All About Steve (2009) *

Directed by: Phil Traill

Starring: Sandra Bullock, Bradley Cooper, Thomas Haden Church

Ugh. I've probably said this 100 times in my life if I said it once, but how can such a likable actress like Sandra Bullock choose her projects so poorly?   She has almost infinite energy and a completely winning smile, but yet stars in vehicles like All About Steve which only serve to have an ordinary guy like me question her career path. Bullock took a couple of years off to reassess her career and make better films, but in 2009 she released The Proposal, The Blind Side, and this film.   Even though The Blind Side won her a Best Actress Oscar, it, like the other two films, was a subpar entertainment.

All About Steve has Bullock play a woman named Mary who creates crossword puzzles for a small Sacramento newspaper.   She currently lives with her parents because her apartment is being fumigated, but how does she have an apartment in the first place?   Can one actually make a decent living creating crossword puzzles?   Especially ones that don't even appear every day in the newspaper?  Then again, acting the way she does, she doesn't strike me as the type of woman who ever lived with anyone but her parents.

Her personality is maddening.   Her communication skills consist of constant, inane chatter packaged in tinted red hair and wearing bright red boots everywhere. She explains later on why she wears these boots all of the time.   Something about a toe massage, but I was pretty much zoning by then.   Dealing with a woman like Mary requires a saint's patience and the ability to zone often.

In the film, she is set up on a blind date with Steve (Cooper), a camerman who works for a field reporter on a CNN-type of cable network. Cooper is nice enough, but Mary can't resist his good looks and proceeds to pounce on him.  Steve manages to get rid of her with aplomb, but soon she is following, er, stalking him from Oklahoma to Texas and elsewhere.  If you think that this stalking would involve numerous pratfalls and Mary falling into things like an abandoned mine, then you would be right.

The abandoned mine thing happens near the end of the film and it represents a dead end. Because Mary is such an over-the-top nut, it is obvious that Steve won't do a 180 degree turn and start to fall for her. There isn't much to fall for because Mary is a dead zone and has no positive qualities except an above-average vocabulary.   This leaves the filmmakers scrambling for a happy ending, which it kinda sorta achieves as Mary rescues a deaf girl who had also fallen into the same mine.   Do you really want me to bore you with the logistics of this plotline?

I can't imagine what attracted Bullock to this character. Bullock must've figured her likability would automatically make the character likable, despite the fact the character is certifiable. But All About Steve did have one plus: It introduced me to the word "cruciverbalist", which apparently is the name for one who creates crossword puzzles. Mary said this during one of her seemingly endless bouts of verbal diarrhea.