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This looks what the Coens were trying to do with Intolerable Cruelty, but actually funny.

Antoine Doinel wrote:This looks what the Coens were trying to do with Intolerable Cruelty, but actually funny.

Ha, my exact thoughts when I first saw the trailer: "This looks like the movie the Coen Brothers keep trying to make, only good."

Yep, I got the Intolerable Cruelty vibe too. I'm just glad somebody is trying to make this type of screwball comedy again, even if it takes them a few tries to get it right. As an actor, Clooney was born for the genre. It remains to be seen how he handles it as a director.

I want Renee Zellwegger's hats.

The movie looks good, too.

Screen Daily interviews Clooney, as does the Financial Times.

Variety is not impressed.

Saw this tonight - quite a disappointment. Clooney has talent but lord knows why he didn't do a substantial rewrite on this to sharpen it up. Brief moments aspired to something great - the obvious attempt to pick up where the Coen Bros struggled with the screwball, including many acting alum from "O Brother Where Art Thou?"... a a major homage to Clark Gable inspired characters (specifically It Happened One Night, including a scene straight from the "walls of jericho").

But overall it felt like a Woody Allen imitation film that Woody Allen would've made much better. The period piece, the jazz, the witty back and forth banter, the cinematography (at times, at least, when they weren't in for a Hollywood close up to break up a good shot and scene). Thing is - Woody would've done it much, much better. Some of the jokes were good ideas but ended flat and tripped over themselves.

If there was anything to save this movie from sinking, it was Clooney himself as an actor - he can at least make this tolerable. Occasional bouts of decent cinematography were consistently conflicted and overall the film was flat. It started out that way and could never gain enough steam to head anywhere... it also never escaped the inevitable sports-film cliches and once the duel dilemmas of the film (the outcome of both the scandal and game) were set up, it was perfectly obvious how each and every one would play it. Then it took too long to get there with no interesting detours.

AWA wrote:Clooney has talent but lord knows why he didn't do a substantial rewrite on this to sharpen it up.

Maybe he shouldn't have touched the script at all. From IMDB:

Clooney Splits From Writers Guild

George Clooney has withdrawn his membership from the Writers Guild of America after the union turned down his request for a writer's credit on Leatherheads, Daily Variety reported today (Friday). Clooney had maintained that he had rewritten all but two scenes in the script originally submitted by Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly. Clooney told the trade paper, "When your own union doesn't back what you've done, the only honorable thing to do is not participate."

AWA wrote: Clooney has talent but lord knows why he didn't do a substantial rewrite on this to sharpen it up.

Actually it was revealed today that Clooney "left" the WGA last year over not getting a writing credit for his rewriting of the screenplay but didn't mention it so as to not distract from the strike.

That's interesting news... and it makes it even more disappointing that Clooney rewrote this and this was the final results. Perhaps George is just a director - actor - producer and not a writer after all.

I saw this yesterday and have to say that i just don't understand why so many people are not liking the film. While it is full of what seems like every screwball situation and dialogue from Zelwegger's snappy banter in the newsroom, to the homage to the sheer buffonery of the Keyston cops, there is a much deeper, darker reflection in this film which maybe gets lost on some if you simply approach it as a football comedy.
The movie is critical of war and how history, politics, the media, and yes, even people themselves can create lies that become truths. It questions the ideas of what is really heroic, and why do Americans need heroes. It critiques the ways in which in the 1920s, even before the Depression, many men in the country were being forgotten, simply so that rich people could get richer. It is also a film that presents the truth behind corporate capitalism in American media and culture: this is why we see a myriad of ads for Carter Rutherford in the film: selling himself to sell toothpaste, shaving cream, chewing gum, razors, etc.
For my money what Clooney accomplishes with this film is to continue his critques of American culture and the ways in which it is in reality a culture built soley on artifice. Therefore as in the first two films he made about television, here he is saying that all American experience is the product of a triangle of money, celebrity, and historical fogetfullness.
Fianlly i would like to say that this film which is clearly an homage to the films of the 1920s and 1930s from studios like RKO and MGM (which is mentioned) in any other director's hands would have been reduced to inane comedy. Clooney is developing into a very good director who both resepcts the art of cinema and its power to convey ideas, qualities which are suffering in many directors' today.

filmnoir1 - yes, I got the socio-political message of the film, and while it is a good idea to make any given film aspire to a greater idea than just a few cheap pigskin laughs, such content does not a good movie make. Case in point - that film. Has all the ingredients but there was far too much missing in the bakery, if you know what I mean.

Clooney is good, but he fumbled this one. No pun intended.

Finally saw this and it was nothing short of a disaster. Clooney falls victim to about every period piece cliche imaginable. The screenplay aspires to be a screwball comedy but the flick's been made by a crew clearly untrained in what made those type of films work. Aimless where it should be taut yet rushed when it should slow down, Clooney's inability to edit and shoot properly for laughs drowns the whole affair in tone-deaf nothingness. There was simply never any reason for this film to exist. It's an "Old Timey Film" only for people who've never seen a film older than they are.

Released at about the same time earlier this year and utilizing a not-dissimilar methodology, the infinitely more-successful Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day reveals every false step of Leatherheads by virtue of succeeding where Clooney's film fails. Pettigrew, while not a screwball-aspiring comedy, possesses a similar stylistic and narrative approach, as both films deliver a period piece presented as a traditional Hollywood narrative told in the classical tradition with modern technological and (minor) moral advances. Yet unlike Leatherheads, Pettigrew is tightly composed and constructed by filmmakers clearly aware of the tradition they're inhabiting. And best of all, it never falls victim to the loathsome period fetishization of Clooney's film.