CHICAGO - MOVIE REVIEWS ALL ABOUT STEVE

MOVIE REVIEWS ALL ABOUT STEVE

All About Steve , starring Sandra Bullock as a crossword-puzzle constructor for a local paper, is generating some of the most caustic comments of the year -- many of them ideally suited for crossword puzzles. "Toothless and tasteless" is the way Claudia Puig describes it in USA Today. Manohla Dargis in the New York Times uses the word "inert" to describe the filmmaking on display here. Kyle Smith in the New York Times warns "Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy review," then describes the movie as "grotesquely unfunny," "brain-stranglingly witless," "a deeply unpleasant, bottomless well of cringe induction," and then the kicker "It may be the worst Bullock movie I've seen, and I've seen Speed 2 Cruise Contro l." Peter Howell in the Toronto Star comments that the film should "have gone straight to DVD -- or even better, to landfill." But Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune produces perhaps the best put-down of them all "There's nothing wrong with All About Steve that a rewrite couldn't fix," he writes, "as long as the rewrite involved a different writer, a different character and a different story."

04/09/2009