Yes, before that I'd soldiered on through a good eight new releases, none of the viewing of which really suffered from my underlying distant foul mood the past two weeks. (Fortunately for me, here in Australia removed from it all, it has managed to be very distant, as my coping mechanisms for dealing with this disappointment have been working.)
But having given myself a little comfort food in the form of Friends episodes on the very night of the election, I finally gave myself a little of the cinematic kind on Sunday night.
The comfort came in the form of a romantic comedy in general, and The Proposal in particular.
Anne Fletcher's romcom is not a great movie, not by any stretch of the imagination. (Which, arguably, might have made it more effective as comfort food.) But it's a far better one than you might think, and it benefits from starring the darling Sandra Bullock, always a personal favorite. More on her in a moment.
The last time I watched The Proposal was the second time I'd seen it within the space of a year, while in the hospital after my older son's birth in 2010. It was only just new the year before that, but I didn't see it until the calendar flipped to January in order to include it in year-end rankings.
So I do think about it sentimentally for that reason. In the state of emotional fullness of becoming new parents, my wife and I watched The Proposal in her hospital bed -- her actually in the bed, me in the neighboring chair -- while we waited the comically long amount of time to be discharged. It helped pass the time quite well and we were both highly vulnerable to the charms of Bullock and Ryan Reynolds, to say nothing of the ways they lower their defenses and show each other their hidden fragility over the course of the narrative.
I did find myself mildly pushed in those same emotional directions while watching The Proposal on Sunday, but only mildly. I thought I remembered a few more moments of getting all the feels.
One thing that did not disappoint was the comic charm and comedic timing of Bullock, and it caused me to ponder that it has now been 30 years of having Sandra Bullock in our lives.
I'm usually the sort of pedant who would point out that Bullock's acting career began in 1987 with a movie called Hangmen -- or would have been if I'd bothered to look it up on IMDB. (Just so you don't think I'm the kind of freak who can spontaneously produce the name of Bullock's first feature, made when she was only 23.) That's closer to 40 years ago than 30.
But we all know that Sandra Bullock really became SANDRA BULLOCK with the release of Speed in 1994. In fact, so striking was that movie as an introduction of "new" talent -- even if it was her 15th credit on IMDB -- that she is the person I think of any time I think about movies that introduced a future star to us.
By coming out in 2009, The Proposal now represents the halfway point between Speed and this moment in time.
And because it took Bullock until she was 30 -- or about to turn 30 six weeks after Speed was released -- to get this sort of role, that means she was halfway to the age she is now at the time she made it. That's right, Bullock turned 60 years old in July.
Even though it would make sense that this is how old she is, seeing as how I just had my own 51st birthday, it made me a bit sad to consider it.
Sad not because I think a 60-year-old should be thrown in the bin. If you're a man, you might just be getting started at age 60.
Sad because as a woman, Bullock won't get that chance, and she has already begun her inevitable receding from the public spotlight. She doesn't have an acting credit since 2022's Bullet Train -- which I haven't seen, which reminds I still have plenty of unseen Sandy Bullock to look forward to -- and though I see that Practical Magic 2 is in the works, I don't have much hope of any more films where she gets to work her series of facial expressions and low-level physical pratfalls. (Just think of that great shot in Miss Congeniality where she takes a spill while walking in high heels, which combines both.)
I feel like a little Sandra Bullock retrospective might provide me any more comfort I might need, whenever I might need it.
But lest my 30-year crush on this actress comes too much to the forefront, I may need to keep it on the down low a bit. I already survived a couple entrances into the living room last night in my which wife surely wondered why I was watching an old Sandra Bullock film and could probably even identify which one it was. If I follow that in short succession with The Heat, The Lake House and While You Were Sleeping, I'll probably have some 'splaining to do.
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