Leatherheads (2008)

Director: George Clooney

Writers: Duncan Brantley, Rick Reilly

Composer: Randy Newman

Starring: George Clooney, John Krasinski, Stephen Root, Renee Zellweger, Jonathan Pryce

More info: IMDb

Tagline: In the beginning, the rules were simple. There weren't any.

Plot:  In 1925, an enterprising pro football player convinces America's too-good-to-be-true college football hero to play for his team and keep the league from going under.

My rating: 7.5/10

Will I watch it again?  Yeah.

I really dig Clooney a lot when he does comedy and he's made for this kind of picture.  It's a really fun ride and I was really impressed by the look and feel the filmmakers achieved of time and place.  It's great.  It's the kind of great that I'd like to step into the screen and hang out with these cats back in the twenties.  Randy Newman's score goes a long way in cementing that vibe.  It's bouncy fun.  The cast is great.  They picked some great, interesting, period-looking mugs to be in this picture.  The laughs are fun and it was clear that Clooney was going for that 1930s screwball comedy feel. The only problem with that is that the best of those pictures were snappy, tight and flew by with lightning speed.  LEATHERHEADS doesn't share that quality.  It would be a bigger blast of a ride if it were tighter.  At almost two hours, though, they do pack a lot in so it'd be really tough to cut bits out as the atmosphere is super rich and welcoming.  It's still a fun picture.  The Universal DVD has a nice anamoprhic widescreen print and there are lots of fun extras, too.  You get 8 minutes of deleted scenes, a 6 minute making of featurette, a 9 minute featurette on recreating 1920s football games, 4 minutes on Clooney's pranks, 6 minutes on the visual effects and a commentary track with Clooney and producer Grant Heslov.