Friday, September 4, 2009

The Joy of Overwhelming Dislike















I don't typically engage in schadenfreude, but the Metacritic page for the new Sandra Bullock movie, All About Steve, is pretty great. It's not easy to annoy virtually every major film critic (even Transformers 2 received a few decent reviews), but Bullock managed to pull off that ignoble feat.

Here's an especially good quote, from the Boston Globe:
It is to comedy what leprosy once was to the island of Molokai: a plague best contemplated from many miles away.

In a spectacular feat of miscasting, the star plays a California fruitcake named Mary Horowitz who lives with her parents, constructs crossword puzzles for a living, and never stops yammering about the trivia that fizzes around her brain. Mary is supposed to be adorable. She’s not. She’s possibly the most irritating character I’ve ever encountered in a Hollywood movie. Five minutes in her presence produces only a searing pain in one’s frontal lobes and a primal flight response. The other characters understand this. Why don’t the filmmakers?
Ouch.