads spent most of their time together arguing.

This all got me to wondering why film companies buy certain scripts and who they think is watching their films. It’s like When Harry Met Sallly did well, and now all rom-coms have to revolve around that Meg Ryan character — who was cool in that film, but I’m sick to death of her now. Can’t we introduce a new template for the rom-com heroine? OR if we’re going to spend the rest of our lives with new versions of that particular rom-com, can’t we at least see characters falling in love in a practical way? To this day, I love that most of WHMS was taken up by the two characters’ friendship. That was awesome. More mature relationships based on two people actually liking each other and getting along please!

Anywho, I’m calling this my first terrible movie of 2010. Hopefully, I won’t have endure too many more.