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 y...