ALL ABOUT STEVE

Starring:
Sandra Bullock, Thomas Haden Church, Bradley Cooper, Ken Jeong, DJ Qualls, Katy Mixon and Keith David

Director:
Phil Traill

Running Time:
99 mins

Out to buy on Blu-Ray/DVD 17/05/10

"My Steven with a V"

Still living at home but loving her crossword puzzle designing job, Mary Horowitz (Bullock) is seen as slightly bizarre as she continues to spout useless information when ever she opens her mouth. When her parents set her up on a blind date with CCN news cameraman Steve (Cooper), she instantly falls for him but Steve doesn’t exactly feel the same way. When he makes an excuse to leave by saying that if she didn’t have a job she could come with him on his latest news report, Mary instantly makes a connection. Inadvertently losing her job, Mary decides to follow Steve to his latest news story, much to the amusement of news reporter Hartman Hughes (Haden Church).

When it comes to doing something truly unique in entertainment history, Hollywood is usually the provider and with ‘All About Steve’ Sandra Bullock inadvertently does just that.

In the career of Sandra Bullock, 2009 will be a monumental year. This is the year that she scaled new heights in her acting career. The year that will change her career forever and one that Hollywood and the critical press will remember for a long time because 2009 was the year that Sandra Bullock’s show exactly what she can do. Late in the year we saw the release of two films that would allow her to make history, for every different reason. One was called ‘The Blind Side’ and the other was ‘All About Steve’ and both would win her awards but they would be very different.

Graced with the Best Actress Oscar for her role in ‘The Blind Side’, the night before the biggest night in the Hollywood calendar, Sandra Bullock won Worst Actress at the alternative awards, The Razzies for her role in ‘All About Steve’. This is the award that no performer wants to win but, to her credit, Sandra Bullock accepted a Razzie in person, playing to the crowd and giving every member of the audience a copy of the movie that she produced herself. The question that any Sandra Bullock fan should be asking is, why is she still appearing in movies like this?

After appearing in ‘Speed’ in 1994, Sandra Bullock became the new Hollywood darling and quickly became a stalwart in the romantic comedy genre but with fame coming relatively late in her career she quickly headed to the dreaded 40. With many a Hollywood starlet disappearing after they pass this dreaded milestone, Bullock started to choose some more challenging roles and different genres to show what she could do but only really the Oscar winning ‘Crash’ and ‘Infamous’ gave her the chance to show what she could do until ‘The Blind Side’. Instead she continued to make romantic comedies but, as with Ryan Reynolds in ‘The Proposal’, her leading man is man is almost ten years her junior but ‘All About Steve’ is a little different’

As Mary Horowitz, Sandra Bullock asks us to dispel belief and think that someone who looks like her, however weird her character supposed to be, still lives at home with her parents and can’t get a boyfriend. Ok, so Mary is very strange, constantly talking about crossword puzzles and sprouting facts about everything she sees or hears, and the moral of the story is that we should accept people for who they are, but this supposed to be an outrageous comedy and it does not have the laughs to qualify for this. The problem is that the audience will find Mary irritating and instead of not liking Bradley Cooper’s Steve for doing everything to avoid her, you are thinking that he should be running away from her. Throw in Thomas Hayden Church as clichéd news reporter, a subdued Ken Jeong as their producer Angus and DJ Qualls who has done nothing since making his name in ‘Road Trip’ and you have a very average comedy film.

The big question is if ‘All Above Steve’ is as bad as Razzie win makes you think and the simple answer is no. While this won’t be a career highlight for anyone involved, there is a little bit of charm about the film when it comes to the finale making it just about bearable to watch. Lets just hope that now she has won the Oscar, we never see Sandra Bullock in movies like this ever again.

Special Features:
Deleted scenes and Gag reel

The Proposal


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2010