Sunday 28 February 2010

REVIEW: Leap Year


So you walk into a screening of Leap Year as a solitary male. You try to look confident as you walk to your seat and every one looks at you like you were carrying a concentrated dose of swine flu. You take your seat, and as the first of three Orange adverts you've seen enough times to collectively cover the entire length of the Lord Of The Rings Extended editions and you think why am I doing this. Leap Year is clearly going to suck diseased balls. Its going to be embarrassing, awkward and last a comparative eternity, and I have to feel like a killjoy being creatively repulsed whilst females of all ages get a fix of sugary guilty pleasure, laughing at every bad joke and every time two time Oscar nominee Amy Adams falls over.

I comfort myself with a medium Coke that contains more liquid then an average African village would see in a month and the thought that I'll get to go all Anton Ego on this shit in a couple of hours, and oh how sweet that will be.

Sitting here now, with hindsight, I realize how wrong I was. There's no joy in ragging on this film, because its such a corporate concoction, in which every moment is written by the methodology of the flowchart that insulting it is a mute point. Its like trying to say McDonald's is bad for you. You're going to be met with a barrage of people saying well obviously as they dig into their Avatar happy meal ( where the fuck is my Stephen Lang toy god damn it). People know already, it just doesn't matter and if you try to explain it to them. Well...

Why doesn't it matter?

Because it doesn't.

But surely you care about substance, about quality, about being intellectually engaged?

Where does this pinko college boy get off. Next you're going to be telling me that the Ugly Truth isn't the funniest film of 2009.

er..but..you can't?

Oh know when you've been owned. Now be quiet, two-time Oscar Nominee Amy Adams is learning you can only love when you stop trying to control everything.

But didn't Sandra Bullock learn that in the Proposal, and Helen Hunt learn that in What Women Want and Katherine Heigl learn that in 27 Dresses and/or The Ugly Truth?

Don't make me hurt you.

Sorry. I'll let you enjoy two-time Oscar Nominee Amy Adams and Ozymandias plastically try to riff. Oh for god's sake I can't take this anymore. This aggression will not stand. People of this cinema, we can stop this. We have to rise up and say we will not be fed recycled garbage anymore. Romantic comedy doesn't have to be this way. It can be genuinely funny, genuinely moving and not just be a series of cliched set-pieces in which every single second feels false, a genetically modified mush created in a lab to make you delude yourselves into superficial happiness. We are mad as hell! and we are not going to take it anymore!

At this point this reviewer was mobbed, kidnapped and forced to watch leap year on endless loop for all eternity. He was last seen trying to eat his own face.

Rating: 2/10

1 comment:

Antonionioni said...

I nearly went to see this because i thought it might be the best of a bad bunch, etc etc (see Paris comment)..... scenes of Ireland. But I didn't, tank de lord and pass de guinness.