When you learn that Sandra Bullock produced as well as stars in "All About Steve," you can't help wondering, "What was she thinking?" In a film that comes on like a madcap romance but settles swiftly into inept crazy comedy, she looks as bland and thin as a bleached pretzel stick and acts as if she were starring in a medical cartoon about logorrhea.
Yes, I mean logorrhea: according to Webster's New World, Second College Edition, "n., excessive talkativeness, especially when incoherent and uncontrollable." (I'm amazed that definition didn't make it into the script, a cross between a dictionary and a bad issue of Mad magazine.) Bullock's character, Sacramento, Calif., crossword constructor Mary Horowitz, can't help turning conversations into wearying brain twisters built on word relations and floods of facts. She's like a walking, talking - especially talking - synonym finder.
Bullock does her damndest to be nerdy and instead becomes excruciatingly artificial - a malfunctioning verbal fun machine. Her whimsy sinks like a series of lead thought balloons. Director Phil Traill and screenwriter Kim Barker aid and abet her disastrous quest to be simultaneously brainy and goofy with a never-ending series of would-be comic catastrophes, including a hole in the ground that swallows a gang of deaf children. (Costume designer Gary Jones does his bit for Calamity Mary, too, supplying her with shiny red long boots and secret naughty scarlet lingerie.)
