[Editor’s note: After reading the following review I felt that its obvious bias necessitated the release of certain information about the writer gleaned from files compiled by the Justice Department, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Republican National Committee, the Democratic National Committee, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the Department of Defense, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, all of which were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act; his high school yearbook was helpful too:
David’s first serious girlfriend, at age 15, was a petite brunette drill-corps captain who dumped him for a basketball player; he keeps her photo in an envelope taped to the underside of the bottom right drawer of his desk at CL where he thinks no one else knows about it. He later suffered a pivotal heartbreak at the hands of another gymnastic brunette, this one of Teutonic extraction, who took advantage of his Army top security clearance to gain repatriation for another foreign national. On his left deltoid is tattooed the name “K____,” whom he once admitted, while under the influence of several chocolate daiquiris at an office party, to be an Arab-American woman, also brunette, who is still the most supernaturally beautiful thing he has ever laid eyes on. And his recruitment into the Libertarian Party was secured by a topaz-eyed brunette who has since disavowed all sexual and political affiliations and joined a militant group, inspired by Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, that liberates wild animals from zoos, circuses, and movie sets.
I think you’ll agree, there’s a dark-haired pattern here. Had I known about this in advance I would have had one of our other staffers review Miss Congeniality instead, but deadlines would not permit a rewrite. Objectivity is always the priority for us at CL. Rest assured this sort of thing will not happen again.]
Like many actors of her generation, Sandra Bullock has decided that, in order to exercise a little more control over her future, she should get into producing some of her own movies. Although her career hadn’t exactly tanked – in 1999 she was considered the second most bankable film actress, behind Julia Roberts – she hadn’t revisited the success of her 1994 and ’95 breakout movies, Speed and While You Were Sleeping, which together earned half a billion dollars worldwide. So far the performance of her self-produced films has been inconsistent; Hope Floats did okay at the box office, but Gun Shy rightfully flopped.
Now comes her most hopeful in-house project yet, about an FBI agent who goes undercover at a beauty pageant. And in the words of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, from the song “Cousin Dupree” off their long-awaited new CD Two Against Nature: “All I could say was ‘ow-ow-ouch.’”
Bullock plays Gracie Hart, a lifelong tomboy who gets her jollies bashing around bad guys for the Bureau’s NYC office. She can shoot, punch, drive, and swear with the guys, but is also an unfeminine frump who’s basically unhappy because she’s not getting any. Or vice versa. When a serial bomber threatens to crash the Miss United States pageant in San Antonio, her punishment for a previous screwup is to masquerade as Miss New Jersey and check it out. The pageant’s organizer (Candice Bergen, still sounding essentially like Murphy Brown) and emcee (William Shatner, still sounding essentially like the Big Giant Head from “3rd Rock”) are willing to cooperate, but it will take an industrial-strength makeover and crash-course in poise to pass Gracie off as a beauty queen. Enter unambiguously foppish consultant Vic Melling (Michael Caine), who works a miracle.
Miss Congeniality is only fairly funny – about what you’d expect considering the mixed record of director Donald Petrie (Mystic Pizza and Grumpy Old Men, and the gawdawful filmed version of My Favorite Martian) and screenwriter Marc Lawrence (he wrote Bullock’s pleasant romantic comedy costarring Ben Affleck, Forces of Nature, as well as the tiresome, unnecessary remake of The Out-of-Towners). Bullock exhibits an reasonable affinity for physical comedy, but frankly, compared with Michael Caine, everybody else in the cast, especially Benjamin Bratt, who plays Gracie’s co-worker and kindling love interest, appears to have studied acting via correspondence course. What makes the whole thing worth a month’s pay though, and has me wondering if it’s too late to take up a career in beauty-queen consulting myself, is the moment when the new, improved Gracie strides out of an FBI hangar into the sunlight, freshly coiffed and Versace’d to the nines like something out of an old Whitesnake video. The rest of the movie is kind of a fog after that.
I’ve previously stated in these pages that I’d happily drink Sandra Bullock’s bathwater. You can add to that the contents of her swimming pool and all five quarts of 20w50 from the oil pan of her Beemer, because I was floored. I am still scraping old Milk Duds off my chin.
You know, I heard she’s not dating Matthew McConaughey anymore. I wonder if a good tattoo artist could change “K_____” to “Sandra”? B-