Word: declan
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Anna's means of transportation to Dublin are way more varied and imaginative than the route that the screenwriting team of Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont has Anna take from the dry comfort of Jeremy to the drenched adventure of Declan. You don't have to have seen the 1945 Brit film I Know Where I'm Going!, with Wendy Hiller as the prissy traveler who finds improbable love, to know that Leap Year is a simple ransacking of older, better movie romances. And of bad ones too: the scene in which Anna and Declan, barely on speaking terms...
...Leap Year Day - Feb. 29, once every four years. But the plane she takes is rerouted to Wales, and she must travel by turbulent boat, crowded bus, creaky old Renault, unpredictable train and occasionally on foot to reach her beau. Meanwhile she discovers true love in the form of Declan (Matthew Goode), an Irish innkeeper she hates at first sight...
...Goode, who had what we'll call the Jeremy Irons role in the 2008 Brideshead Revisited remake, and who is Colin Firth's lover in A Single Man. Here he agreeably inhabits his character even as he somehow stands outside the film, fixing it with the same skeptical eye Declan focuses on Anna. "The countryside's pretty and the pay's OK," Goode's attitude seems to say, "and it's not my disaster." Welcome another gentleman Brit to possible leading-man status in Hollywood. Everyone else involved should redact Leap Year from...
...past, Miller has relied on handheld camera work to create a sense of intimacy. Here her cinematographer, Declan Quinn, spares us the shaking, but frequently slides the camera between adjacent sets. We travel from the bed one tousled blond woman (Suky) collapsed in a bed to another (Pippa), waking in another town and another decade. It's a neat trick to suggest life as a continuum - Pippa is ruled by guilt and a need to emulate her mother's happy "commercial" existence, aiming for perfection but without the pill popping - but it also represents what's going on in Pippa...
...does being on 30 Rock compare with being on Saturday Night Live? -Declan Murphy, Manassas, Va. Saturday Night Live is the hardest thing I ever did in my career. Period. If you can survive Saturday Night Live, then you're good as far as show business is concerned. My ex-wife, she was considered a widow because I was never home. You had one day off, and that was Sunday...