Review of All About Steve (2009) by Chads — 03 Sep 2009

Happy-go-lucky Mary Horowitz(Sandra Bullock) is a stalker, yet inexplicably, Hartman(Thomas Haden Church), a television reporter, encourages the crossword puzzle specialist to continue chasing Steve(Bradley Cooper), a cameraman, for no other reason but to further the plot.

As it turns out, not only does Hartman give Mary directions to Silver Plume, he gives her directions to a Billy Wilder film. In the 1951 classic "Ace in the Hole", a former big city reporter(played by Kirk Douglas) augments the life of a story by convoluting the rescue procedure for a silver miner trapped under rubble.

Likewise, in "All About Steve", after the "last" child is pulled out of an abandoned mine shaft, Hartman's designs to fabricate news(perhaps he was hoping that the woman would attack Steve) manifests itself in a totally unexpected way.

Mary falls down the hole, therefore prolonging the story's newsworthiness, and it's here where the film's narrative about journalism supercedes its narrative about love. Since the cameraman knows Mary, Hartman has himself an exclusive(the same objective as Chuck Tatum, who makes the story his by bribing the sheriff); this ambition is the calliope music that fuels the media circus outside the tragedy in the making.

All those hordes of onlookers is the key visual that links this film with "Ace in the Hole". Both men are willing to put their careers ahead of human life. (How the heck did Mary and all those deaf kids escape injury?) The film should really be entitled "All About Hartman", since Mary means nothing to Steve, contrary to the forced happy ending.

Steve acts like he's the protagonist in Clint Eastwood's "Play Misty For Me".