Avis des utilisateurs

Reading the plot of the movie and watching some wonderful scenes in addition to knowing that Preisner is making the score and Sean Penn is in it , i was so much intrigued to watch this film ; what a pity and what a waste of so much potential by the director . It all begins quite interesting , but soon enough you realize that the director tries so hard to prove nothing, Hitchcock, Lynch, Trier, all mixed up . It's not lyrical but tries to be , it's not poetic but tries to be , it's not a thriller but tries to be , it's not a love story but tries to be ; in vain .

I loved "The Celebration" and was very disappointed when I saw this at Sundance. In brief, this suffers from the same delusion as "Eyes Wide Shut": namely that implication = meaning. There is implied tension, implied sexuality and an implied conspiracy, none of which are delved into, and a barrage of imagery that is neither satisfactorily abstract nor clearly explicated. Joaquin Phoenix is too passive to be much of a lead and Claire Danes, while beautiful, lacks depth. The picture IS gorgeous, and kudos to the DP and design team.

'It's All About Love' is a true oddity. It feels almost like someone recorded all the strange ideas that came into their head for a week, and chose a common topic, i.e. 'Love', and wrote a screenplay from their notes.

But that's not to say it's a bad movie.

In truth, I quite enjoyed it, although I came out of it feeling like I'd woken up from a dream, or possibly a nightmare.

It's quite unsettling.

The plot is both incredibly simple and incredibly complex:

John (Joaquin Phoenix) goes to New York to get a divorce from his famous figure skating wife, Elena (Claire Danes). While he's there, he notices that Elena seems to be in the middle of a vast conspiracy, and together they try to escape it, rediscovering their love at the same time.

The film is set in the near future, although it doesn't really need to be. I like the future in this film, because it's not radically different (except for flying Africans...go figure) but feels like twenty odd years from now. In the near future, people who are lonely or suffer a great loss will often drop dead. And the people of the near future merely walk over their bodies.

John and Elena are Polish, although they don't need to be. It adds certain poignancy, two foreigners not quite in place in a world that keeps putting them out of place.

Joaquin Phoenix and Claire Danes, while both very good (I think...it's hard to tell in a film as strange as this) could possibly have used some accent work. At times they speak with no accent at all, and it seems to distract.

On that note, I would like to point out how brilliant Claire Danes is. Ever since I saw Brokedown Palace, I have been astounded by her acting ability (although, that said, she doesn't do heart-wrenching crying very well). I won't spoil it, but under the circumstances of what happens to her character(s), she's incredible.

Also thrown into the mix is Sean Penn playing John's brother. I honestly couldn't see why he was in the movie, except maybe to oversee all the weather changes (think a far more subtle, low budget Day After Tomorrow with more meaning. For instance, it snows in New York in July, and there are days when all the fresh water freezes) I'm not saying it's a bad point, but another end that wasn't loose, but still needed tightening.

As I mentioned, the plot is incredibly complex. It twists a fair bit, until it seems to cut all things loose and start a new movie some twenty minutes before the ending. Still another way this movie unsettles me.

Visually, the film is stunning. It looks like a far more mainstream film than it obviously is. And while the film is beautiful, it still feels hard to watch, like there's something dreaded under the gloss.

If this reads as an ambiguous review, that's probably a good thing. I like this movie, quite a lot. But I also dislike it. It's easy to see why the DVD cost me $10.

I also like the fact that I own this movie before America even get an official release date. As an Australian, always open to release dates getting pushed back by three months, or movies being on DVD in America for about a year before we even get a theatrical release, this gives me a strange sense of superiority.

An incredibly strange movie and most certainly not everyone's cup of tea, I'll have to be careful of who I recommend this movie to. But see it yourself, as it's a movie that deserves an audience, just a very select one.

7/10

Holy crap. I don't know where this came from, but I think that the actors and actresses were held at gunpoint to make this film - I can't possibly think that they voluntarily decided on this script.

I think the movie producer(s) decided that they wanted to make a movie about the end of the world, a person who couldn't get off airplanes, floating Ugandans, and clones, and then got with some script writers and was like: "let's see how we can make this work!" Watching this movie was like slitting my wrists while hanging from my toenails. The only reason I finished watching it, was because I was sure that they were going to make sense of it all, or at least explain what the hell Sean Penn was doing in the movie (his role made absolute zero sense).

Alas, they succeeded in stealing my $4.37 (or whatever it costs to rent from Blockbuster), without giving me an ounce of entertainment (save for one of the clones getting shot in the backside on the ice rink).

If you are interested in wasting a few hours of your time, I suggest getting into the long line at the Department of Transportation just for kicks before selecting this flick.

This film is poor, unconvincing and boring. What a waste of good actors! What were they thinking to take part in this drivel? There are plot holes to drive a train through and contradictions such as "is there a telephone?" when he uses a cell phone in another scene. Among other inconsistencies there are poles who don't appear to speak Polish and a champion ice skater who smokes. Does the director really think that, in the future, smoking won't be a thing of the past?

Having said all that I can think of about this truly dreadful waste of time, I have to add that Joaquin Phoenix is one of my favorite actors and was the main reason I began to watch this garbage.

Saw a re-run of this recently, followed by a Vinterberg interview, explaining some of the tough points to grasp: Sean Penn represents the detached modern human being who has given up earthly matters (like love) to be forever on the move. He is Modern Man: insightful, charming, reflective. always moving - but has lost his grounding. The Ugandans? Vinterberg is disgusted with modern man's ability to disregard the suffering of others (witness also the dead bodies that everyone just steps right over): The disconnection is so complete that, for all we know, all the poor Africans might as well be - yes, exactly, flying.

Dumb, boring, pretentious and incomprehensible. It was so bad I laughed out load several times. The last shot is so incongruous and is the perfect icing on the cake for one of the worst movies of all time. Too bad I loved "Festen". Talented guy, dumb move. Better luck next time.

This was so mediocre that I stopped watching after half an a hour of suffering. The movie is a collection of juvenile ideas that remind me of silly crap I would come up with back when I was a teenager and think it was ingenious but reflecting on it now only makes me cringe. Silly stuff like floating Ugandans and that TV report with that man saying something like "we are not angels we didn't choose to fly, we want to be on the ground just like you" with super dramatic music playing in the background was the epitome of stupid. Also that crap about everyone dying around because they lack love is equally retarded.

The plot is a joke and I figured most of it just from the half hour I saw (I actually was very surprised how accurate I was after checking IMDb, however, that had more to do with the laziness of the script writers than my "plot-guessing" abilities.)

To be avoided.

If Dogville shows the new directions taken by Director Lars von Trier since Dogme, It's All About Love shows the very different creativity of Dogme co-founder Thomas Vinterberg.

John (Joaquin Phoenix) is planning to meet his wife Elena between flights in order to have divorce papers signed. Their marriage has broken down some years ago. It is as if their 'calendars are written in different languages.' Things are not what they seem. And things don't go as planned.

It's All About Love is set in the near future but defies the sci-fi or any other genre tag. Attention is focussed on the title, what love is really about. What happens when a relationship ends? When you still ‘love' someone but no longer want to be part of each other's world? When the other person seems like almost another person to the one you knew? It's All about Love looks at parallel emotional dislocation and its extension into the physical world, a world near the brink of cosmic collapse. It contains images of stunning beauty and is also jarring and artistically innovative. It's probably also the quirkiest movie since David Lynch's Mulholland Drive.

First, the good news. The photography and lighting are lush and beautiful. I can see why Anthony Dod Mantle got the nod for Last King of Scotland.

Otherwise, by the time the credits rolled, not only didn't I care about these characters ... I wanted to see them dead. I didn't care if they were shot, frozen to death, or died of lung cancer from the non-stop smoking.

Not bad enough? Sean Penn's part seems like it was tacked on as an afterthought. We're supposed to believe this story unfolds nearly two decades in the future ... but oddly, all the cars and clothes look like it's 2003. We're supposed to believe there are a number of clones of Claire Danes's character ... but they barely look like her. There's a global catastrophe afoot ... but it's mostly a big yawn.

In short, the entire undertaking is confused and pointless. I want these 104 minutes of my life back.

The one movie I've seen in the last 2 years that doesn't actually telegraph what's happening 2 frames ahead. i took the wrong fork in the mystery, got surprised, loved the production values, enjoyed some great music, the best mood music with ice since Smilla's sense of snow, and a video store find turned out to be the best in 4 rentals.

This movie got slammed by a lot of critics, who seemed to resist what the director was trying to present. life is a well choreographed, visually designed mystery with randomness thrown in. The terrestrial back story to the anomie in the societal makeup brings the character;s focus and hope in clearer definition.

is the headline craziness in this film any weirder than what's actually in the headlines today? There is a post-Katrina resonance to the topography agitating for notice in the periphery, and i actually wondered if it was written by Philip K Dick, there is a first-The Matrix freshness here that backs up our suspicions, that nightmare incidence of a look over your shoulder, when not only is something there, but it's not good, and you can actually see all the way down its gaping maw.

see it.

This is a really rotten movie. The other reviewer is being much too lenient. There aren't just loose ends in this movie, there are loose screws for which the concepts of completely unexplained flying Ugandans and days when all and I mean all fresh water suddenly freezes qualify (question: does it also happen when it's just been put in your stomach?) The presence of the otherwise excellent actors here is truly puzzling although Sean Penn is extraneous to the movie and does forget to put on a Polish accent. In sum, the plot is nonsensical, sort of like watching just one episode only of "Lost". For you who have not yet utterly wasted your time on this, Don't.

I like weird movies that are hard to follow...as long as they make some sense and have some logic for their own created worlds at least. I've grown up with studying David Lynch films. I know surreal. However this movie, "It's All About Love" is one of the strangest and hard to comprehend movies I've ever seen. Its jumps ahead with its story with amazing lack of clarity and explanations, all the while assuming the viewer knows everything thats going on up to that point. I assure you most viewers will be basically lost from start to finish and long after. I like the two lead actors. I like the look of the film. Its the plot that needs a lot of fixing up. That said, I still found it a very interesting movie and while I was struggling hard to comprehend what in the blazes was going on in the movie, it did keep my attention. I was hoping for some bizarre, weird, or even sad ending to at least marginally give me a clue as to what I was struggling to understand, but alas in the end, I was left with total dumbfounded gawking that it ended where it did, and had no idea why...Still, somehow, I kinda liked it.

Lars von Trier, who invented the minimalist film movement Dogme, followed up his own Dogme film with a musical. It's a sign that the ideas of the movement sprung from a general interest in how films are made, rather than a commitment to minimalism per se; and the same thing can also be seen in Thomas Vinterberg's post-Dogme film 'It's All About Love', which does have a certain minimalist aesthetic, but which is made with all of the tools available to the modern film-maker that the Dogme movement so consciously abandoned. And in spite of it's dreadfully uninspiring title, it turns out to be an interesting movie: stylised, beautifully constructed, and engagingly mysterious. Vinterberg proves himself to be a master of mood, creating scenes of a tender, haunting beauty but backed by a vague sense of menace. But judged purely as a thriller, the film is less good, because the menace and mystery never coalesce into something more certain, what we have here is images of a storyline, but no real story: things happen in sequence, and sometimes we are allowed to understand why, but it's unclear that there is a larger whole waiting to be discovered. Instead, we are presented with the illusion of fragments, beautifully executed (and Claire Daines in particular plays her role well), but without any necessary (visible or invisible) connectedness. The overall result could not be called great; but it is ambitious, distinctive, and directed with no little skill.

If it is all about love, then where is the love of the audience? There are two stories here co-joined in the most hideous and thoughtless of manners. In the first plot line we have a figure skater held captive by her family and forced to skate in spite of a heart condition that she doesn't know about… And then the estranged husband returns to get divorce papers signed, and he helps her to escape (which is what I should have done myself 10 minutes into it!) There's more extra crap in this plot line that doesn't develop either.

Plot line #2, the planet has lost gravity, selected people only, (except they float up so they got thems the antigravity- you tards!) in Uganda. (where are physicists without borders?) People die because their hearts are lonely. It snows in July in NYC. "You see peoples' hearts reflect the chaos of the world around them." which must have seemed profound when written under the influence of (?)Vodka, X, Blow, D-all-of-the-above. Modern polish existential drop-out curse the society's heartlessness, the planet is dying can't you see. All we need is love.

How did Claire and Joaquin get themselves into this? Is it sheer pride that makes these two think that they make this poop shine? It's a job? The skinny Penn brother has a remarkably stupid role with accent to go with it.

This is to movies what spam is to E-mail, keep it out of your in-box.

It is truly amazing how Thomas Vinterberg can go from a great film such as Festen to such a horrible piece of "wannabe-Kubrick"-crap.. Visually, this movie is very very beautiful. Great camerawork and great cinematography but the story and the acting is absolutely terrible. Joaquin Phoenix delivers a very superficial performance as if he never really had the time to get into his character (or maybe he just didn't understand it...). The plot (Elena-clones) is simply ridiculous and it's all so far out that you never really get to care about the characters or the development of the storyline.

The flying people of Uganda are cool though... And I love the idea that Penn has gotten an "anti-flying-fear-overdose" which means that he can only fly... However, his character is as absurd as the rest of the movie.

Vinterberg has gotten delusions of grandeur and has created a confusing and unimportant movie..

So many critics of It's All About Love have discussed the obvious. The script has issues etc... What I found most bothersome was that after all the main characters go through; there is no real pay-off for you the viewer staying with the story. You get to a point where you wonder what is the plot? Is it really that the husband must save his wife? What is her specific danger? When things do unfurl, those answers only spur more questions. I'm not kidding. This was annoying but I stayed with the story assuming and hoping the new questions would have suitable answers. They never come.

Modern day movie viewers don't expect directors to fill in all the blanks anymore, but in this case I can't think of one that was filled in. Therefore I had no way of cross referencing for my own answers.

To this end I can't recommend the film despite its artistic value. And yes the dialogue was not written well especially for Sean Penn's character. If you have a movie rental plan then sure give this a shot out of curiosity, otherwise it may be OK for a couple to watch that is patient with weak story lines.

The pacing is perhaps the only thing I could identify in keeping with modern movie-making. You get weak character development at best. One character is a brother to the female lead and it means nothing to reveal it late. It has ZERO bearing to reveal his motivation by being a brother. This is not a spoiler as it really has no impact. I say this to make the point... the film maker seemed to be reaching for any twist he could create for some suspense in this would be dramatic suspense film. The saving grace is the actors in this film whom dutifully portray people in difficult circumstances with bad dialogue in which to communicate their plight which turns out to be almost trivial until we get our only plot twist near the end which again goes un-answered. If you can deal with questions upon questions, then this is a ground-breaking film. You get served up with yet another "why?" question at the near end when you witness the fate of the main characters. And you'll have at least three questions "why?" when it happens.

While the story was inoffensive it simply didn't deliver on any other level except your hope and cinematography.

Calling this film It's All About Love may be fitting but hardly appropriate.

The movie has beautiful soundtrack and photography, the story is very imaginative but...the script has many holes and when the movie ends the question is "that's all? the whole world is collapsing and there's no interest about that". Yes it could be a romantic movie, but the director lose his way and the film turns to a thriller very soon and remains like that until the end of it. If you are a cinemaniac and you don't interest very much about the plot see it, otherwise see another movie.

What a dreadful little film. If you make it all the way through to the end, and many did not, the "touching" ending turns out to be quite comical, but it's still not enough to make this film worthwhile.