Sunday, October 19, 2008

Leatherheads, another marketing failure

So George Clooney's Leatherheads is many things. It's a one-minute buddy comedy, a one-minute screwball comedy, a one-minute romantic comedy, with one-minute about the old rules of the NFL, two minutes about the new rules of the NFL, and two minutes about being a war hero. By my calculation that means the movie should be about eight minutes long. The other 90 minutes don't seem to do much. This movie was marketed, right in the title, as a story about football. The original profession football players and how they became legitimate. This is NOT a sports movie. And then it was supposed to be about the love triangle with Clooney, Renee Zellwegger and John Krasinski (totally inappropriate for this role, still channelling Jim rather than this character). That doesn't happen, except for the lipstick scene shown repeatedly in the commercials. The war-hero story line was interesting, but kept losing it's focus between other non-plot points. So basically, this is a terrific 8-minute movie, but I wouldn't bother with the rest. 2 LAMBS/stars

Large Association of Movie Blogs

3 comments:

Cat said...

I hate it when they sell a movie wrong! Though it sounds like there wasn't much to sell here. Which is a shame, since I would have found this era of early organizing in spots pretty interesting. (It's set in the 1920s, no?) Too bad the movie wasn't up to it! No wonder the preview was better.

Jess said...

It would have been a good movie if they'd explored any one of their one-minute efforts. They introduced all kinds of terms for football rules that were no longer allowed when the NFL came in, but they never showed us what they were or how it made for a winning team. Very odd.

Fletch said...

Ha! I haven't seen this, but I love your summation. Should I ever see it, can you direct me to the 8 minutes I should look out for?