Leap Year

Yes, it’s a cutsie rom com. We know this because there are two good-looking, youngish people starring in the film and on the cover of the DVD, etc, plus there is instant sexual chemistry, though, naturally, the two do not like each other at first. Your typical rom com fare. Here the good-looking couple who are determined NOT to fall in love are Amy Adams (so irresistibly perky and vibrant) and Matthew Goode (so brooding…doing his best “I do not want to be lovable” routine). The two of them almost make us forget that not only have we “sort of” seen this type of material before, we have seen almost EXACTLY the same material in a 1995 Lawrence Kasdan film, French Kiss with rom con queen Meg Ryan and Kevin Kline. There, Ryan, like Adams, runs off to follow her boyfriend abroad where she meets Kline, a Frenchman, and naturally nature takes its course and soon the boyfriend is forgotten and Kline is the ONE! So, Goode is Irish not French and plotwise, the boyfriend in French Kiss met another woman in Paris and in Leap Year, it’s that said boyfriend hasn’t proposed yet. But, still, they are pretty similar. And, to top that off, I LOVE French Kiss. It’s one of my favorite films from the 1990s and definitely one of my favorite contemporary romantic comedies. And I still like Leap Year, with its copied and clichéd characters, plot, etc.? Yes, I do. Amy Adams and Matthew Goode are so likeable (separately, but mostly together) that we do not care that we already know the ending and have heard much of the dialogue and seen much of the plot before. Another bonus here is Ireland…the lush scenery, the vistas, the gloom and rain... Well, you can’t have sunshine everyday, right? Think again – it’s sunshiny everyday in Romantic Comedy Land.