Word: leaping
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...Book of Eli, directed by another twin-brother team, Allen and Albert Hughes.) Made in Australia back in 2007 for not much money, the movie looks both distinctive and plausible. It's much savvier at visualizing a things-to-come world than this weekend's new romantic comedy, Leap Year, is at bringing Ireland to life, and all Leap Year's director had to do was wait for the rain. (See why Leap Year is the worst film...
...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, are forced to have a big smooch in public, got an airing in The Proposal; and the local dance where the warring parties start...
...Adams' turn to get hazed. In the mostly awful Leap Year she's Anna, a beautifier of apartments about to be sold, and she's nearly engaged to the smarmy Jeremy (another thankless role for Adam Scott, who also exuded essence de smarm as Will Ferrell's real brother in Step Brothers). She thinks Jeremy's going to give her The Ring at dinner this evening, but he gives her earrings instead. Impatient to tie a comfortable knot, she resolves to follow him to a business trip to Dublin, where, as Irish tradition supposedly has it, a woman may propose...
Observing the critic's code of scrupulous fairness, I have to say that Leap Year becomes very nearly bearable in the last reel, when the two leads can finally radiate a little mutual charisma. That's mostly thanks to 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...
...hockey player who's forced to become The Tooth Fairy. But in February there's the new Martin Scorsese, plus a fine French thriller A Prophet and the sequel to the parkour classic District 13. So there's reason for optimism at the movie houses, long before the next Leap Year...