June 18, 2012

Movie Review: Leap Year

I swear I won't only be reviewing chick flicks.

That being said, I enjoyed Leap Year.  I was suspicious during the first half of the movie that it would tell us it's OK to cheat on your fiance if you happen to find your a sexy Irish man who makes fun of you in a cute way.  But it didn't!  That being said, please please please take more than three days to decided you want to marry someone.  Let's continue.

The movie takes just a step or two outside of realism and it benefits from that immensely.  There are doses of quality comedy doled out from small supporting roles, which is a tribute to the writer's skill and the director's ability to pull it off.  Amy Adam's and Matthew Goode's characters are funny because of how unaware of their flaws they are; the rest seem to be small teams of stand-up comics that follow them around and act as a foil to their melodrama.  All in all, the movie has a great comedic structure.  While there are some stock comedy bits (Amy Adams falls down in the mud in heels) and we've seen the "frustrated tension turns romantic love" bit before, there are enough original bits mixed in with the regular equation that the sharp edges of cliche are softened up a bit.  But just a little.

Amy Adam's character was a slight twist on the typical Type-A Female CEO character, in that she seemed vulnerable the whole time.  While I won't make a call to say it was completely intentional or she was a bit out of her range, what it did do was shorten the distance her character had to go to change.  It wasn't a very dynamic shift that she made by the end.  She was already desperate at the start of the movie; that's where we picked her up, instead of getting to see the shift to desperation as well.  Or maybe she's just a normal person who has always felt desperate in some way.  But that makes for less exciting movies, and movies don't exist without an audience that needs to be excited (or saddened or enlightened or whatever).

The realization scene where Amy Adams discovers her fiance is not the right guy is well done for being easier to spot than on oncoming train.  It contains some wonderful storytelling via the cinematography and there are very few words spoken; it only requires the audience to remember a brief but poignant conversation between the two lead characters twenty minutes earlier.

Overall, an entertaining movie that doesn't tell you to cheat on your significant other.  And it's clean save for a humorous moment detailing the differences between what Americans and Europeans consider "decent."

I'm a sap. Jesus died for your sins.  This movie won't tell you that though.

That's all.

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