'All About Steve'
(Sandra Bullock, Bradley Cooper, et al / DVD / PG-13 / 2009 / 20th Century Fox)
Overview: This off-the-wall comedy about a blind date gone hilariously wrong. When eccentric but lovable mary gets set up with steve a news channel cameraman she falls hard. He does not. Mary decides to follow steve on a cross-country hunt for breaking news and soon finds herself entangled in the story.
DVD: Bullock plays Mary Horowitz, who designs crosswords for a local Sacramento paper. Mary is unmarried and without a boyfriend, living with her parents while her apartment is being fumigated. Mary is an oddball, eccentric to the point of being insane. She's socially awkward, but this is not simple eccentricity. Mary needs to be diagnosed and medicated for whatever is wrong with her.
Mary meets Steve (Cooper) after her parents set her up on a blind date and she is instantly obsessed with him. Steve, a cameraman for news channel CCN, instantly sees that she's crazy and flees. Mary, misinterpreting Steve's comment about wishing she could go with him, decides to follow him across the country as he covers various stories with his team; reporter Hartman Hughes (Thomas Haden Church) and Angus (Ken Jeong).
This is around the time you realize this is not the story of an eccentric girl who falls for a straight-laced guy, but the story of a stalker who will not stop until she gets what she wants. Steve is frightened by Mary, while the antagonistic Hartman encourages her, but no one in the film seems to get just how frightening this situation would be if it played out in real life. Furthermore, the Mary character provides very few laughs because of how creepy she is. Bullock plays Mary in a way that makes you wince whenever she comes onscreen.
Writer Kim Barker has written one of the unfunniest "romantic-comedies" of the year. Besides having forced scenes that are supposed to be humorous, but never live up to that goal, there is some miserably poor dialogue throughout the film including almost endless ranting about crossword puzzles. Yes, the "dead-horse" scene was relatively amusing but that had more to do with the way the actor's handled the material than the actual material itself.
If Bullock and Cooper had not had their box-office successes' it's not inconceivable to think this film would've been released straight-to-DVD. Everything aspect of it is low-quality except for the actors, who I'd recommend fire their agents. In conclusion, 'All About Steve' is forced and unfunny in every aspect imaginable including it's title. A cartoonish waste of talent from everyone involved. [JM] This is a Widescreen Presentation (1.85:1) enhanced for 16x9 TVs and comes with the Special Features of:
A Commentary Track
Deleted Scenes
Gag Reel
Making-of Featurettes
And More!
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