Zany movie comedies are a major gamble. On too many occasions, the humor does not work for enough people, or maybe the director’s sense of humor is different from the audience, or the comedian/actor does not connect.
"All About Steve" may be a shallow story, with television disaster coverage enough of a comedy all by itself, and maybe Sandra Bullock is over the top too far and too often. And yet, I enjoyed the movie, which opens here today, and Bullock tickled me from start to finish. She’s Mary Horowitz, half Jewish and half Catholic, though this potential vein of laughter never is mined, and she does not mention it until the movie’s final minutes.
Anyway, Mary thinks in crossword puzzles, and she creates and designs them for her hometown newspaper in Sacramento, and she has an amazing knowledge of trivia and word counts, but she has no social life, few friends and no fashion knowledge besides the red boots she wears all the time. Why? Stick around and she’ll tell you. I won’t.
Her mother arranges for a blind date one night-that’s where Steve comes in-and, as soon as the car door closes, Mary goes sexually bananas in a hilarious scene enhanced by some nifty, intricate direction from Phil Traill.
A funny, frightened Steve (Bradley Cooper) gets away, but Mary’s life has turned around. The next day, she devotes an entire crossword puzzle to Steve, and she is fired for this lack of professionalism. Then the stalking begins in earnest. Steve works for a television network, as the cameraman, with Thomas Haden Church as the most self-admiring anchor since Ted Baxter, and Ken Teung as the very put-upon Angus the producer. I found all three of them absolutely delightful.
Mary follows Steve to a press conference about a three-legged baby, a flood in Texas, the world’s largest pothole in Arizona, getting in the way and driving Steve to distraction and practically to hysteria
"All About Steve" gets rather boring in the final 20 minutes, but that’s not enough to quench the enjoyment built up along the way.
At multiple theaters
–Joe