A Movie Composed Entirely Out of Cliches
Leap Year is direly stupid. I only watched it because it was the only thing on cable when I was in the mood for some TV that didn't have to do with a serial killer who murders little girls (The Lovely Bones) or a serial killer who murders women (a CSI episode) or rapists who attack women (Law and Order SVU) . Why the fuck do Koreans import all these horrible dramas from America? Why don't they import The West Wing? Ugh.
Leap Year has all the cliches of the romantic comedy genre that moreover make up the staple plotlines of every. single. Korean drama ever made ever ever.
Let's count the ways:
1) Improbably handsome man who was hurt by a woman in the past and as a result hides into himself and stays single and celibate and available for the heroine, which is the complete opposite of 100% of every real man who has ever been heterosexual and human at the same time.
The casting on this was both perfect and not quite right: Matthew Goode is so good looking it's a little bit irritating. I want him to have zits or something. Even his wrinkles are beautiful, what the fuck. The sheer unlikeliness of this man's existece always takes the fizz out of this sort of light-confection movie for me. When men get dumped by a woman, they find the very next woman, any woman, as long as she's sentient and breathing, and fuck her. If they're not good looking enough to achieve that, then they go to a strip club and get stupid drunk and molest a stripper. That's how every straight man I've ever seen ever behaves. And if you look like Matthew Goode and you're in a town where (apparently) 95% of the men are alcoholics in their 70s, you're definitely sleeping every. single. woman. in town. All day every day. The chaste hot man fantasy makes me think male and female sexuality is not, at core, all that different. The one girly movie I recall that didn't do this character was a Hugh Jackman vehicle called Someone Like You, in which Hugh Jackman is a hot straight guy who gets dumped by a girl and proceeds to sleep with every single model in Manhattan, a different one, every night.
2) Through Plot Machinations, the man and the woman are forced - forced I tell you! through no fault of their own! - to spend a night (or more) in the same bed together. There's just no choice - they have to. Oh, and nothing happens sexually, except they wake up holding each other. Whenever I've slept in the same bed with someone, whether lover, friend, family member or cat, I always wake up far far away from them and they from me.
In a way, the prevalence of this trope gives me comfort. Getting to the bedroom part is a goddamn challenge once you're out of the dorms where every room in the effing building is a bedroom. Even when you're dating and you've been seeing each other for a bit - this part is surprisingly awkward to get to. It really is. And you really have to get in there and make out and lie in the same bed to get anywhere, you know? The variations that are most commonly used for this are:
(a) They have pretend to be married and have lied about it to the powers that be and it's a life-saving and/or bed-for-the-night obtaining pretense. There are two variations on this -
(b) Mnus the powers that be: They're out in the middle of nowhere and there's only the one bed in a very dire makeshift camp situation.
(c) More long-term situation: The hotel has double booked them into the one remaining hotel room in the entire metropolitan area. Or, the landlord has double-rented the room, the apartment, the sublet and they've both already sunk their entire life savings into this one particular piece of real estate. And lastly -
(d) They're already wed, in an arranged marriage they didn't know about until just now, accidental marriage, drunken marriage etc.
3) The heroine is contemptible in some way, and at first the hero actually feels, if not contempt, disdain for her and rightly so. Any reasonable person would find this level of incompetence at living a bit appalling in a full grown woman. And then, in some weird Stockholm Syndrome way, the hero starts to really feel attracted to the very contemptible, unreasonable, incompetent-at-life qualities of the heroine. This about-change usually happens after the forced-night-together as above. And he usually ends up begging her to stay exactly as she is, which usually means a chain-jerking, thoughtless, self-centered asshole.
This is both misogynist and man-hating - misogynist because it says that men only want women who are vastly stupider/ weaker than they are; and man hating because it insists that men can't love the best part of you and endure the worst parts - they better fucking love ALL of you, including putting up with emotional abuse.
4) Sort of related to 3): The heroine gets completely drunk out of her head and vomits on/ near the hero. And sometimes she hits him or otherwise physically hurts him while drunk. This would not be acceptable in a male character who gets the girl at the end, but for some reason the hero, in addition to being celibate while straight and hot, is also attracted to drunkness and vomit. The hero is the hero because the very moment when he's holding her hair back while she vomits into the toilet is when he decides he must marry this drunken harpy and take care of her. (Reverse genders and you have Oscar baiting drama about female empowerment, wherein the woman realizes she doesn't exist to rescue others and gets her own life).
5) The hero gets into a fight on behalf of the heroine, usually with multiple men. Sometimes he wins. Other times he loses. Still other times it's not so much a fight as he gets assaulted because of the heroine. Violence and chaos turns on the heroine, as much as drunkenness and vomit turns on the hero.
Ay carumba.
Oh, according to this movie, Ireland is really, really empty. Pretty, with lakes and ruins and mossy grassy knolls, but essentially empty except for some sheep and cows. Also Ireland apparently has no Hertz or other global rental car business. It's really, really rural, and poor, and a little bit dankly dirty. And its peasants wear rough homespun looking dun-colored fabric most of he time. Nobody ever wears jewel tones in Ireland.
Really? In 2010? Well maybe it is now that the Irish economy has tanked, but weren't they at the forefront for a while there? Where they acquired access to the internets and stuff? No?
HOWEVER:
There was no stabbing, no kidnapping, no rape, no blood, no corpses and no autopsies in this movie. And that, sad to say, is getting really hard to find in movies these days!