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We don't want to like Sandra Bullock.
For a while, she made that easy for us by appearing in movies like Two if by Sea (remember America's brief love affair with Denis Leary? We don't, really, either) and the vanity project In Love and War and the Waterworld-calibre flop Speed 2: Cruise Control. When she started commanding Julia Roberts-level pay on the strength of her supporting (though undeniably charming) performance in the original Speed and her (oh, all right: adorable) starring role in While You Were Sleeping, we were a bit surprised at her audacity.
But now, we have to admit that she deserves the money, and the fame, because she is a genuine movie star.
The question, naturally, is, what does that mean?
In Sandra's case, it means that even as her movie fortunes ebb and flow -- from the above-named flops to more favourably received efforts like Forces of Nature, Hope Floats, Practical Magic, and the recent 28 Days -- she's not out of place on the cover of InStyle or Vanity Fair. Her Q rating is high. She plays in Peoria.
And Sandra's name has enough weight that nearly any movie in which she appears is essentially a star vehicle (for herself, I mean). Think about it: her most recent films have paired her with the likes of Aidan Quinn, Harry Connick Jr., Viggo Mortensen, and some British dude whose name even I don't remember. (Wanna bet whether she does?) Okay, one could argue that Ben Affleck, her himbo du jour in Forces of Nature, was, at the time, a star of her magnitude -- his face was visible on the poster and video box, after all -- but my feeling was that she was giving poor Ben a leg-up in some kind of Bring Your Flat-Headed Frat-Boy-Pig to Work celebrity outreach effort. Because...can Ben carry a movie on his own? No. No, he can't. He needs his ex-girlfriend or a giant meteor or Bruce Willis or a Japanese bombing attack (or some combination of the above) to use as a crutch to prop up his ever-declining appeal. Wrong, am I? Check out Reindeer Games and then we'll talk. But this isn't Ben Affleck's Fame Audit; my point is that, when you really think about it, Sandra Bullock is a much bigger star than he.
And well she should be. There's a reason she's so frequently compared to Julia Roberts; both exude a natural sweetness and sort of aw-shucks normalcy that is so rare and precious that when a Gwyneth attempts to manufacture it in Bounce, it's a big story. "Look, she's acting like she lives in the Valley! Couldn't you die?" Would it be a story if Sandra Bullock played a middle-class widowed mom? No. Similarly, it wasn't much of a story when Julia Roberts played a lower-middle-class divorced mom in Erin Brockovich. Some actors are capable of being huge movie stars and playing normal, insecure, sometimes messed-up people you might want to hang out with, and if Sandra's apparently normalcy and goofiness in her real life (or, as much as we see of it in interviews, anyway) is an act, as some have charged, then it's even more to her credit that she's able to pull it off in the movies. Hey, we don't buy all that America's Sweetheart crap, but our sense, inasmuch as we're able to observe Sandra Bullock, is that she doesn't, either.
Sandra Bullock is a movie star, plain and simple. She may not be a virtuoso actor, but she knows her strengths and she gets the job done. Long may she get movies greenlit on the sheer force of her personal appeal.
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