What's even harder to forgive is the way Anna is forced to wobble through the Irish countryside in a very pretty but extremely precarious pair of $600 (at one point she makes note of the price) ankle-strap platform shoes. The camera repeatedly lingers on these absurdly unstable shoes: Anna totters around on them, along city streets and through airports, as if perched on baby deer feet. The effect could be defended, I guess, as disgustingly adorable, until these shoes become an unavoidable symbol of how low a bunch of filmmakers are willing to go to humiliate a character: First their spiky heels sink deep into beach sand; then they find their way into thick piles of cow poo. When Anna finally has the good sense to take them off, she slips in the mud and becomes covered, from head to toe, in brown slime. (Stephanie Zacharek, “Leap Year: One giant leap backward for romantic comedy” 7 January, 2010)
Strange, this, going to movies which entrench cow poo in such near proximity to all your memories of the genre's exemplars of wit and charm. While you go to sleep, and you're not so there to keep their emotional / cognitive neural-arrays neatly categorized, you might find movies like this actually are seeping their way into the ones you hoped to keep clean. It is possible, if they have cunning, and you're feeling worn-out, that they may read this film as analogy and make sure all your wit and charm delights incur cow-dung implantation. I suppose in the daytime you might remedy this by recalling your favorites and forcing into your memory of them a long line-up of shovels, to be handed out to the main principals for use at night to scoop away the slimers. I suspect this would work . . . but at the cost of never knowing your sense and sensibilities again, without knowing them, with shovels -- a high price to pay, in poetry/farm exchange.
I think you should hire someone who likes this film to screen future romances for you. If s/he likes them, have her/him give a detailed plot summary, and then fake it for us. We're all eating a la "Francis Lam" and keeping company no more, with Hobbitan swine, so we'll understand.
Link: “Leap Year: One giant leap backward for romantic comedy” (Salon)
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