Amy Adams to Explore the Romantic Possibilities of Leap Year

I mentioned in a post back on Feb. 29 that movies released on Leap Day are exceedingly rare. Surely you remember that post, and the glaring error I made in it, as though it were yesterday. But even rarer than movies released on Leap Day are movies about Leap Day. Why have the cinematic properties of Feb. 29, an extra day that occurs just once every four years, so far mostly eluded the magic-makers in Hollywood?

That oversight is about to be remedied with Leap Year, a romantic comedy that The Hollywood Reporter says is probably going to star Amy Adams (Enchanted). She would play an uptight woman who goes to Dublin on Feb. 29 to take advantage of an Irish custom dictating that if a woman proposes marriage to her boyfriend on that day, he is obligated to say yes. (What the hell kind of operation are they running over there? I don't think that would hold up in a court of law.) But -- get this! -- shenanigans and tomfoolery delay her, and a surly innkeeper has to help her get across the country in time to make her proposal! One suspects that hijinks and merriment are also involved, though The Hollywood Reporter is unclear on that aspect.

I don't like to judge a movie before I've seen it, or before it's finished, or before they've even started filming it, but I'll go on the record now: Wow, this sounds awful. Casting the exuberant, lighthearted Adams as an uptight woman in a generic-sounding rom-com is wrong to begin with, and the screenplay is by Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont -- the duo behind the paralyzingly bad Made of Honor.

But hey! Maybe I'm wrong! Maybe they'll adjust the character to suit Adams, or maybe she'll surprise us by playing an uptight woman with great skill. And maybe Made of Honor was just a fluke in the otherwise spotless career of Kaplan and Elfont, who-- wait, nope, they also wrote Surviving Christmas, Josie and the Pussycats and The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas. Hmm. Well, maybe Amy Adams will at least get to sing a musical number with an entourage of countryside Irish vermin.