All About Steve

The next chance I had to see a movie after Little Rock was four days, after making my way up through Oklahoma and into Kansas. After five nights in a row camping, when I rolled into Dodge City, I felt dusty and tired, and decided to treat myself to a motel. It was Sunday afternoon, and after checking in and taking a nice long shower, I used to motel wi-fi to peruse the local movie listings on Google Movies.

Before heading off the movies, I did a little sightseeing. It turns out Dodge City is very underwhelming. There is much less there than you'd think there should be, and what is there is mostly a cheesy reconstruction of an old western town. By far the most interesting thing was the old movie theater (no longer showing movies) in downtown where the movie Dodge City (1939) directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Errol Flynn premiered. It's one of my favorite movies, actually, since its a subgenre which I find fascinating, which are movies featuring cattle drives. I enjoy most movies that feature cattle, but ones with cattle drives are special.

Dodge City isn't a very big place, but out on the Great Plains, almost any community of appreciable size feels like its own little planet in deep space, so there were a nice big multiplex showing a good spectrum of recent releases.

The multiplex turned out to be located in a mall---at least what passes for a little mall in Dodge City. As malls go, it was the kind I liked, with a little downstairs with an amusement arcade, and of course, a nice big multiplex theater with a huge brilliant marquee inside the mall. I wanted to take a picture, but there was a security guard there giving me the stink eye, so I decided not to.

There as nothing remotely interesting as Dodge City on the bill that evening. Nothing with cattle drives. No westerns. Instead I invoked my principle of seeing the movie that had been out the longest, which in this was a romantic comedy called All About Steve, starring Sandra Bullock.

It was the second romantic comedy for Bullock this summer, after The Proposal, which is sitll plugging along in a few theaters after three months. But whereas in The Proposal, Bullock is a smooth, high-powered bitch executive whose heart must learn to melt from love, in All About Steve, she is a type of awkward female dork loner that we rarely rarely see in Hollywood movies.

I was not surprised to see that Bullock was a producer of this movie. It was the kind of risky movie (and role) that mature successful actresses sometimes like to pursue when have the pull in order to do so. Her character (Mary) is not at all sexy. She's real. Or is she?

Actually I didn't think she was real at all. She was too dorky to be real, and to be played by Sandra Bullock. But I think that was not the point. Let me explain.

It occurred to me while watching the movie that so many comedies lately feature men who are completely infantile and unable to relate to women except in the crudest of terms. There are probably a lot of men who wind up watching these movies and who don't at all realize that they are exactly like the men the movie.

On the other hand, All About Steve was clearly a movie aimed at women. It occurred to me that many women probably watch this movie and think they are exactly as dorky and awkward as the Mary character but in fact they are not. Bullock's Mary is the kind of character women fear that they are. Vive la difference.

All About Steve tutrned out to be a more complex and interesting movie that I thought it would be. It is defintely not going to be in theaters very long. It simply isn't "mainstream Hollywood," but I'm sure Bullock knew that when she was making it. She makes movies like The Proposal (where she is the bitch audiences expect) in order to finance a movie like All About Steve (where she is a dork, which audiences don't expect).

My surprise at the nature of this movie was enough to sustain my interest and amusement throughout the story, which is a little bit of a stretch into absurdity, but that seemed good enough for me.

The only thing that rubbed me wrong was right at the end. Throughout the story, there seemed to be a sort of grudgingly loveable portrayal of characters who are obviously meant to be born again Christians (who befriend and help Mary). For some reason at the end, out of the blue, we have to learn that good-hearted Mary is "Jewish Catholic."

Her religion seemed immaterial throughout the story. Why do we have to learn that she is Jewish Catholic? Judaism seems to crop up everywhere in movies lately. Christianity is always portrayed as screwed up, but decent Jewish characters come up at least once a month or more. I don't mind when it is part of the story, but this seemed to come out of the blue, shoehorned into the narrative, almost like a commercial. The upshot was that all of sudden, Mary was no longer everywoman---her quirkiness is due to her ethnicity and religion. It made her less universal at a stroke, and for no reason at all, it seemed.

Errol Flynn never would have done it that way.