LOS ANGELES - 'I stopped doing them - how many years ago? They are terrible, they are bad, and they are not funny,' said Sandra Bullock about a movie genre she has been long associated with: romantic comedies.

The Hollywood star, who took a two-year break from Hollywood, was promoting her latest movie 'The Proposal,' about two people who start out hating each other but fall madly in love after a series of screwball adventures.

Which sounds a lot like a romantic comedy.

'I don't call this a romantic comedy,' Bullock told reporters.

The movie 'reminds me of the films from like the 1930s and 40s where there was a landscape, a story, and drama was allowed to be in there, and you can't have good comedy without drama in it,' said Bullock, 44.

In the movie, Bullock is a high-powered, Canadian-born book editor who faces deportation because of her immigration status, so she quickly announces an engagement with an assistant - actor Ryan Reynolds, 32 - who she has tormented for years.

Hollywood writers 'don't generally write well for women in romantic comedies and I love my comedy too much to bastardize it with... romantic comedy,' she said.

The star of two 'Miss Congeniality' movies, who was being paid some 15 million dollars per film in 2002, bemoaned appearing in what she described as bad comedies.

Her attempts to break out of the action and comedy mold - especially in 2006's 'The Lake House,' a romantic drama co-starring Keanu Reeves that had been poorly reviewed box-office flops. -- AFP