MANILA, Philippines—Sandra Bullock’s stellar career has been a dizzying roller-coaster ride of late. Some of her starrers have failed to click with viewers, but she made up for lost luster with the success of her co-starrer with Ryan Reynolds earlier this year. That’s why hopes were high that her new rom-com, “All About Steve,” would similarly turn out to be something to smile about. Unfortunately, however, the movie is less of a viewing treat—for several reasons.

To start with, Bullock is cast as a maker of crossword puzzles—not exactly the most exciting occupation in town, and difficult to get viewers excited about. To compensate, Bullock’s character is made to come across as really weird and ditzy, but this merely compounds the movie’s problems, because she’s a turn-off rather than cutely crazy.

As the movie’s plot thickens, Bullock’s character is goaded to take a last chance on love by stalking a handsome TV news field cameraman (Bradley Cooper). This gets both of them into all sorts of trouble, but their genuinely humorous output is minimal.

In general, at about this point, we get the feeling that the film is floundering around for an even comedic keel that continues to elude it—until its final fourth section, when things finally lighten and brighten up.

Before that, the production attempts to generate humor by surrounding its two lead players with a veritable rogues’ gallery of antic supporting players. Sadly, however, they only add to the weird and strident proceedings.

Two happy exceptions to the rule are Thomas Haden Church and Ken Jeong, who are cast as the news cameraman’s loopy associates. Church is really funny because his spoof of self-obsessed on-camera TV news people is spot-on, while Jeong gets a lot of comic mileage out of his fey portrayal of the news team’s harassed producer.

The two characters are funny because unlike the others, they don’t have to scream and carry on like a house on fire to delight viewers. In particular, Church is a pleasure to behold because he spoofs familiar excesses of TV news “stars” with sardonic gust.

For his part, Cooper is also quite appealing, but he’s limited by the movie’s less than consistently focused interest in his character. When all is said and done, his and Bullock’s romantic angle is even scrapped in favor of a near-exclusive concentration on her ditzy character. Still, with the relatively few scenes he’s given, Cooper is able to show that he’s leading-man material, so he should do better in his next co-starrer.

What about Bullock? Aside from coming across as too floridly and loudly ditzy by half time, she has difficulty managing the big shift when her character suddenly stops being demented and emerges as a heroine! This is too much even for a fantasticating rom-com to pull off, so, it isn’t likely that the actress will cite this production as one of her career best.

Yes, she does prove that she can go way on a comic limb, but at what price logic and consistency of characterization? To be effective, humor has to be delivered with a light touch, rather than hitting viewers on the head with a caveman’s club.

Swank, Weaver

Hilary Swank is known for the unusually gutsy characters she portrays, so it’s no surprise that she’s been tapped to play the similarly vital aviatrix, Amelia Earhart, in her latest starrer. In “Amelia,” Swank plays the controversial record-setting aviatrix with characteristic grit and passion—for flight, as well as for life itself. The fact that Earhart’s tale ended under mysterious circumstances further whets the public’s imagination about how her final flight really ended, and adds to her iconic stature.

For her part, Weaver returns to the sci-fi mode in James Cameron’s comeback film, “Avatar.” The film’s action mostly takes place on a distant planet named Pandora, where a blue-skinned race is under threat from invading humans working for a huge conglomerate.

After making her sci-fi mark in the “Aliens” film series, Weaver feels right at home filming space travel and exploration, because her father was an astronomer.

As for threats to the environment, she observes, “Definitely a character in our movie’s story is greed, and the production counters it by making its story about people trusting nature, understanding nature, being connected to each other, and to the other creatures. It’s very timely, so hopefully people will think about what they see in our film.”