Do I owe Sandra Bullock an apology? Somehow, the siren song of The Proposal was just too loud to ignore for the movie-going public. While it wasn’t entirely offensive from a critical standpoint, I still find myself scratching my head and wonder what exactly appealed in that movie to make it one of the biggest movies of the year with over $150 million in ticket sales to its name. Fast-forward a few months and here we are again with another relatively harmless Sandra Bullock comedy wherein the star plays Ugly Betty in one of her charmingly mismatched rom-coms.

Bullock’s Mary Horowitz is a kind of Rain Man with words, a befuddled and anxious motormouth that creates the weekly crossword puzzle for a Sacramento newspaper with the glee and self-satisfaction of a scientist that just broke the human genome. It’s important to like what you do, but Mary’s OCD attention to detail leads her to propose bizarre puzzles, like one shaped like a leprechaun’s head for St. Patrick’s Day. Speaking of obsessive detail, Mary does all her puzzles by hand. Now, I’m not an expert on the fine art of puzzle making, but I’m more or less sure there’s a couple of computer programs that can do that for you. Just like how there’s programs that allow you to lay out a newspaper – in the computer. I know newspapers are hard up, but they can still at least afford an old copy of Quark or InDesign.

The plot sees Mary set up on a blind date with Steve (The Hangover’s Bradley Cooper), a handsome cameraman with what I suppose is a 24-hour news network. (That point’s not made explicitly clear.) After a quick, near romp in the back of Steve’s truck, Mary decides that she’s madly in love with him, and decides to quasi-stalk him as Steve goes on assignment from one human interest story to another. As you may have guessed, Steve’s enthusiasm for Mary is somewhat less than enthusiastic. Cooper gets to extend his tactless jerk streak to two, but I’m afraid there’s not the balance in character that there was in The Hangover.

In fact, in many ways, this film belongs to Thomas Haden Church as the blowhard reporter that keeps telling Mary that Steve’s evasion is shyness and keeps stringing her along by feeding her their next location. Church’s ludicrous line delivery creates genuine belly laughs, so much so that you scarcely let yourself believe it at first. For that matter, a lot of what works about All About Steve has nothing to do with Mary and Steve and more to do with the film’s hilarious send-up of TV news. The Daily Show’s Jason Jones plays Church’s cross-network rival and his use of speculative graphics will make any regular viewer of CNN roar in recognition.

Of course, this isn’t a 21st century take on Network, but an off-kilter love story about a kook in bright red boots and her disinterested love match. It takes the movie a while to find a good place, but if you can sit through the first 30 minutes with all its maddening over-the-top characterization, then you should be well situated to make it through the next 60 or so, at least until the sappy and clichéd ending that really resolves nothing. The winning trio of Cooper, Church and Ken Jeong as their frazzled field producer are the real winners in this movie and if they made a sequel starring just those three I’d be the first in line to watch. However, seeing All About Steve means sitting through Sandra Bullock’s attempt to make typical female leads in romantic comedies seem sedate by comparison, and at least on that level she succeeds. Depending on your definition of success of course.