ThiefHott Too much of everything

Console best movie i've ever seen.

Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

thinker1691 In 1925 America was experiencing a growth burst. Two years later Lucky Lindy would fly the Atlantic, the following year would bring the Wall Street crash, followed by the Great Depression. Within a further two years America would suffer the Dust Bowl and crippling unemployment. Indeed it is noteworthy that professional football and the NFL were also in their infancy. This is the age when our movie takes place. The spirited era of College rivalries and football field shenanigans. men's fox skin coats, hidden booze flasks, the flapper and 'the speakeasy' were all in fashion. America is in flux and painful, but heroic memories of World War I are giving way to the exuberant emerging power of a professional contact sport. Dodge Connelly, (George Clooney) an aging college athlete is keenly aware of the changing attitude. Sensing the prevailing mood, he develops a theory that football fans will pay good money to see popular heroes on the gridiron. He assembles his dwindling fortune and seeks out a World War I veteran, Carter 'the bullet' Rutherford (John Krasinski) and convinces him to play for the struggling Deluth Bulldogs. Banking on his 'hero' status the team becomes a major attraction and nearly unstoppable on the field. Enter the Chicago Tribune, who sends 'Lexi Littleton' a opportunistic female reporter ( Renee Zellweger) to interview the war hero in hopes of discrediting him and thereby advancing to an editor's desk. Although the story is very loosely based on the career of field phenomena 'Red Grange', it's also a biopic of the fading antics of football. With the changing tide of the sport, the free-for-all nature of the game which has also become a economical franchise and thus subject to the inevitable establishment of rules. Clooney does a remarkable job of presenting the twenties era complete with black female singers and the jazz age. All in all, a sympathetic and nostalgic view of an emerging nation seeking a new pastime, despite the struggles it must first endure. ****

Roland E. Zwick In the 1920s, even though college football was regularly playing to sellout crowds, the professional side of the sport was as anathema to most Americans as Hulk Hogan being feted as guest-of-honor at the Queen's high tea.Poorly regulated and sparsely attended, these early pro games were true spit-and-bailing-wire affairs, the players little more than a ragtag collection of "miners and farmers and shell-shocked veterans of the Great War," the equipment well-worn or nonexistent, and as for venues - well, pretty much any turnip field that didn't have too much of a slant or too many holes in the ground would suffice in a pinch. It was about as far from the multimillion dollar contracts and corporate sponsorships of today's NFL as one could possibly imagine.It's nice to be reminded of football's humble beginnings every now and then, and "Leatherheads," at least in theory, is just the movie to do it.Based very loosely on fact, the screenplay tells the story of Jimmy "Dodge" Connelly (George Clooney, who also co-wrote and directed the film), a pro ball player who comes up with a scheme to save the league from extinction by recruiting the top player from Princeton, a charismatic war hero named Carter "the Bullet" Rutherford ("The Office"'s John Kransinski) to play for the Duluth Bulldogs. This brings the fans to the arenas in record numbers, and pro football seems well on its way to a bright and lucrative future. Enter Lexie Littleton (Renee Zellweger), an acerbic ace reporter for the Chicago Tribune whose editors have sent her on assignment to investigate whether Rutherford's status as a war hero is really all it's trumped up to be or whether it's just a carefully manufactured fiction designed to boost his popularity with the fans - an expose that, if printed, could well spell doom not only for the young man himself but for the sport whose new-won fame is intricately linked to the prestige he alone confers upon it.Done in the style of a 1930s screwball comedy, "Leatherheads" is filled with sharp-tongued characters who basically spoon and spar their way to a happy ending. But while the movie certainly looks sensational and boasts tremendous star power in the likes of Clooney, Zellweger and Kransinski, the triteness of the storyline and the cutesiness of the humor rob it of much of its sophistication and charm (an attempt at a Keystone Kops parody is a particularly dopey and ill-conceived stab at period detail relevance). Unfortunately, the farther the story drifts from the field and the history of football itself, the less compelling the movie becomes. Thus, "Leatherheads," with all its side forays into romantic schmaltz, corny newsroom melodrama and lowbrow slapstick, squanders its opportunity to be the first mainstream movie to truly explore the infancy of the game. A pity.On the other hand, the movie does contain some of the best art direction, costume design and cinematography of any movie in recent memory. And that alone might make it worth checking out.

rajiraouf I became a fan of George Clooney watching him as Billy in The Perfect Storm. But I must say I watched this movie for its Renee factor much more than anything else.Leatherheadsis quite a conventional unconventional movie. It got no save the world plot, and yet has more than one plot intertwined within another series of plots. Just like ordinary life. The movie is quite subtle and has a plot of a suspected war hero, a failing football player, the birth of professional football and a teeny weenie romance as a side dish. Each scene seems honest and short. And sometimes shocking. There are no technicalities and the entire movie follows no particular rule of movie making or story telling. Just like the tagline says, this is a movie before the rules where there.Renee is a reporter sent to check the stories of an alleged war hero who now plays football but wants to study in Princeton. Clooney is struggling in football with a rough gritty team that's got all the usual comical characters. The forty year old man fights over the thirty old lady with the twenty year old boy. The villain is the new chief of professional football who brings in the rules to the game. There is one final football match that sets into concrete everyone's character. And the movie is over before you know it.Its a slapstick comedy in the 1920's. Its light and easily subject to too much criticism. Its worth a watch.

TJ McCarthy A lot of the negative reviews here concentrate on the historical accuracy of this film. OK, it had about as much to do with the actual NFL as your average war movie has to do with an actual war, or a Western has to do with the true "old west". So, I think we should give them an artistic license pass on that one.The problem here is, the director (Clooney) apparently thinks that making a screwball comedy means a) do stupid things, b) mug for the camera, and c) take stupid scenes full of mugging and stretch them out way too long. Screwball comedies need a fast pace, not necessarily frenetic, but moving briskly along at all times. Here, things drag, and drag, and drag. After you watch this movie, it will make you appreciate how brilliant Mack Sennett was when he pretty much pioneered the genre with his Keystone Cops. After 90 years, you would think that directors would have studied the old masters and learned a thing or two, maybe even improved on things a bit. But no, it's as if someone had watched an automobile pioneer build a Duesenberg, and nearly a century later, paid homage and "improved" on the concept by cobbling together a child's wagon with square wheels.I've enjoyed several of Clooney's movies, I consider him a gifted actor. But very few actors can competently direct themselves; Clint Eastwood notably took a while to get the hang of it. Clooney is clearly at the bottom of a very steep slope. The movie becomes more watchable during the very few times he is out of the frame, but when he's in the picture, he makes himself the centre of attention. In the fight scenes, his mugging is so obnoxious you wish somebody would thump him for real.If you are making a screwball comedy and want some romance thrown in, you need to develop some chemistry between the male and female leads. Clooney and Zellweger have all the chemistry of pair of dumpsters sitting in a parking lot. No spark, no sizzle, not even a post-mortem twitch. Zellweger, who has also turned out some pretty good movies, must have traded her botox injections for oak tannin, giving a stunningly wooden performance. She might just have pulled off the "tough broad in a man's world" act if just once, while trying to out-testosterone the guys, she had looked into the camera with a little half-smile and twinkle in her eye. But no, she kept her jockstrap cinched up tight to the very end.Of course, the biggest sin here is that the movie simply isn't funny. Doing stupid things is not the same as slapstick. Doing stupid things very inventively, like the Stooges, or very athletically, like Buster Keaton, can be hilarious. But otherwise it's boring and, well, stupid. I think I got one good laugh out of the entire movie.Avoid this one. I saw it for free on cable, and still wanted my money back.