All About Sandra

What the heck happened to Sandra Bullock?

It seems like just a decade ago when she was America's sweetheart -- a genuine movie star whose girl-next-door persona seemed a welcome alternative to the artificial glam of a Sharon Stone or Pamela Anderson.

Now Ms. Bullock seems determined to trash her old persona in order to revive her big-screen career, only to create one disaster after another. Granted, most of the films Ms. Bullock made back in the 90s were hardly classics... but they seemed more watchable than her most recent efforts.

First there was The Proposal, a summer movie based on the idea that basing a whole romantic comedy around a variation of the bossy character Ms. Bullock played in Crash would be a good idea. It wasn't.

Not only was Ms. Bullock's “boss from Hell” routine fairly dull compared to Meryl Streep's take as Miranda Priestley in The Devil Wears Prada, but the movie went on to put in her character's mouth the same sort of stereotypical immigrant jokes that should have become obsolete in the year 2009. Not to mention the fact that the movie gave us yet another variation on the old “green card marriage” subplot -- a subplot that might have worked better had the writers not seemed so bound and determined to skip over some of the real-life issues facing modern-day immigrants in order to give Bullock's character a happy ending.

After that came All About Steve, a movie about a woman who travels halfway across the country in pursuit of a would-be boyfriend. Apart from the movie's tabloid news parodies and some scenes featuring Thomas Haden Church as a egotistical newsman -- scenes which get a lot more humor from Mr. Church than the script deserves -- this is not all that funny a movie.

I guess the movie started to lose me that it suggested that Bullock's character (Mary Magdalene Horowitz) was seriously abnormal just because she likes creating crossword puzzles and wearing red boots. Excuse me? Liking crossword puzzles is weird? Wearing bright red boots in an era in which even shy suburban women sometimes go in for tattoos and not so shy women sometimes go in for body piercing is abnormal? Is the screenwriter serious?

Then there is the script's constant attempt to get humor out of stuff that is not all that funny. For example, an incident in which several deaf children fall into a hole is treated as the stuff of high hilarity And an attempt to parody pro-life and pro-choice demonstrations is made which does not actually parody such demonstrations but rather provides a lukewarm and inoffensive imitation of such.

The sad part is that the movie hints at enough potentially interesting themes -- be yourself, diversity is a good thing, conformity is bad -- that it could have been great had the filmmakers put forth some effort.

But they did not.

And I can't help but find it pretty ominous for Ms. Bullocks' future that both movies have tried to sex up the traditional Sandra Bullock image by either showing Ms. Bullock in various scenes of near-nudity or else dressing her up in a red bra and short skirt. In other words, it is no longer enough for Sandra Bullock to act like Sandra Bullock. Now she has to act like Sharon Stone. Which is an odd message, indeed, to include in that second movie -- that movie that supposedly encourages people to be themselves...