BEFORE: I just found out that March is Women's History Month - so that's a great way to justify my romance chain carrying over into March, right? I don't have to call it "March Marriage Madness" like I did last year, I can just say I'm celebrating Women's History - or is it Herstory? I've got "Wonder Woman" coming up in March, can that count? OK, I'm being facetious here, but maybe some of my programming is close enough to qualify, I'll have to take a look. Today in Women's History - on March 3, 1913 thousands of women marched in the first suffragist parade in Washington, DC. And on March 3, 2005, Margaret Wilson was elected as the Speaker of the New Zealand House of Representatives, and for the next 17 months, all of that country's highest political offices were held by women (including Queen Elizabeth II).
Thomas Haden Church carries over from "Lucky Them".
THE PLOT: Convinced that a cable news cameraman is her true love, an eccentric crossword puzzle maker trails him as he travels all over the country, hoping to convince him that they belong together.
AFTER: And almost 11 years ago - on March 6, 2010, Sandra Bullock attended the Golden Raspberry Awards in Hollywood, which traditionally nominates the WORST films and acting performances of each year. She WON (if you can call that winning) 2 awards for her work on "All About Steve", Worst Actress and Worst Couple. But she showed up and handed out DVD copies of the movie, promising that if everyone watched it and it was truly the worst, she'd show up at the ceremony again the following year. Then the next day she won an Academy Award for "The Blind Side", so I'm pretty sure she had the last laugh there.
That being said, the Razzies were well deserved, this is a terrible movie, with terrible characters and a terrible storyline, also terrible dialogue. I don't even know where to start, but Bullock's character is as good a place as any. Mary Horowitz is a cruciverbalist - that's a crossword puzzle creator - for a small Sacramento newspaper. She only has to create one puzzle a week, but she wants to do seven per week, getting harder each day like the New York Times puzzles do. This is to show us that she has ambition, but we soon come to realize that she also dreams big, and doesn't know her own limitations - somehow this is because her brain is filled with all the (mostly) useless facts one needs to know to create crosswords, like the NENE is a Hawaiian goose and the BESSEMER process is important to making steel. Since she lives in this world of words, she's fairly clueless about normal interactions with humans - so being smart actually makes her dumb? Yeah, this doesn't really track.
She's also an adult who still lives with her parents, and has no personal life - so when she's set up on a blind date, she sets her expectations WAY too high - it's just a date, it barely means anything, but to her it means EVERYTHING. So this leads me to conclude that she's got some weird developmental thing, maybe she's autistic or somewhere on the spectrum, but I've met really nerdy girls who have relationship problems, trust me, they don't look anything like Sandra Bullock. But what do you expect from a screenplay that thinks putting a female character in a short skirt and thigh-high boots counts as introspection? Anyway, she totally blows it on her date with Steve - and she practically rapes him in his truck, they never even get to the restaurant? She definitely doesn't know how to play it cool...
Now, to most guys this would seem like a windfall, getting to second base before the date even starts - but Steve is a normal, together guy, for the most part - not because some screenwriter made him that way, it feels more like they forgot to assign any kind of personality to him. But things are clearly moving too fast for him here (honestly, I can't decide if this plot point was believable or not) so he calls off the date and says he just got called to work in Boston - Steve's a camera-man for a cable news show, like "Inside Edition" or CNN or something. Which is more unbelievable here, that a woman would cluelessly initiate sex before the first date starts, or that a man would reject it? I don't think this makes sense from either angle, but unfortunately, it's what we're given to work with today.
Clearly Steve just wanted to be rid of her - he listened to her talk for five minutes, I get that. She's a lot, and she never stops talking about USELESS stuff - OK, the stuff is only useful if you're writing crosswords, so if you have a friend or potential mate who writes crosswords, by all means, dump them now, because they'll never stop and they have no boundaries, plus no cruciverbalist has ever managed to become a respectable member of society, they all live in their own little worlds. (This may seem a little unfair, to paint all "word nerds" with the same brush, but don't blame me, I'm just extrapolating from what this movie is laying down.). Have you met Will Shortz, and managed to have a meaningful conversation with him? I didn't think so.
Mary writes the next week's crossword all about her date with Steve ("All About Steve", get it?) only the problem is that none of the newspaper's 44,000 readers know who Steve is, so the puzzle is unsolvable - again, Mary has no filter, no boundaries and no clue, because being so smart makes her really dumb. So since apparently there is NO EDITOR checking her work before printing it (that's a NITPICK POINT if ever there was one...) Mary loses her job.
So when left alone in the tub to think about thingss, Mary somehow concludes that when Steve says, "I wish I could take you with me..." that he was being sincere (he wasn't) and since she no longer has a job in Sacramento, she takes off to find him, somewhere in America. Because that's what you do when you love somebody, you watch the news channel they work for to find out where the news is, and then you just go there. That's super dumb - by the time she gets there, he's moved on to the next story!
But then she does catch up with him, at a rally for some controversy over a baby girl born with an extra leg - which I don't think is a thing that happens. The reporter who works with Steve wants to keep Mary around because she's a useful dispensary of useless facts that he can quote on air, or maybe he just wants her around because this annoys Steve, or maybe just because he's a dick, it's tough to say. Seriously, this screenplay is all over the damn place and has no focus. Mary and her rally friends then encounter a tornado while trying to catch up with Steve again, only this plot point really goes nowhere, also. The tornado destroys the car she was riding in, only it still sort of works, so what was the damn point?
Then, in Colorado, a group of deaf kids has fallen into an abandoned mine-shaft while running across a field to attend a county fair - so Steve and crew are off to cover the story, and Mary and her clueless friends eventually show up there, too, because nobody seems to have anything better to do with their lives but follow around three reporters? And Mary is so excited to see Steve that she runs toward him, only there is a GIANT HOLE in the ground in between them which she somehow DOES NOT SEE, and she falls in the hole. I wish I could say that was the end of the story, but it's not. It gets worse...
Somehow her useless knowledge allows her to not panic while in the abandoned mine, find the last missing deaf child who somehow got left behind by the rescuers, and communicate with her. Only Mary SAYS that she knows sign language, but then NEVER USES IT - she just keeps talking to the deaf girl in English, only louder, which is positively useless. There was a chance here to make Mary a smart character who saves the day by knowing ASL, but this got bungled too. All they had to do was teach Sandra Bullock a few signs, and that didn't happen - the character could have talked and signed at the same time, that was possible, thereby communicating to both the deaf character AND the audience at the same time. Nope, that was apparently too much for the film to handle. So I'm left wondering how the deaf girl understood Mary at all - the girl signed at Mary, and Mary just spoke back to her. In English. STUPID.
The reporter guy also jumps into the mine for some reason, because he feels responsible for Mary being there in the first place, and not knowing that she was so dumb that she'd walk straight toward a giant hole that's right in front of her. Because why not make the problem worse? But then some arcane knowledge about how a pulley works, and using the weight of a mine car rolling down a track, they're able to rescue themselves. Which is good, because the hundreds of professional rescuers gathered around the giant hole in the field really had no game. Are you kidding me?
There's no payoff, either - we don't find out that Steve suddenly appreciates Mary for the weird, quirky nice girl that she really is, who just happened to try to make out with him on the first date. We don't find out that he never saw her again, either, so I guess it's up to the viewer - only, would that have been so hard to resolve, one way or the other? Did Mary learn anything about maybe not chasing a guy around the country when he's not that into her? I guess we'll never know, because the movie just sort of forgot to tell us anything. It doesn't so much end, instead it just stopped. Which is fine, I couldn't any much more of it, anyway.
Everything's just a bit shy of horrible here - like the big revelation about why she wears those boots. Spoiler alert, it's because they're comfortable. Why does it just feel overall that nobody making this film was trying to do well, not even a little?
Also starring Sandra Bullock (last seen in "The Blind Side"), Bradley Cooper (last heard in "Avengers: Endgame"), Ken Jeong (last seen in "Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween"), DJ Qualls (last seen in "The New Guy"), M.C. Gainey (ditto), Katy Mixon (last seen in "State of Play"), Beth Grant (last seen in "Jackie"), Howard Hesseman (last seen in "Heat"), Luenell (last seen in "Dolemite Is My Name"), Jordan Morris, Keith David (last seen in "Night School"), Holmes Osborne (last seen in "Cheaper by the Dozen"), Jason Jones (last seen in "Chuck"), Kerri Kenney (last seen in "Other People"), Noah Munck, Rachel Sterling, Jackie Johnson, with cameos from Geraldo Rivera (last seen in "The U.S. vs. John Lennon"), Hari Kondabolu, Charlyne Yi (last seen in "Always Be My Maybe"), Eddie Jemison (last seen in "War Dogs")
RATING: 2 out of 10 carved apple heads (also, for NO reason whatsoever)
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