2009 was a rollercoaster year for Sandra Bullock. The then-45-year-old reestablished her rom-com cred by leading The Proposal to box office domination; turned in an Oscar-winning performance in The Blind Side; and made All About Steve, one of the most hated romantic comedies of all time. That’s some impressive time management, especially when you consider Bullock showed up to collect her Oscar for The Blind Side and her Razzie for Steve on back-to-back nights. Though the star had spent years shepherding All About Steve’s development, she at least had a good sense of humor when it bellyflopped with critics. If only some of that humor had made it into the movie itself.
A punchline since the moment it debuted, All About Steve joins My Super Ex-Girlfriend, Failure To Launch, and The Ugly Truth as among the worst rom-coms I’ve ever covered in this column. But not since Gigli have I been as downright baffled by how a film this bizarre could’ve been conceived in the first place, let alone filmed and edited without someone realizing what a monstrosity they were making. In one early scene, Bullock’s socially stunted crossword puzzle creator Mary Horowitz claims that a puzzle’s greatness can be determined by asking three simple questions: “Is it solvable? Is it entertaining? Does it sparkle?” And while it’s easy enough to say that All About Steve isn’t entertaining and lacks any kind of sparkle, I did become a bit obsessed with trying to solve it.
My initial guess was that All About Steve started life as a quirky indie dark comedy that lost its bite as it became a mainstream vehicle—although that seems less likely once you consider that screenwriter Kim Barker’s only other credit is the horrendous 2007 John Krasinski/Mandy Moore/Robin Williams rom-com License To Wed. In the production notes, Bullock celebrates how All About Steve’s interwoven stories all “come down to the fact that not fitting [in] often means you’re really standing out,” which speaks to a cheesy earnestness the film awkwardly tries to shoehorn into the cringe comedy. But the most interesting quote comes from co-star Thomas Haden Church, who told Entertainment Weekly, “Sandy always said her schematic was Wedding Crashers. She wanted it to be a dude comedy, except about a woman.” According to EW, “[Bullock] spent years developing the script until her character resembled the kind of sexually frustrated goofball usually written only for men.”
So after years as America’s sweetheart, Bullock wanted a chance to go big and weird with her comedy, and spearheaded a project that would allow her to do just that. With her blonde shag haircut, shiny knee-high red leather boots, and hyper-verbal tendencies, Bullock plays Mary like a cross between Erin Brockovich, Rain Man, and a horny 13-year-old girl. All About Steve is interested in the question of what life is like for someone who’s smart and kind but also socially awkward in a way that makes it hard for them to interface with the rest of the world. And despite what dozens of reviews and the Razzies might say, I don’t actually think Bullock’s performance is the biggest problem with All About Steve. Mary is supposed to be strange and off-putting with an edge of endearing heart, and Bullock’s take is at least committed and cohesive in a way that could potentially work if placed in the right context.
The problem is All About Steve has absolutely no idea how it wants to present Mary. At times, it seems to see her as a sympathetic but ultimately deeply misguided woman who needs a major lesson in boundaries—like Rebecca Bunch in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. But other times, it sees her as an optimistic, upbeat, Paddington-style figure whose innate, quirky goodness changes everyone around her for the better. In that version, it’s not Mary who needs to change; it’s everyone else who needs to learn to let their freak flag fly. Yet in trying to straddle both modes at once, All About Steve fails to land on anything resembling a consistent tone.
Because Mary’s role within the narrative keeps shifting, the movie has no idea how to write any of the supporting players around her either. That starts with Steve (Bradley Cooper), a handsome cable news cameraman who’s nice enough to Mary on their blind date, even as she tries to jump his bones before they’ve even left the driveway of her parents’ house. Steve is into the encounter until Mary’s non-stop chatting starts to give him bad vibes. Then he puts on the brakes, fakes a work emergency, and placates Mary with a vague platitude about how he wishes she could be there as he heads off on the road to cover the latest breaking news. When Mary takes that brush-off literally and decides to follow Steve across the country, the movie initially seems to be on his side: She’s crossed over into full-on stalker behavior and he’s right to be freaked out!
In the end, however, Steve is the who one apologizes to Mary for saying something he didn’t mean—as if refusing to sleep with someone and then tossing off a vague “I really wish you could be there” is the worst sin a self-proclaimed “nice guy” could commit. Instead of making Steve a genuinely morally dubious character, which could’ve been much more interesting, All About Steve gives all the dubious morality to his pompous news anchor colleague, Hartman Hughes (Haden Church). For truly inexplicable reasons, Hartman actively encourages Mary’s stalking by repeatedly telling her that Steve loves her but is too afraid to admit it. So instead of giving Mary and Steve arcs that intersect and influence one another—which would be the natural choice for a deconstructed romantic comedy—All About Steve makes its two leads pawns in the mid-life crisis of its third most important character.
Ironically, considering its title, All About Steve has focus issues. Huge swathes of its runtime are devoted to satirizing the sensationalism of cable news, which is a through line that never really dovetails with anything else except for the movie’s vague “people sure can be weird, huh?” sentiment. Since Hartman, Steve, and their producer, Angus (an unexpectedly restrained Ken Jeong), are apparently their network’s only crew for a nation’s worth of news, they’re sent to cover a hostage situation in Arizona, a medical battle in Oklahoma, a hurricane in Texas, and, ultimately, a crisis in Colorado where a bunch of deaf children have fallen through the ground into an abandoned mine. The last of those becomes the site of one of the film’s characteristically lazy physical comedy gags, in which Mary falls into the mine while running towards Steve, never mind that the sink hole is fully visible in a highly cordoned off area.
So a film that should obviously end with Mary using her love of language to save the day instead ends with her using a hitherto unmentioned knowledge of physics to MacGyver a pulley system that can get her and a trapped child out of the mine. But not before a superfluous sequence where Hartman jumps in there too, because All About Steve is nothing if not committed to giving Haden Church screentime. The initial promise of exploring what makes someone like Mary tick ultimately boils down to the reveal that she wears her boots because they make her toes “feel like 10 friends on a camping trip!” It’s apparently the sort of intimate detail that can only be shared in a life-or-death situation.
If All About Steve has an interesting germ of an idea at its center, it’s that finding friends who understand you is more important than locking down a romantic partner who checks off all the conventional boxes. In fact, I’d argue that a better version of All About Steve would’ve kept Steve as a more remote figure and instead focused on Mary’s burgeoning friendship with fellow oddballs Elizabeth (Katy Mixon) and Howard (DJ Qualls), who agree to join her nation-hopping romantic quest. Mixon and Qualls bring much more humanity to their wacky characters than Cooper and Haden Church do to their more conventional archetypes. And they have better chemistry with Bullock, too. Alas, glimpses of that more cohesive dramedy are buried under a mineshaft’s worth of studio comedy plasticity from first-time feature director Phil Traill.
In the end, All About Steve is too weird to be written off as just a “bad romantic comedy” but also too off-putting to be worth sitting through for some “so bad it’s good” fun. The best thing to come out of it is probably Bullock’s Razzie acceptance speech, where she challenges the audience to give better line readings of her character’s dialogue than what she gave in the film. Bullock delivers the speech with the sort of wry, authoritative confidence that’s become her bread and butter in the latter portion of her career. For a comedy about the joy of living outside the box, All About Steve makes a far better case for sticking with what you know.
Next time: We celebrate 50 years of Harold And Maude.
84 Comments
psychics
Physics, I assume.
How would you know what she meant? Are you some kind of physics?
thank you!
I knew you were going to correct that. I must be a physic. Um, psychic.
That or it’s an even odder movie than it sounds.
It’s an otter movie? Well, I’m in!
I don’t know. Being able to master a “wheel that carries a flexible rope…or belt on its rim … to transmit energy and motion” (ref. Britannica.com) seems like an extrasensory skill to me.
you knew I was going to post this.
Actually, I’m unfamiliar with that gif.
Doctor Who, School Reunion, s2e2?
The Doctor and Rose go undercover at a school that suddenly went to top science honors, unaware an old friend of his was doing the same.skip the chips.Random Whovian theory: He’s actually telling them something that is so far scientifically advanced by Earth standards vs Gallifreyan standards, it comes out as him simply repeating “physics” over and over and over again, because TARDIS Translation Circuits won’t let him say anything technical to the kids. LOL
Oh god this one. I remember seeing the trailers for it and thinking it looked absolutely poisonous and intensely off-putting. Now sometimes you can chalk that up to shitty advertising rather than the people behind the project (see also the Australian advertising campaign for the High Fidelity TV series which at no point featured anything approaching humour or music).But in the case of this movie, it was accurately depicting an absolutely terrible film which, as you said, is just astonishingly off-putting.
see also the Australian advertising campaign for the High Fidelity TV series which at no point featured anything approaching humour or musicDo you have a link? I would love to see that, but Youtube failed me.
I’ll have a look and see if I can find it. It was airing around the time of the first Covid lockdown in March-April last year, so I got to see the ad a lot while working from home.It was almost entirely made up of shots of the camera zooming in on Zoe Kravitz’s face as she looked pensive or eating cereal or her standing with a group of people with serious and intense instrumental music played. If you had no idea about either the book or the original film, the ad gave no kind of idea as to what the show was even about.No wonder it failed to get any notice over here and made no cultural impact.It’s a shame because it was quite good.
“too off-putting to be worth sitting through for some ‘so bad it’s good’ fun” – Strong disagree there, this is probably the most entertaining awful movie I’ve ever seen. (Disclaimer: I haven’t seen The Room, only The Disaster Artist. But, solid budget and production values aside, this definitely strikes me as a similarly epic misfire.) Bullock is swinging for the fences here, with the baseball bat flying out of
her hands, into the bleachers, and smacking children in the face,
requiring a hospital trip and stitches.
I think the key to understanding the movie lies in the fact that none of the main characters get romantically paired at the end: it’s not a rom-com at all; it’s a female empowerment/coming-of-age story disguised and sold as one. And that might have worked had the protagonist been in her 20s, a Kimmy Schmidt kind of age, instead of old enough to inspire the viewers’ pity over decades of loneliness, and had the script dared to go into some genuinely dark places. (Like, again, Kimmy Schmidt.)
I don’t think I have any interesting in seeing The Room again. There are the notable parts that have been memed to Hell and back, but it feels like it’s 2 hours long and those moments hardly make it worth sitting through.
Agreed mate, my overwhelming feeling watching The Room was simply boredom.
Any entertainment value of watching The Room in 2021 is negated by the prospect of being “the guy watching The Room in 2021.”
I’ve watched it with a cinema audience a couple of times and that’s a really fun experience (especially if you go with someone who’s never seen it before – it’s easy to get swept up in the atmosphere). But I don’t know if I’ll ever watch it at home. That seems more of a slog.
i think if you’re a real deal bad movie aficionado ‘the room’ is definitely played out. it’s really fun that it became a ‘thing’ to go see it and act out and throw stuff, but that’s almost an entirely different thing than the movie at this point.my personal favorite bad movie is a robocop rip-off called ‘ROTOR’ that you can watch in its entirety on youtube.
My current favourite is Live Wire, an old Pierce Brosnan thriller about a special water that turns people into bombs. It was all on YouTube but I think it’s been taken down – but the trailer sums up its appeal.
My wife and I went to midnight screening of the Room in 2010 or 2011, and by then the movie was well-known enough that it was a packed house, and people were wearing red dresses and tuxedoes and throwing spoons and footballs and shouting along with the dialog. After a while it’s like, “What are we all doing here?” It was literally the Rocky Horror Picture Show experience photocopied onto another movie (one that doesn’t have singalong-ready musical numbers, distinctive costumes, or anything intentionally campy).
But that’s what makes it better! I can’t stand movies like The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Attack of the Killer Tomatoes that want to be “wacky” “bad” movies intentionally. They’re too forced. Give me Plan 9 From Outer Space, The Room, etc. any day. Movies that the creators thought were serious, good films but are so bizarre because of the lack of understanding of normal human motivations they have.
I didn’t know where to answer but I feel like the Singalongs in rocky horror or audience participation in the room is a celebration of the audience of being so above the material, of not giving any chance to the narrative and just smash over what it’s displayed. I always despised that relationship with movies (saw so often in mystery theatre and badly disguised as love for the genre) and I don’t see that intention of “wacky” or “bad” in rocky horror: that is your interpretation, that queer characters doing unusual things is bad or intentionally wacky instead of any weekend on a gay club (which is what Rocky Horror reminds me of).
In any case this is completely independent from saying of a movie is good or bad, which I consider the most useless part of critical analysis. These are just celebrations that imply some intention of bad filming and turn into “this is punk cinema”, as if they reached the purity for being bad, on the dumbest and most superficial kind of view but also the easiest one.
The RiffTrax version of R.O.T.O.R. is one of my favorite things they’ve ever done.
My best bad movie would either be Rock and Roll Nightmare (aka Edge of Hell) or Shark Attack 3. Depends on whether you’re feeling like seeing a man in a studded leather jock strap fight puppet Satan, or a man on a jet ski hucking grenades at a poorly animated giant shark.
I’m sure those Rocky Horror-like screenings are fun, but I think I would rather watch a movie than have people shouting and throwing things every other line.
It’s a very, very awkward experience. The “fun” of The Room is that so many elements fail – the plot, the dialog, the acting, the production design, the editing – that it’s like this bizarre mirror-world version of a movie. That kind of mockery doesn’t jive well with a big crowd – it’s like if Mystery Science Theater 3000 had 50 hosts, and instead of riffing on Manos they were all shouting “the Master wouldn’t approve!” The Rocky Horror Picture Show experience works because the movie is a queer musical that’s designed for dressing up and singing along. It also has an ending that’s a little underwhelming but not “the main character makes a very awkward speech and shoots himself.”
Fair enough. All About Steve is a lot of things, but it’s not boring.
I’ve seen The Room three times in a theater, and every single time the last third is the hardest part to get through. It’s truly when the film starts going off the rails. I’ve noticed audiences giggling, but it’s a kind of nervous laughter, like they’re afraid Tommy Wiseau is gonna leap off the screen and come at them with a knife.
I think the “singalong” experience, ironically, creates an emotional investment that the movie doesn’t really earn, which makes it harder to laugh at the ridiculous ending. Or I suppose a lot of people find it hard to pivot from laughing at “I definitely have breast cancer” and Sestero’s reading of the line “my best friend” and just everything about Denny to laughing as Tommy frantically rubs himself with his wife’s dress and then shoots himself. That ending is pretty funny, but only if you feel so completely alienated by the rest of the movie that you’re just morbidly waiting to see what crazy shit happens next.
The worst showing I saw was a Valentine’s Day show that Wiseau himself hosted. No matter how you slice it, The Room is misogynist. Even Sestero has pointed this out. Lisa is evil for no good reason, and all the women do in the film is gossip, drink Merlot, and shop. Wiseau was inspired by a woman who broke his heart and he put every ugly, negative emotion you could in the film. And clearly there’s an audience for that because all the men were shouting “Slut! Whore! Bitch!” every time Lisa was on screen.
So in a twisted way, the film found its niche in spite of itself.
Wiseau can be somewhat excused in not knowing how women act in reality because he is unclear how humans in general act.
Probably once a month I’ll think about how crazy it is that Kimmy Schmidt worked as a premise at all.
A wildly optimistic lead character who refuses to acknowledge the realty of what’s happened to her is fertile ground for both comedy and pathos – often in the same moment. But you probably have to be a Tina Fey-level comedy talent to pull it off.
Pretty young cheerful women trying to be kind can get away with a whole lotta stuff.
I mean, her age might have played into it a little, but there’s just some people who don’t coalesce with the rest of society no matter what. I was willing to accept that she was quirky and got lost in what she loved doing most of all to not focus on romance until the right one came along. It just ended up being a moment that got overblown for her that she took it too far. And was egged on further by Church’s character, which just made it worse.Ther said, I love the message of empowerment and accepting people for who they are first and foremost. I genuinely don’t have a problem with this film.
“I was willing to accept that she was quirky and got lost in what she
loved doing most of all to not focus on romance until the right one came
along.” – Um, but the movie never suggests she has any solid reason for thinking Steve is actually “the right one.” The writing, performances, and direction all indicate that, beneath her everyday demeanor, she’s secretly so starved for male attention that the mere sight of a handsome date turns her into a sex-starved crazy person. It tries to mine comedy laughs from her being certifiably insane, then later scolds other characters/the audience for thinking she’s weird. It’s the old Adam Sandler hypocrisy, but disguised as a rom-com instead of a man-boy flick.
The biggest problem with this movie is that it completely forgot to give its characters any sort of motivation for anything they were doing. Mary seemed odd, but she had a functional life before she met Steve. Why did she give it all up to stalk him? Why did Thomas Haden Church encourage this? Why did her weirdo friends she just met follow her across the country to enable this? Why did I stay in the theater for the full runtime? None of these things make any sense.
Agreed, which is a big part of what makes it so watchable. It feels as though it was written by a genuinely insane person.
Well, Bullock was married to Jesse James at the time, so if she wants to claim temporary insanity, I’ll allow it.
I always felt Church’s character was just being a knob, to keep annoying Steve by egging Mary on; nothing more.
This place is dead.
There is a great episode of How Did This Get Made about this film, highly recommend: http://viajon.net/HDTGM/PodcastGenerator/index.php?name=20110404-all_about_steve.mp3
I’m only interested if Jason Mantzoukas describes the movie as “bonkers.”
PAUL SCHEER: Squarespace!
JASON MANTZOUKAS: It’s literally actually bonkers!
JUNE DIANE RAPHAEL: What I don’t understand is…
(Saying this as a fan)
I listened to part of it. I didn’t catch a “bonkers,” but I haven’t listened to the podcast in a long time, and I’d forgotten the specific joy of June Diane Raphael sounding genuinely concerned about the health and stability of the people who made the movie.
My favorite June is the one that gives in to the madness and just gleefully enjoys whatever bad movie they’re reviewing, like Fair Game or From Justin To Kelly.
PAUL: That scene makes no sense. We’ll find out why, later.
JUNE (shrugs): Will we?
PAUL (shrugs): Eh.
Also her observation from Speed 2.
JASON: They get sucked into the propellors and the husband tells his wife, “Don’t worry, it’s not your fault.”
JUNE: YES IT IS! It’s no one’s fault but hers!!!
The really baffling thing is there’s a scene of Mary on a bus explaining her whole stalker scheme, and everything about the way it’s presented indicates that our sympathy is supposed to be with the other passengers who are stuck with no escape as she annoys the hell out of them. How could the filmmakers have that much self-awareness about her in this scene, but nowhere else?
This article fails to discuss the use of Drops of Jupiter during the powerful emotional climax of the film and how I couldn’t stop laughing at it.
“But not since Gigli have I been as downright baffled by how a film this bizarre could’ve been conceived in the first place, let alone filmed and edited without someone realizing what a monstrosity they were making.”Now, I actually want to check this out.
I felt this way about Good Luck Chuck, a movie a group of us saw out of boredom on valentines day thinking it would just be a generic rom-com we could talk through. It was compellingly awful. It was a rom-com where Dane Cook drops the c word in the first 10 minutes. It was a rom-com with Dane Cook for crissakes. I kept watching thinking it was amazing that this movie wanted to be Old School and You Got Mail at the same time.
Sandra Bullock trying to do her best ‘Anna Faris’?
The Razzies should have nominated her for The Blind Side instead. Instead of a easy target.
The Razzies always go for the easy target.
I feel like this movie would’ve clicked if Faris was the lead. She’s way better at going broad and ridiculous than Bullock.
I actually do think it crosses over into “so good it’s bad” at points, but she is right in that any attempt to actually solve this movie or apply any rational thought to it will ultimately frustrate you. You just have to get in the headspace that this film wasn’t made in the conventional sense, but rather came together in some far-off galaxy big bang style. Maybe it was a natural phenomena, maybe it was set in place by a deity, we can never know for sure. At some point, this creation was accidentally transmitted to Earth in 2009, with human characters that have absolutely no human characteristics.If someone tries to tell you that there actually was a logic in making this movie and it was just lost in the execution, they’re the feds and they’re trying to shield you from the truth that there are alien beings with vague understandings of Earthlings who nevertheless keep attempting to make movies about us.*Runs away from this post like a group of deaf kids running through a field that suddenly collapses and I think was supposed to be funny, maybe?*
The trailer does not look that terrible
This movie is unnatural! God made All About Eve, not All About Steve!And it also sounds really misguided from the start, given Church’s quote. The Wedding Crashers dudes are horny sleazebags, not sexually frustrated goofballs, and that kind of character — the guy who gets laid a lot but has to learn to settle down etc etc — is not the same at as the horny dork who is usually in high school/college, the American Pie template. The horny dork would make an epic journey, a Road Trip if you will, and like other people are noting here Bullock’s character is way too old for this kind of person.
It’s a case of gender-swapping just not making a lick of sense. Everyday straight male divorce lawyers who look like Vince Vaughan and Owen Wilson can’t get laid with random/new people at will, so their labors for hanky-panky have the potential to be funny. A woman who looks like Sandra Bullock, on the other hand, can pretty much choose who she likes.
Vince Vaughan as someone who can’t get laid, yes. Owen Wilson, not so believable.
The Proposal was pretty decent, though Sandra Bullock’s character in this sounds a bit more fun, though the movie seems like an ill-conceived, pointless mess around her
At times, it seems to see her as a sympathetic but ultimately deeply misguided woman who needs a major lesson in boundaries—like Rebecca Bunch in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. But other times, it sees her as an optimistic, upbeat, Paddington-style figure whose innate, quirky goodness changes everyone around her for the better.I would argue that the second sentence also describes Rebecca Bunch, which proves that this combination can be done right.I have never seen this, and this is one of your entries that made me not want to watch it, even out of curiosity. Great article, shame about the film, to paraphrase Not the 9 O’Clock News.
Rebecca Bunch does both, which is one of the things I love about the series: she is damaged and certainly dangerous at times, and makes people around suffer, but also triggers positive change around.
That’s the only reason I could watch Crazy Ex. I’m too much of an empath to watch Becca Bunch suffer over and over without any kind of redeeming, positive qualities
“Sandy always said her schematic was Wedding Crashers. She wanted it to be a dude comedy, except about a woman.”I’m ready to see the Wedding Crashers reboot with two female leads. You could do the gender-swapped version in which they crash weddings for free food and drink and to hook up with the groomsmen, or you could really go for it with the LGBTQ version about two lesbians cruising for one night stands with drunk bridesmaids. I’m betting that both versions would be much more watchable than “All About Steve.”
I feel like this wouldn’t be a hard movie to write and could go in a ton of different directions, depending on the casting.
Presumably they would NOT want to include a gender swapped version of the scene where Isla Fisher ties Vince Vaughn to a bed and forces him to have sex with her against his will.
I’m ready to see the Wedding Crashers reboot with two female leads.
Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates was sort of that.
Sort of, and I am fond of that movie. (Well, fond of certain scenes within that movie.) So I take that as encouragement – we need to get this female-led Wedding Crashers reboot off the ground!
Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates was sort of that.On the subject of worst films I’ve ever seen …I wanted to walk out on that one and yes I’m queuing up the I was on a plane remark.(I really was. The plane was going to be landing fairly soon and they shut the entertainment system a bit earlier and I chose this film because its runtime showed it would finish before then and what was the worst that could happen …? Well, let that be a lesson to me.)
Cast it with Kate McKinnon and Dan Levy. They are, of course, crashing weddings for free food and a chance to score with bridesmaids and groomsmen. They draw attention from the wrong people—the best man takes a liking to a totally disinterested Kate, while the maid of honor relentlessly chases a terrified Dan. Ultimately, the only way out is to play matchmaker and get their pursuers to hook up.Will Ferrell could reprise his role as the legendary Chazz Reinhold, there to impart his wisdom to Kate and Dan when things go, oh so predictably, wrong.I think McKinnon and Levy can mine some serious gut busting comedy out of that scenario.
using a hitherto unmentioned knowledge of psychics to MacGyver a pulley system Yeah, I can see where mind-reading would come in handy when it comes to making pulleys. Maybe you could read the mind of someone good at physics.
My main question about this when it came out (other than “god why?”) was about Bradley Cooper. Yes, he’s charming, yes Julia Roberts married Danny Moder, but does this movie do something other than have him being handsome and charming as the reason why Sandy has her psychotic break and leaves her life to (financially ruinously I am sure) stalk him across the nation? If you’ve ever seen Passion by Stephen Sondheim…that one left me with the same feeling, like sure this Giorgio guy reads a few books, that’s great, but mole-woman is only so into him because he’s a hunky stud and the musical fails at revealing or hinting at unplumbed depths, he’s just a bro who’s plumbing some hot blonde instead of mole-woman.The other side of that is the “SWF” type terror of being stalked just because you tried to get away from someone you’re not into…which isn’t that kind of like “Swimfan”?
As a counterpoint, I present you an example of “male character goes crazy for a woman only because she’s beautiful and she contributes nothing else”: most of cinema.
Nice fucc boi hairdo
one of the only film credits of podcaster/Bubble author Jordan Morris. That’s a reason to see it I guess.
Showing up for her Razzie Award cemented her place in Coolness.
Not surprisingly, Paul Verhoeven broke new ground yet again by leading the way here as well.“Paul Verhoeven was the first person to go to the ceremony to receive his awards; he accepted Worst Picture and Worst Director awards for the 1995 film Showgirls, at the awards ceremony at The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_have_accepted_Golden_Raspberry_Awards#:~:text=Paul%20Verhoeven%20was%20the%20first,at%20The%20Hollywood%20Roosevelt%20Hotel.
Yeah, but Sandra owned it. And the audience went bananas from it. AND she won the Oscar the following day for The Blind Side. Hell of a week.
I’ve generally liked this column, but perhaps instead of the outliers that suck, maybe focus on the good ones that get overlooked? Throwing The Fabulous Baker Boys out there “for your consideration”.
This movie feels like someone learned there was a movie called “All About Eve”, didn’t know anything about it, and said “Hey, what if we make a movie called All About *Steve*? Huh? Huh?” and high-fived everyone in the room.
THC should have played Steve’s BFF/roommate, Adam.Shenanigans ensue as she thinks they’re a couple.spoiler: they are, but they’re both bi and looking for a babymama.
I thought the movie was funny in a quirky sort of way. It did allow Bullock to expand on portraying an awkward character and showcase her slapstick skills.However, it was painful to watch Bullock’s character chase a man who wasn’t remotely interested in her in such an insanely stupid way. While her wreckless abandon could be seen as a form of total commitment, she quite literally wrecked her life over a man who barely knew she was alive. The main thing I kept thinking to myself as she went from one disastrous vignette to another was, “Come on Mary. You’re better than this!”And as for Cooper’s character, he’s not some sort of villain. He’s an exceedingly normal guy who’s trying to let this lovesick puppy of a woman down gently and pretty much failing to get through to her. From a male perspective, it’s only funny if you’ve been there before and managed to not have it turn into a real-life Fatal Attraction.Of course, love—or what we may think is love—really can make us stupid. So there’s that.