Sep. 09, 2009 - Issue #725: Sex in the City 2009
All About Steve
All About Steve is an odd humorous film (6 letters) that sent me through four stages of Reviewer's Shrugging Acceptance That This Is A 2-Star Movie: 1) Feeling awkward for the lead character. 2) Feeling embarrassed for the actor playing the lead character. 3) Feeling some admiration for the movie's all-out, gawky commitment to awkward comedy. 4) Feeling some annoyance at the usual rom-com schmaltz-injections—cheesy music, soaring speechifying, crap about self-love—meant to turn our frowns upside-down.
The actor in quizzical question is Sandra Bullock, playing Mary Horowitz, a crossword puzzle-maker (14) who falls in romantic feeling (4) with Steve (Bradley Cooper), a TV news cameraman her parents set her up with on a blind date.
There's something about Mary, alright—she's a reclusive workaholic who natters away in anyone's company, but when she sees Steve, Mary Horowitz come off as, well, a whore with wit, joking away and shooting off trivia and thesaurus words (8) while stripping off Steve in the back of his truck for some hot down-and-across puzzle-solving action—nothing cryptic about Mary's designs here.
Steve's scared off by this behaviour, as would be HBO's Samantha and Co., not to mention anyone even remotely feminist, since the kooky, sex-starved spinster isn't exactly the most 21st-century character around. But then the film starts to indulge its inner weird child. Mary pretty much stalks Steve, and their first reunion is a cringe-comedy take on the lovers-running-towards-each-other cliché. And tragedies, especially falling into an abandoned coal shaft, are mined for their strange, uncomfortable slapstick quality. Turns out that watching someone absentmindedly, or purposely, fall into a deep hole (3) is pretty damn funny, even in slo-mo.
On the one hand, Mary is irritating, even unlikeable. On the other hand, Mary is irritating, even unlikeable, and that's kind of daring for a romantic comedy. Besides, Thomas Haden Church grabs most of the attention (6, 3, 4) as Hartman Hughes, a leather-tanned, cocky TV reporter who's totally at ease with his sleaze.
All About Steve does have a lot of dead spots, though. Laughs at strangeness and affectionate humour about geeks are tough to completely pull off, and DJ Squalls' apple-sculptor doesn't quite cut it, nor does Katy Mixon's helium-cheery serial demonstrator. The zipping around the country—in a Gremlin, no less—defies geography, and the use of deaf children in the climax feels a little cheap (6). The direction is pretty boring (2-3) and the Authorized Rom-Com Dictionary, Volume 20: Sentiment to Soundtrack, gets consulted a lot. Ultimately, though, the romance gets punctured like a balloon at Pinhead's birthday party and the movie doesn't offer a totally upbeat conclusion (5, 6).
(Answers: comedy; cruciverbalist; love; synonyms; pit; steals the show; tawdry; ho-hum; happy ending)
All About Steve
Directed by Phil Traill
Written by Kim Barker
Starring Sandra Bullock, Thomas Haden Church, Bradley Cooper
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